The Bookshelf continues to explore new fiction, beginning in this episode with Ruins by Amy Taylor, a plunge into holiday chaos during a simmering summer in Greece. Maria Reva’s Endling takes us to Ukraine, where an eccentric scientist is breeding rare snails. And, Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse...dystopia with a twist.

BOOKS 

Amy Taylor, Ruins, Allen & Unwin 

Maria Reva, Endling, Virago 

Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse, Grove Press 

GUESTS 

Mark Mordue, music writer, journalist, and poet – whose books include Boy On Fire: The Young Nick Cave 

Robert Goodman, critic who writes regularly for the Newtown Review of Books and on his website, Pile by the Bed

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED

• Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal
• On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan
• Louise Erdrich, works
• Lanny, Max Porter
• The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, Shehan Karunatilaka
• By Night in Chile; 2666, Roberto Bolaño
• Leviathan Wakes, James S.A. Corey 
• Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie
• Chronicles, Bob Dylan 
• Just Kids, Patti Smith 
• Road Series, Hugo Race 
• Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, Will Hermes 
• Perdido Street Station, China Mieville 
• Babel; Yellowface; Katabasis, R.F. Kuang
• The Animals in That Country, Laura Jean McKay 
• The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation, Charlotte Beradt
• The White Hotel, D.M. Thomas
• Salvage, Jennifer Mills
• Juice, Tim Winton
• Arborescence; Hovering, Rhett Davis
• Deaf Republic, Ilya Kaminsky

CREDITS

• Presenter, Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh
• Producer, Kate Evans and Sarah Corbett
• Sound engineer, John Jacobs and Tegan Nicholls
• Executive producer, Rhiannon Brown

Kate and Cassie discuss Vera, or Faith, Gary Shteyngart’s new novel about a ten-year-old Korean-American girl growing up in a dystopian United States. Alongside guest critics, they also look at The Bombshell by Darrow Farr, which traces the radicalisation of a young French woman in Corsica, and The Slip by Lucas Schaefer, the story of a missing teenage boy and the transformative power of boxing.

Books:

Darrow Farr, The Bombshell, Atlantic

Lucas Schaefer, The Slip, Simon & Schuster

Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith, Atlantic 

GUESTS

Sarah Gilbert, writer and documentary producer; head of UTS Impact Studios, which makes the literary podcast Fully Lit. Her first book of non-fiction - Unconventional Women: The story of the last Blessed Sacrament Sisters in Australia - came out last year

Michael Winkler, critic and novelist. His book, Grimmish, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2022. His novel Griefdogg will be published next year 

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED

• Brian Castro, Chinese Postman
• Michelle de Krestser, works
• Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
• Denis Johnson, Train Dreams
• Carys Davies, West
• Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang
• Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
• Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
• O. Henry, The Last Leaf
• Loïc Wacquant, Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer
• Armistead Maupin, Tales of the City series
• Rhett Davis, Arborescence
• Raaza Jamshed, What Kept You
• Alexis Wright, Carpentaria

CREDITS

• Presenter, Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh
• Producer, Kate Evans and Sarah Corbett
• Sound engineer, John Jacobs and Tegan Nicholls
• Executive producer, Rhiannon Brown

Australian author Rhett Davis re-imagines the everyday in his novels. In his latest, Arborescence, ordinary people begin transforming into trees. Is it a cult? Performance art? Or something else entirely? Also on the show: Guest reviewer Roanna Gonsalves discusses Saraswati, the debut novel by Gurnaik Johal, which winds its narrative around a sacred and possibly mythical river in North India. And, Kate Evans speaks with Irish writer Colm Tóibín, delving into the literary influences that have shaped his work. 

