The Bookshelf
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What are you reading, loving or being challenged by? We review the latest in fiction for dedicated readers and for those who wish they read more.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Sep 16, 2022 • 60min
Drugs, gangs, racism and reputation: three new works of fiction
Reading Tracey Lien's All That's Left Unsaid, Diane Connell's The Improbable Life of Ricky Bird and Clarissa Goenawan's Watersong – Kate Evans and Elizabeth Flynn with guests George Haddad and Mandi McIntosh.
Sep 9, 2022 • 60min
A Renaissance wedding, a Mediaeval war and the ghosts of Modernism: three new novels
Kate and Cassie with three new novels: grappling with modernism and creativity in Sophie Cunningham's This Devastating Fever; a young woman caged by intrigue and expectations in Maggie O'Farrell's The Marriage Portrait; and working soldiers bleed across France in Dan Jones' Essex Dogs – with guests Stephen Gapps and Amy Walters
Sep 2, 2022 • 60min
The Book Club: Is crime fiction a literature of resistance? (plus a guide to Korean lit)
RN's Book Club in a different format to usual: a panel discussion plus a quick reading guide. The big question: Is crime fiction a literature of resistance? Also, a guide to fiction in translation from Korea
Aug 26, 2022 • 60min
Three monks in a boat, the last white man, and wild wild women
A story of three men trying to create a new world, on a craggy island in seventh-century Ireland, in Emma Donoghue's Haven; anxieties about race and migration, in Mohsin Hamid's The Last White Man; and scrappy voices from history, in Selby Wynn Schwartz's fragmentary lesbian colloquy, After Sappho.
Aug 19, 2022 • 60min
Joan of Arc re-imagined, dystopian coastlines and trees in the Oz literary imagination
Joan of Arc as a capable, scrappy young woman; unmoored on a strange coastline; and trees in both crime fiction and the Australian literary imaginary: reading Scott McCulloch's Basin, Katherine J Chen's Joan (with Prof of Philosophy Karen Green) and crime writer Margaret Hickey's Stone Town on both crime and landscape
Aug 12, 2022 • 0sec
A champion pedestrianist, an island haunted by grief and running into all your exes
Reading Robert Drewe's Nimblefoot, Eliza Henry-Jones' Salt and Skin and Sloane Crosley's Cult Classic with critic and literary judge Susan Wyndham and novelist and funeral director Jackie Bailey
Aug 7, 2022 • 54min
Big Weekend of Books at the State Library of NSW: writers special
Writers Hayley Scrivenor, Michael Brissenden and Yumna Kassab join Kate and Cassie onstage to talk libraries, stories, trauma, failure, children, Australian identity and more in this Big Weekend of Books edition of The Bookshelf
Jul 30, 2022 • 54min
Reviewing the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award winner and shortlist
Reviewing the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award winner, Jennifer Down's Bodies of Light, and shortlist with theatre writer Tom Wright and literary critic and interviewer Nicole Abadee
Jul 23, 2022 • 54min
An urn full of memories, an everlasting lightbulb and what to read next: Chris Womersley's The Diplomat and Anjali Joseph's Keeping in Touch
Reading Chris Womersley's The Diplomat and Anjali Joseph's Keeping in Touch plus a guide to Sri Lankan fiction from Smriti Daniel and what's coming out later this year with independent bookseller Mark Rubbo. Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh, bringing you new fiction
Jul 16, 2022 • 54min
Paul Daley's Jesustown, A G Slatter's The Path of Thorns, and a guide to books for kids
Contact history and its 'saviour' mythologies turned upside down in Paul Daley's Jesustown; inside-out fairytales and an invented gothic world in A G Slatter's The Path of Thorns (read by Elizabeth Flynn); and a guide to middle-grade fiction from writer Tristan Bancks. Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh, bringing you new fiction
