Emerald Fennell's film adaptation of Wuthering Heights has been marketed as "the greatest love story ever told", which is not typically the description given to the original novel. What does this adaptation achieve, and what does it sacrifice in the process?

The Bookshelf's Kate Evans and Radio National's Arts Hour's Sky Kirkham discuss what they felt did and didn't work in this film and, in an expanded podcast extra edition, they also discussed the film adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet

Kate and Cassie read Kin, the latest novel from Tayari Jones — the acclaimed American novelist behind An American Marriage, a book that resonated with both critics and readers alike. Her work sits alongside a bold mix of stories in this episode, from a vampiric love story to speed‑dating slasher fiction, and South African writer Nadia Davids adds her own unsettling brilliance, taking us into the life of a furious yet outwardly obedient domestic servant in a mysterious house on a hill in Cape Fever.

BOOKS

• Tayari Jones, Kin, Penguin
• Nadia Davids, Cape Fever, Scribner
• Shailee Thompson, How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates, Atria Books
• Pip Knight, Aubrey Wants to Die, Harper Collins  

GUESTS

• Tony Birch, poet and novelist; Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at Melbourne University
• Beejay Silcox, writer and critic

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED

• David Peace, The Red Riding Quartet; Twilight series
• Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
• Dan Jennings, Dancing Through the Fire
• Rebecca Perry, May We Feed the King
• Maylis de Kerangal, Painting Time

CREDITS

• Presenter, Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh
• Producer, Kate Evans and Sarah Corbett
• Sound engineer, Harvey O'Sullivan and Simon Branthwaite
• Executive producer, Rhiannon Brown

Join Kate and Cassie as they explore new fiction alongside guests: musician Tim Rogers (You Am I) and novelist Madeleine Gray (Green Dot, Chosen Family). Three American novels, each tackling big ideas in very different ways - from the political absurdity and humour of Jess Walter’s So Far Gone, to the mockumentary-style tensions of Patmeena Sabit’s Good People, to the darkly comic moral maze of Jonathan Miles’ Eradication.

BOOKS

• Jess Walter, So Far Gone, Harper
• Jonathan Miles, Eradication, Riverrun
• Patmeena Sabit, Good People, Virago

GUESTS

• Tim Rogers, singer-songwriter and actor. Frontman of You Am I.
• Madeleine Gray, novelist whose books are Green Dot and Chosen Family

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED

• Larry McMurtry, works
• Bertie Blackman, Bohemian Negligence
• Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts
• Nussaibah Younis, Fundamentally
• Niamh Campbell, Make Strange
• Ellena Savage, The Ruiners; Blueberries
• Alexandra Vasti, Ladies in Hating
• Katherine Mansfield, works
• Ian Penman, Three Piece Suite
• Zadie Smith, The Fraud
• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

CREDITS

• Presenter, Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh
• Producer, Kate Evans and Sarah Corbett
• Sound engineer, Antonia Gauci and Harvey O'Sullivan
• Arts editor, Rhiannon Brown 

Madeline Cash’s buzzy debut Lost Lambs pairs an off‑kilter storytelling sensibility with a sharp exploration of displacement and identity. George Saunders returns with Vigil, offering his moral curiosity in a novel that probes what it means to pay attention to the world. George Kemp’s Soft Serve delivers a charming and quietly affecting debut about growing up in a small town; and Steven Carroll’s The Afterlife of Harry Playford continues his investigations of history and memory.

BOOKS

Madeline Cash, Lost Lambs, Doubleday

George Saunders, Vigil, Bloomsbury

George Kemp, Soft Serve, UQP

Steven Carroll, The Afterlife of Harry Playford, Fourth Estate

GUESTS

• Michael Robotham is an international crime writer and former journalist whose books include The Secrets She Keeps, Good Girl Bad Girl, and his latest, White Crow. His next novel — his first to be set in Australia — will be published in October.
• Roanna Gonsalves is a writer and teacher of creative writing whose short‑story collection The Permanent Resident won wide acclaim. Her novel The Servants will be published later this year.

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED

• Kurt Vonnegut, works
• Joseph Heller, works
• Thomas Pynchon, works
• Jonathan Franzen, works
• Paul Murray, The Bee Sting
• DBC Pierre, Vernon God Little
• Shaun Prescott, The Town
• Stephen King, works
• Liz Nugent, The Truth About Ruby Cooper
• Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
• Deborah Adelaide, When I Am Sixty-Four
• Tim Ayliffe, Dark Desert Road
• Katie Kitamura, Audition

CREDITS

• Presenter, Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh
• Producer, Kate Evans and Sarah Corbett
• Sound engineer, Roi Huberman
• Arts editor, Rhiannon Brown

Kate and Cassie read award-winning Australian author Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s bold new novel Bugger, while reviewers Hannah Kent and Tom Wright take on Jennette McCurdy’s provocative new book Half His Age — from the former child actor whose memoir I'm Glad My Mom Died shook readers worldwide — and Nina McConigley’s How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder...does it live up to the name?