BOOKS 

Rhett Davis, Arborescence, Hachette 

Gurnaik Johal, Saraswati, Serpent’s Tail 

Colm Toibin, works 

GUESTS 

Roanna Gonsalves is a writer, teacher of creative writing at UNSW, and editor of the literary journal, Southerly 

Colm Toibin, Irish novelist and essayist – whose books include The Blackwater Lightship, Nora Webster, Brooklyn, The Master, The Magician – and his latest, Long Island. He spoke to Kate Evans at the 2025 Sydney Writers Festival 

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED

• Jane Austen, works
• Fiona McFarlane, Highway 13
• Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees
• J.R.R. Tolkein, works
• Malcolm Knox The First Friend
• Raaza Jamshed, What Kept You
• Georgia Rose Phillips, The Bearcat
• Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
• Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge
• Henry James, works
• Thomas Mann, works
• James Baldwin, works

CREDITS

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

A critical assessment of the shortlist and winner of Australia’s most prestigious literary award, The Miles Franklin Literary Award. Kate and Cassie are joined by guests, scholar and literary biographer (and former judge of the MFLA) Bernadette Brennan; and critic and publisher, Geordie Williamson.

BOOKS

• Brian Castro, Chinese Postman, Giramondo
• Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice, Text
• Winnie Dunn, Dirt Poor Islanders, Hachette 
• Julie Janson, Compassion, Magabala Books
• Fiona McFarlane, Highway 13, Allen & Unwin
• Siang Lu, Ghost Cities, UQP (WINNER)

GUESTS

Bernadette Brennan, literary scholar; former judge for the Miles Franklin Literary Award  

Geordie Williamson, chief literary critic, The Australian; publisher, Picador 

CREDITS

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

Parties, scandals, sex, love, families, friendship, death – these books have, as they say, all the things. Nell Zink’s Sister Europe moves through one night in Berlin, while Amy Bloom’s I’ll Be Right Here sweeps through 80 years of history, and in James Frey’s Next to Heaven, the beautiful and rich fall apart rather spectacularly.

BOOKS 

Nell Zink, Sister Europe, Penguin Viking 

Amy Bloom, I’ll Be Right Here, Granta 

James Frey, Next to Heaven, Swift 

GUESTS 

Shannon Burns, writer and member of the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. His memoir, Childhood, was published in 2022 

Suzanne Leal, writer and literary interviewer. She writes for both adults and children, and her novels include Deceptions, The Watchful Wife and The Teacher’s Secret. Her latest, The Year We Escaped, was published last month

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED

• James Frey, works
• Raynor Winn, The Salt Path
• Colette, works
• Yuan Yang, Private Revolutions
• Lenora Thaker, The Pearl of Tagai Town
• Peter Grose, A Good Place to Hide
• Pablo Neruda, The Captain's Verses
• Robert Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
• Brian Castro, Chinese Postman

JANE AUSTEN EVENT

Still Turning Heads at 250: Jane Austen’s Enduring Charm

ABC Radio National's The Bookshelf & The Minefield join forces with a literary scholar & the State Library of NSW on Austen the professional. Book your spot here 

CREDITS

• Presenter, Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh
• Producer, Kate Evans and Sarah Corbett
• Sound engineer, Tegan Nicholls and Emrys Cronin
• Executive producer, Rhiannon Brown

Stories of the sea – and a great white whale in Xiaolu Guo's Call Me Ishmaelle; Hungry ghosts and kitchen mishaps in Daria Lavelle's NYC set novel Aftertaste; and the latest Australian crime fiction (of which there is a lot!)

BOOKS 

AUSTRALIAN CRIME FICTION:

•  Mark Brandi, Eden 
• Paul Daley, The Leap 
• Sam Guthrie, The Peak 
• Angie Faye Martin, Melaleuca  
• Michael Robotham, White Crow 
• Tanya Scott, Stillwater 
• Matthew Spencer, Broke Road 

Xiaolu Guo, Call Me Ishmaelle, Chatto & Windus 

Daria Lavelle, Aftertaste, Bloomsbury 

GUESTS 

Mark Dunn, historian whose latest book is The Convict Valley: The Bloody Struggle on Australia's Early Frontier 

