In this episode, a conversation with broadcaster and writer James Crawford, author of The Vanishing Earth: A Journey Through the Last Days of Abundance, a deeply reported journey into the scarred landscapes of global extraction.

Humanity has remade the Earth with astonishing speed. In the last fifty years alone we have taken more out of the planet than in all prior history combined. Across every continent lie the immense wounds left behind by extraction: the mines, quarries, poisoned rivers and hollowed-out towns that now form the true map of our civilisation and our age.

Everything we touch – rock, metal, sand, water, even thought itself – feeds the reckless dream pursuit of limitless economic growth. Born into a family and landscape steeped in fossil fuels, James Crawford travels through the living ruins of extraction and meets the people living within its extremes: exploring the radioactive fertiliser-ziggurats of Florida’s Bone Valley, the lithium flats of the Atacama, Greenland’s collapsing melt-edge, the desertified shores of Spain’s Sea of Plastic, and the resource-hungry cloud centres birthing new artificial intelligences, to expose the true cost of this hollowed-out dream.

Yet within these same landscapes lie radical alternatives. Hope emerges in the communities waging legal battles to leave oil untouched beneath the rainforests of Ecuador and the wildfire-stricken plains of Montana; technologists attempting to reverse extraction on Iceland’s tundra; and architects raising wooden skyscrapers amid Scandinavia’s felled forests – finding the path to repair for a world pushed to the brink. Incisive, immersive and visionary, The Vanishing Earth exposes the ideological forces that have shaped the planet and charts the essential pathways that could yet save it.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781761382116/the-vanishing-earth--james-crawford--2026--9781761382116

In this episode, a special conversation with Young Adult and Middle Grade Fiction writer Tamara Moss, author of a new book, Five Voices, a thrilling and addictive YA murder mystery.

‘Five Voices’ is the highly popular podcast founded by five friends – Rosie, William, Simone, Zac, and Ocean – who debate contentious issues while playing classic board games. Until one night when, an hour after a huge argument during a recording session of the podcast, William is found dead. Everyone claims innocence, but something doesn't add up ... somebody must be lying.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781761182761/five-voices--tamara-moss--2026--9781761182761

In this episode, a conversation with Anna Heyward, animal behavioural scientist and New Yorker writer, and author of a new memoir: Living with Freddie, a book about seeing the world from the point of view of man's best – and oft misunderstood – friend, the dog.

When Anna Heyward adopted a rescued Italian greyhound, she was thrilled to bring a dog into her life. But Freddie, she quickly realised, had severe separation anxiety, unable to be left alone for more than thirty seconds without crying uncontrollably, biting his own tail or scratching at his body. While some would have given the dog back, writing him off as a 'bad dog', Anna transformed her life. She took Freddie to work and hid him from her boss. Her social life withered. Her relationship with her fiancé began to flounder. She dedicated her life to entering the mind of her dog. As Anna observed Freddie's behaviour, she began to experience the world as he did: the quality of light, the timbre of sound; a leaf falling from a tree. And she changed – but not in the way you might expect. This is a meditation on what it means to be bad or good, on how much we can – or should – try to alter another being's behaviour, and on what is possible to know about another mind. But at its heart, Living With Freddie is a beautiful portrait of the relationship between a human and a dog.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9780733654800/living-with-freddie--anna-heyward--2026--9780733654800

In this episode, a conversation with Alice Pung, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of her landmark memoir, and a bona fide modern Australian classic, Unpolished Gem.

In a wonderland called Footscray, a girl named Alice and her Chinese-Cambodian family pursue the Australian Dream – Asian style. Armed with an ocker accent, Alice dives head-first into schooling, romance and the getting of wisdom. Her mother becomes an Aussie battler – an outworker, that is. Her father embraces the miracle of franchising and opens an electrical-appliance store. And every day her grandmother blesses Father Government for giving old people money. Unpolished Gem is a book rich in comedy, a loving and irreverent portrait of a family, its everyday struggles and bittersweet triumphs, and a longstanding Readings favourite.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781760645762/unpolished-gem--alice-pung--2026--9781760645762

In this episode, a conversation with novelist Robyn Dennison, author of a new crime novel, In Plain Sight. This story follows Detective Lara Wilton, a sex-crimes detective who returns to her home town to investigate disturbing photographs found on a USB. But the twin sisters at the centre of the case are guarding secrets of their own, and without their cooperation, the investigation can go nowhere. Exploring the complicated relationship between evidence, justice and personal agency, In Plain Sight is a gripping literary crime novel about the constraints of the law and the blurred boundaries between professional and personal lives.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781923670068/in-plain-sight--robyn-dennison--2026--9781923670068

