Chris Hammer is the guest. The book is Trust, the third novel in the Martin Scarsden series. We talk about writing break out debuts, why setting is so important and how Chris manages to find new compelling stories for the same characters. We also talk about writing and setting novels in the time of Covid.

The guest is Ceridwen Dovey. The book is Life After Truth. Ceridwen is an author, essayist and academic. She attended Harvard University on a scholarship where she met Jared Kushner and Natalie Portman. Her brilliant latest novel, Life After Truth, is inspired by her experience of attending the 15 year reunion of her class at Harvard. We talk about tech, machine learning, politics, how people change, an ill fated meeting with George Lucas and about raising children among many other things. This was one of my favourite interviews and Ceridwen is an author everyone should read.

The guest is Robbie Arnott. The book is The Rain Heron. Robbie's debut Flames  was shortlisted for and won a number of major literary prizes. His second novel is just as good. He writes compelling, inventive stories about our relationship with and dominion over the natural world. We talk about writing second novels, finding inspiration and our writing process. Robbie is also the first guest to feature on the show twice.

Mirandi Riwoe is the guest. She is the author of a number of books, most recently the historical fiction novel Stone Sky Gold Mountain, set in 1870s in a gold rush town in Queensland. Mirandi is an enormously generous writer, providing deep insights into her process and the ways she created authentic migrant characters and brought to life a town which no longer exists.

The guest is Liam Pieper, author of a number of books including his most recent novel Sweetness and Light. Liam has an intriguing story and he talks to us about how his time abroad inspired much of the story and how to write with authenticity and accuracy about cities and countries you don't live in. Sweetness and Light is a beautiful novel full of heart and life, sitting snugly in that magic cross section between literary depth and commercial pace.

The book is Shirl, an eclectic collection of short stories that will surprise and dazzle but beneath it all, there is a beating heart and real insight into what it means to be a man in small town Australia. Wayne writes with a surrealist bent in the vein of George Saunders and Shirl draws to mind other ground breaking collections like Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's Friday Black. Wayne also has a touching story about why he started to write this collection and how it came to be published.

The guest is Gary Disher, the author of a number of novels over a career spanning decades. Gary's latest novel Peace is a beautifully wrought rural crime novel that starts off quietly and builds as the story progresses. Gary is a master of the craft and shares many of the insights he's gathered over a long and prolific career.

The guest is Alice Bishop, author of the short story collection A Constant Hum. Alice lost her family home in the Black Saturday bush fires in Australia and the stories of Hum are all linked to those fires in which 173 people died. Alice writes with sensitivity, capturing the details so perfectly to show the lives and experiences of those affected. In this interview she speaks with emotional honesty about the process of writing and researching Hum, and what we learnt, or perhaps didn't learn from the last catastrophic bush fires. Given the scale and devastation of the 2019/2020 fires it's a book everyone should read.

The guest is Bram Presser, multi-award winning author, lawyer, and punk rocker. His book is The Book of Dirt which we talk a lot about. We also talk a lot about writing to preserve family histories, the fallibility of memory and how it influences story telling, the 'Museum of the Extinct Race', pop novelists hijacking narratives around the Holocaust, and many other things.

The guest is Susan Hurley debut author of the medical thriller Eight Lives. Eight Lives is the story of David Tran and the drug he discovered which ultimately kills him in a failed medical trial. The novel maps all the cause leading to and the effects of his death. Susan speaks candidly about the struggles of getting this book published and her extensive experience in both the medical world and academic worlds.