BOOKS 

• Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Bugger, Hachette 
• Jennette McCurdy, Half His Age, Fourth Estate 
• Nina McConigley, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, Fleet 

GUESTS 

• Hannah Kent, novelist, screenwriter, and memoirist, whose books include Burial Rites, The Good People, Devotion, and Always Home, Always Homesick 
• Tom Wright, Artistic Associate at Belvoir St.Theatre 

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED

• Jim Butcher, Twelve Months: The Dresden Files 
• Sita Walker, In a Common Hour 
• Jonas Jonasson, The Distinctly Competent District Councillor  
• Catherine Newman, Wreck 
• India-Rose Bower, We Call Them Witches 
• Amie Kaufman, Red Star Rebels 
• Yxavel Magno Diňo, The Firefly Crown 
• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
• Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
• Olga Ravn, The Wax Child 
• Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
• Travis Baldree, Brigands and Breadknives 
• Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths

CREDITS

• Presenter, Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh
• Producer, Kate Evans and Sarah Corbett
• Sound engineer, Micky Grossman and Ann Marie Debettencor
• Arts editor, Rhiannon Brown

Kate and Cassie are back for a big year of books, beginning with Booker-Prize winner Julian Barnes' Departures, a novel about looking back, facing the future, and coming to the end of life. Plus, regular reviewers Tony Birch and Beejay Silcox join us for discussions on This, My Second Life by British novelist Patrick Charnley, and Iluka, by Australian author Cassie Stroud.

BOOKS

• Julian Barnes, Departure(s), Jonathan Cape
• Cassie Stroud, Iluka, HQ Books
• Patrick Charnley, This, My Second Life, Hutchinson Heinemann

GUESTS

• Tony Birch, poet, novelist and short story writer whose books include Dark as Last Night, Shadow Boxing, Women and Children and The White Girl. His latest is Pictures of You. He is also a Professor of Australian literature at the University of Melbourne
• Beejay Silcox, critic, writer and regular interviewer at writers festivals.

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED

• Lily King, Heart the Lover
• Anne Enright, Attention
• Melissa Lucashenko, Not Quite White in the Head
• Bryan Washington, Palaver; Family Meal
• Souvankham Thammavongsa, Pick the Colour
• Charlotte Wood, The Weekend
• Ann Patchett, Tom Lake
• Jonathan Tropper, And Then We Came To the End
• Maggie Shipstead, Seating Arrangements
• Emily O'Grady, Feast
• Hayle Felicity, Our Brother Nick and the Tolling Bell
• Elizabeth Strout, My Name is Lucy Barton
• Joe Hill, King Sorrow
• Haldor Laxness, Independent People
• Dani Netherclift The Shape of Absent Bodies
• George Eliot, Middlemarch
• Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
• Eric Puchner, Dream State

CREDITS

• Presenter, Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh
• Producer, Kate Evans and Sarah Corbett
• Sound engineer, Roi Hubermann and Ann Marie Debettencor
• Arts editor, Rhiannon Brown 

Novelist and memoirist Maggie O'Farrell in conversation with Kate Evans at the 2025 Sydney Writers Festival. Her nine novels include After You'd Gone, the Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, This Must be the Place, Hamnet and the Marriage Portrait . . . and her extraordinary memoir is I Am I Am I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death.

Kate and Cassie on stage at the 2025 Brisbane Writers Festival with authors Eric Puchner, Toni Jordan, Patrick Holland, and Zeynab Gamieldien, discussing their most recent novels and the books and writers who inspire them. This discussion was recorded in front of a live audience, just ahead of our Top 100 Books of the Century.

It was first broadcast on Friday 17 October 2025

GUESTS

Eric Puchner, novelist, academic, and short story writer, whose books include the collections Last Day on Earth and Music Through the Floor, and the novels Model Home and (his latest) Dream State

Toni Jordan, a writer whose novels include Nine Days, Our Tiny, Useless Hearts, Prettier If She Smiles More, Dinner with the Schnabels . . . and her latest, Tenderfoot

Patrick Holland is a writer and academic, and author of eight books, including the novel The Mary Smokes Boys and — his latest — Oblivion. He lives between Hong Kong and Brisbane

Zeynab Gamieldien is a writer whose first novel, The Scope of Permissibility, won the inaugural WestWords/Ultimo Prize (for emerging writers from Western Sydney); and her second novel, Learned Behaviours, has just been published