In this episode, we’re presenting conversations with Readings booksellers who have participated in judging this year’s Readings New Australian Fiction Prize. With the shortlist of works announced today, we thought it would be a great opportunity to share reflections and observations from judges about their favourite books from this year’s shortlist. The Readings Prize has been celebrating outstanding new Australian writing since the prize was first awarded in 2014, and we’re incredibly proud of the impact we’ve had as champions of emerging authors in that time. This year’s winner will be announced Tuesday 27 October, and there will be a live celebration, but until then, do listen in to hear from our booksellers on the shortlisted books for this year’s prize.

Enjoy what you heard? Head to the Readings website to check out the books mentioned in this episode: https://www.readings.com.au/news/the-readings-new-australian-fiction-prize-2026-shortlist

In this episode, something special from our archive. Last year, Readings Carlton hosted Syrian-Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun for a reading and conversation with another poet, Readings bookseller Ender Başkan. Fluid and unselfconscious, Ghayath Almadhoun writes love poems in the shape of nightmares:, andI have brought you a severed hand is a surreal mix of absurd humour, heteroerotic lust and dead seriousness. Caught between two exiles, the one inherited from his Palestinian father and the one he chose and lives, Almadhoun attempts to explain water and tame hope.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781739843120/i-have-brought-you-a-severed-head--ghayath-almadhoun--2025--9781739843120

In this episode, another instalment of the Readings Kids Podcast, hosted by Readings Prize and Readings Foundation coordinator Angela Crocombe. Angela was joined by members of the Teen Advisory Board for a discussion with Suzy Zail, author of A New Kind of Beautiful, a moving YA novel about love, loss, and the beauty in the things we can't always see. Paige Wilding has her future mapped out – the Year 10 Art prize. Graduation. A coveted spot in an elite art school in New York. But when she's diagnosed with an incurable eye disease, the perfect life she’s planned starts to blur. She makes a choice to keep her condition secret and live louder, love wilder, and paint like her life depends on it. Only her best friend Jazz knows the truth, and is helping her cram a lifetime of colour into a single year. But as her sight fades and she’s forced to give up painting, it’s Zac, her rival for the art prize, who helps Paige find a way back to her art and a new kind of beautiful; messy and imperfect but also raw, unfiltered and fiercely alive.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781760653743/a-new-kind-of-beautiful--suzy-zail--2026--9781760653743

In this episode, a recording taken from the Melbourne launch of Tom Griffiths’ new book, Alice’s dreaming, an astonishing work of history about a girl and the Indigenous world she encountered. Early last century, Alice Duncan-Kemp grew up on a remote Queensland cattle station. Later she would write down her childhood memories of learning from Aboriginal women and men at home on their own Country. In her books, she evoked a rich parallel universe of storytelling and lore, which she felt privileged to witness. She also spoke of an informal local treaty that curbed the violence of the frontier. What are we to make of 'Alice's dreaming' today? Master historian and writer Tom Griffiths takes us into – and beyond – this revelatory encounter. Through it we glimpse the turmoil of a complex and tragic frontier, and a remarkable story of survival and cultural resilience. In recent years, the Mithaka people Alice lived among and wrote about have reclaimed their Country, drawing in part on her writing to support their claims. Alice's dreaming shows how moving, intimate – and unexpected – history can be.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781760646240/alices-dreaming--tom-griffiths--2026--9781760646240

In this episode, a conversation with Amanda Curtin, author of a new novel – Six Days. Daniel, an expatriate Australian who has lived in Paris for more than forty years, has made a mess of his life and is trying to atone, to become the ‘good man’ his friend Marcelline believes him to be. But Marcelline has disappeared, the quotidian world has been tipped out of balance and Daniel makes an error of judgment that places at risk everything he values. The novel’s six-day narrative, set in the Latin Quarter of Paris in the winter of 2012, expands into lifetimes, histories, as interconnecting stories weave through Daniel’s. Stories of abandonment and fractured families, rape and coercion, addiction, ambition, loss and grief, are told in moments and set within the context of war and occupation, the revolutionary sixties, riots in a Catalan town in the south of France, a grassroots movement to make visible the invisible homeless. The personal stitched into, and inseparable from, the political. And throughout, the constant of footsteps and pawpatter as Daniel and his old dog walk the streets of one of the most idealised and romanticised cities on earth.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781764239745/six-days--amanda-curtin--2026--9781764239745