Danielle Bagnato, writer and book critic – whose work appears in The Big Issue 

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED

• Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
• Alice Oseman, Radio Silence
• Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby
• Douglas Stewart, Young Mungo
• Herman Melville, Moby Dick
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• Richard Flanagan, Question 7
• V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
• Catherine Webb, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
• Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman; Vanishing World
• Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

CREDITS

• Presenter, Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh
• Producer, Kate Evans and Sarah Corbett
• Sound engineer, Simon Branthwaite and Roi Huberman
• Executive producer, Rhiannon Brown

A panel of international authors discuss the current state of the art of fiction. The latest Booker Prize winner Samantha Harvey, Rumaan Alam, Torrey Peters, and Robbie Arnott find connections in their writing and their bookshelves.

PANELLISTS

• Samantha Harvey, an English writer whose five novels include The Wilderness, Dear Thief, and the 2024 Booker Prize winner, Orbital. Her non-fiction work is The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping
• Rumaan Alam, an American writer whose five novels include Rich and Pretty, Leave the World Behind and Entitlement.
• Torrey Peters, an American writer of novels, short stories and novellas, including her debut novel Detransition, Baby and a new collection, Stag Dance.
• Robbie Arnott, an Australian writer whose novels are Flames, The Rain Heron, Limberlost and Dusk.

------------------------

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED

• Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
• George Orwell, 1984
• Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
• Melanie Cheng, The Burrow
• Helen Garner, The Children’s Bach
• Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
• Edward St Aubyn, Parallel Lines

------------------------

CREDITS

• Presenter, Kate Evans
• Producer, Kate Evans & Salome Lines-Morison
• Sound Engineer, Simon Branthwaite & Timothy Jenkins
• Executive Producer, Rhiannon Brown

The same question is at the heart of three very different international novels on The Bookshelf this week, “What really happened”…

To a WWI soldier who has forgotten his name and identity in The Remembered Soldier by Dutch author Anjet Daanje?

To a fortune teller for the elite class in Ben Okri’s Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-hearted?

When four high achieving American boys entered a cave, and one emerged terribly hurt, In Sameer Pandya’s Our Beautiful Boys?

Keep scrolling for a full list of all books mentioned on this week's program.

BOOKS

• Anjet Daanje, The Remembered Soldier (translated from the Dutch by David McKay), Scribe 
• Ben Okri, Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-hearted, Apollo 
• Sameer Pandya, Our Beautiful Boys,  Bloomsbury  
•  

GUESTS 

Tom Wright, theatre writer and adapter, and Artistic Associate at Belvoir Street Theatre.

Bronwyn Rivers, researcher and novelist whose debut, The Reunion was released this year. She also has a PhD on the 19th century novel.

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED

• Bronwyn Rivers, The Reunion
• Max Porter, Grief is the Thing With Feathers
• Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock
• Ben Okri, The Famished Road
• William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
• William Shakespeare, As You Like It
• T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
• Ben Okri, The Freedom Artist
• E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
• Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap
• Curzio Malaparte, The Skin
• Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob
• Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
• Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
• Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
• Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me
• Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
• Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook: A Jackson Brodie Novel

CREDITS

• Presenter, Kate Evans & Cassie McCullagh
• Producer, Kate Evans & Salome Lines-Morison
• Sound Engineer, Simon Branthwaite & Tegan Nicholls
• Executive Producer, Rhiannon Brown

What would make a great Australian sporting novel? Our guests discuss translating the love of the game, footy nicknames, and intense team culture in ex-AFL player Brandon Jack’s Pissants.

And making sport of the Melbourne literary scene, Dominic Amarena’s debut novel I Want Everything is a clever, celebratory satire. 

Kate and Cassie also review the 2025 International Booker Prize winner Heart Lamp, a collection of short stories from southern India. 

Meanwhile, back home, The Miles Franklin shortlist has been announced.

Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlist:

• Brian Castro, Chinese Postman 
• Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice
• Winnie Dunn, Dirt Poor Islanders
• Julie Janson, Compassion
• Siang Lu, Ghost Cities
• Fiona McFarlane, Highway 13

BOOKS

• Banu Mushtaq, Heart Lamp: selected stories (translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhashti), Scribe 
• Brandon Jack, Pissants, Summit Books Australia  
• Dominic Amarena, I Want Everything, Summit Books Australia  

GUESTS 

James Button, writer, editor and journalist, whose books include Comeback: The Fall and Rise of Geelong, and Speechless: A Year in my Father's Business, about his time working as a speechwriter for Kevin Rudd and what that taught him about his own father's life, John Button, Minister for Industry in the Hawke and Keating Governments. 

Beejay Silcox, writer, literary critic, and regular interviewer at writers’ festivals. 

-----------

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED

• James Button, Comeback: The Fall and Rise of Geelong
• James Button, Speechless: A Year in my Father’s Business
• Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
• Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot
• Brandon Jack, 28
• Leigh Matthews, Accept the Challenge
• Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting
• Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
• Helen Garner, The Season
• David Williamson, The Club
• Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters
• Halldór Laxness, Independent People
• George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Middlemarch
• R. F. Kuang, Yellowface
• R. F. Kuang, Katabasis
• Lucas Schaefer, The Slip
• David Remnick, King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero

-----------

CREDITS

• Presenter, Kate Evans & Cassie McCullagh
• Producer, Kate Evans & Salome Lines-Morison
• Sound Engineer, Roi Huberman & Dylan Prins
• Executive Producer, Rhiannon Brown

The latest best-selling novels from Taylor Jenkins-Reid (Atmosphere) and Fredrik Backman (My Friends) explore 1980s astronauts, ambition and romance; and teenage anguish, friendship and art. Emotive and cinematic, how often is popular fiction written for the screen?

Speaking of the screen, screenwriter Thomas Vowles’ debut novel Our New Gods takes us on a twisted psychological thriller through gay saunas, bush doofs, and the grit of Melbourne’s queer scene.

BOOKS

• Thomas Vowles, Our New Gods, UQP
• Fredrik Backman, My Friends (Translated from Swedish by Neil Smith), Simon and Schuster
• Taylor Jenkins-Reid, Atmosphere, Hutchinson Heinemann

(Keep scrolling to see all other books mentioned on the program)

GUESTS

Tegan Bennett-Daylight, author and teacher of creative writing, whose books include the novels Bombora and What Falls Away; the essay collection, The Details; the short story collection, Six Bedrooms; and the Young Adult novels Royals and (her latest) How to Survive 1985. She’s a Bookshelf regular.

Richard Aedy, longtime Radio National colleague (whose programs included The Money and Life Matters); now producing a podcast for the Productivity Commission: The ProdCast; Also a Bookshelf regular.  

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED

• Taylor Jenkins-Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six
• Holden Sheppard, King of Dirt
• Bret Easton Ellis, The Shards
• Tegan Bennett-Daylight, Royals
• Tegan Bennett-Daylight, How to Survive 1985
• Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove
• Fredrik Backman, Beartown
• Fredrik Backman, Anxious People
• Percival Everett, James
• Samantha Harvey, Orbital
• Ceridwen Dovey, Only The Astronauts
• Taylor Jenkins-Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
• Taylor Jenkins-Reid, Malibu Rising
• Taylor Jenkins-Reid, Carrie Soto is Back: A Novel
• Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time
• Kevin Barry, The Heart in Winter
• Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier
• Sarah Holland-Batt, The Jaguar
• Michelle de Krester, Theory & Practice
• Sharleigh Crittenden, The Un-doing (Published in Island magazine #173)
• Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry
• Ben Lerner, The Topeka School
• Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station
• Ben Lerner, 10:04

CREDITS

• Presenter, Kate Evans & Cassie McCullagh
• Producer, Kate Evans & Salome Lines-Morison
• Sound Engineer, John Jacobs & Anne-Marie de Bettencor
• Executive Producer, Rhiannon Brown