BOOKS MENTIONED BY ERIC PUCHNER

•    James Salter, Light Years

•    Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

•    Joy Williams, works

•    Willa Cather, My Ántonia

•    Jhumpa Lahiri, A Temporary Matter

•    Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

•    Evan S. Connell, Mrs. Bridge

•    César Aira, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

BOOKS MENTIONED BY TONI JORDAN

•    Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones

•    Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe

•    Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

•    Zadie Smith, White Teeth

•    Alexis Wright, Carpentaria

•    Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

•    Richard Ford, Canada

BOOKS MENTIONED BY PATRICK HOLLAND

•    Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

•    Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

•    Ernest Hemingway, 88 Poems

•    Leah Swann, Bearings

•    Felix Calvino, works

•    Brian Castro, works

•    Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse

•    Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian; All the Pretty Horses

•    Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

BOOKS MENTIONED BY ZEYNAB GAMIELDIEN

•    Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

•    Tara June Winch, The Yield

•    Hisham Matar, The Return; My Friends

•    Anne Enright, The Gathering

•    Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn; Long Island

•    Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

•    Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

OTHER BOOKS AND WRITERS MENTIONED

•    J.G. Ballard, works

•    Graham Greene, The Quiet American

•    David Malouf, works

•    Patrick White, works

•    Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell

•    David Mitchell, works

CREDITS

•    Presenter, Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh

•    Producer, Kate Evans + Sarah Corbett

•    Sound engineer, Steve Fieldhouse + Harvey O'Sullivan

•    Arts editor, Rhiannon Brown

The Bookshelf's Kate Evans and the Book Show's Claire Nichols joined forces onstage at the 2025 Sydney Writers Festival — with a panel of international writers — to talk favourite and influential books from the 21st century, in the lead up to the inaugural Top 100 Books countdown of the twenty-first century. This live broadcast happened in May 2025 — with Emirati poet Afra Atiq, English chronicler of gay lives, Alan Hollinghurst, Argentinian purveyor of all things dark and surprising, Mariana Enriquez, and New Zealand novelist with a dystopian edge, Catherine Chidgey.

This discussion was first broadcast live on Friday 23 May 2025

For more details of the final Top 100 Books of the 21st Century countdown, follow the link here

BOOKS MENTIONED in this program

ALAN HOLLINGHURST

Alice Munro, Runaway

David Szalay, All That Man Is

Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang

Bryan Washington, Lot

Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These; Foster

MARIANA ENRIQUEZ

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Dennis Cooper, The Sluts

Jorge Luis Borges, works

Horacio Castellanos Moya, Senselessness

CATHERINE CHIDGEY

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

John D'Agata and Jim Fingal, The Lifespan of a Fact

Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie

Anna Smaill, The Chime

OTHERS

Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

Kate Grenville, The Secret River

Sarah Winman, Still Life

Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

Melissa Lucashenko, Too Much Lip

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words

Trent Dalton, Lola in the Mirror

Robbie Arnott, Limberlost

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonder

Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

CREDITS

•    Presenter: Kate Evans, Claire Nichols

•    Producer: Kate Evans, Sarah Corbett

•    Sound engineer: Emrys Cronin, Hamish Camilleri, Harvey O'Sullivan

•    Executive producer, Rhiannon Brown

Why aren't you reading more poetry? Perhaps you don't know where to begin — in which case, listen here, for a guide.

Join Kate Evans, as she is joined by acclaimed author and poet Maxine Beneba Clarke, Stella Prize-winning poet and academic Sarah Holland-Batt, much-loved broadcaster and author Daniel Browning, and best-selling author and journalist Julia Baird to discuss and read some of the poems that have shone brightest for each of them this century, as well as how the art-form has evolved.

This event was presented at the State Library of NSW in partnership with Red Room Poetry.

This event was first broadcast on 3 October 2025

POETS AND POETRY MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

•    Warsan Shire, Home

•    Adam Zagajewski, Try to Praise the Mutilated World

•    Graeme Dixon, Six Feet of Land Rights

•    Gwen Harwood, In the Park

•    Anonymous Rose, Broken World

•    Zora Howard and Joshya Bennett, Still Life with Police Sirens

•    Ali Cobby Eckermann, works

•    Simon Armitage, The Shout

•    Evelyn Araluen, decolonial poetics (avant gubba)

•    Candy Royale, works

•    Max Porter, works

CREDITS

Presenter, Kate Evans

Producer, Kate Evans, Lisa Needham

Sound engineer, Ann Marie Debettencor + Harvey O'Sullivan

Executive producer, Rhiannon Brown