F.Scott Fitzgerald is known for his glittery tales of excess but he was also a prolific short story writer as Anne Margaret Daniel explains in I'd Die For You: And Other Lost Stories. Then a novel in five parts in Krissy Keen's An Uncertain Grace and the tale of a Chinese Soldier at Gallipoli in Ouyang Yu's Billy Sing.

A mysterious thread throughout with Samanta Schweblin and her unsettling book Fever Dream. John Darnielle takes us to the cornfields of Iowa in Universal Harvester and in Claire Fuller's Swimming Lessons we wonder what happened to Iris. We also want to know what is on Kayla Rae Whitaker's top shelf.

Lia Hills book The Crying Place was written as she drove through central Australia; while Bentley Frazer drives through his own past in a book he calls a novelised memoir, Scoundrel Days. There's also an entire invented Woolgrowers Companion in Joy Rhoades novel The Woolgrower's Companion.

A intimate story about Oliver Sacks by the man who loved him in Insomniac City and art meet popular culture via comics and zines in The Animators. A look at what's on Jeff Sparrow's top shelf and to end a ship of lost souls sailing the world and turned away form every port in The German Girl

A house of books with a creepy neighbour in Dirk Kurbjuweit's Fear and a claustrophobic 1890's home in See What I Have Done and a weatherboard Brisbane cottage in the rain in A Hundred Small Lessons. Then we go back to Michael Rosen's childhood with Emile and the Detectives.

The treatment of Koreans in Japan through a delicate family history in Pachinko and a wig wearing pole dancing mother in Trapeze Act. Then time travel in a boat up and down the coast of Australia in Storyland and the story of a young Irish convict in old Sydney town in 1822 in Cotter.

Flicking between London in the 1960's and Spain in the 1930's we meet some artists in The Muse, the second novel by Jessie Burton. We also meet up with Louis Nowra in his local pub in Woolloomooloo and then travel to Scotland and W.H.Auden in Polly Clark's Larchfield before find out what inspires Flemish artist Stefan Hertmans.

Gods and monsters walk with us through Nail Gaiman's American Gods and perhaps down the streets of Western Sydney with Peter Polites and his urban noir novel Down the Hume. Also some sharp political edges in New York with a couple whose families are deeply divided in Dorit Rabinyan's All The Rivers.

Irish writer John Boyne on his new book The Heart's Invisible Furies, the life story of a gay man stretching from the end of WWll until Ireland's referendum on gay marriage. Also,100 Years of Solitude fifty years on; Christina Baker Kline's novel from a painting, A Piece of the World; and Odetta Kelada, winner of the Dorothy Hewett Prize for an unpublished manuscript.

An American writer, Viet Thanh Nguyen explains the difference between being an immigrant writer and a refugee writer. We go freediving with Kathryn Heyman and her now novel Storm and Grace and discuss fiction in the post-truth era with Anna Funder and Ryan O'Neill. We also find out what's on the top shelf of crime writer Stephen Greenall.