The Readings Podcast

In this episode, a conversation with author Kimberley Allsopp, author of Love and Other Puzzles, and a new book, Rise and Shine.

Charming, wryly funny, poignant and original - Rise and Shine is a love story, yes, but it's a love story that happens ten years into a marriage, when somebody wants out. It is also a story about life, love and happiness, and in the absence of happiness, what we need to do to find it again.

Rise and Shine is an utterly surprising delight, a break-up tale that is also a love story; endearing, astringent and original.

In this episode, a conversation with the bestselling author of The Truth About Her, Jacqueline Maley. Maley’s new book, Lonely Mouth, is a tender and vivid novel about the conflicted way women think about their bodies, their appetites, and themselves in the world.

In this episode, a conversation with Jane Caro, a commentator, writer and activist, and author of Lyrebird.

In this new crime novel, which opens twenty years in the past, ornithology student Jessica Weston recorded a lyrebird mimicking a woman's dying screams and reported it to police, but her claims were dismissed. Now, two decades later, a body is discovered exactly where Jessica had said it would be. Retired detective Megan Blaxland, who originally believed Jessica, returns to lead the reopened investigation. She and Jessica are determined to seek justice for the long-ignored victim, whose death was witnessed only by a bird and her murderer. But as they dig deeper, they uncover dangerous truths that put their own lives at risk.

In today’s episode, author Hamish McDonald in conversation to discuss his book, Melanesia: Travels in Black Oceania. Stretching from Fiji in the east to New Guinea in the west, Melanesia is astonishingly diverse. Its islands are home to some 1,200 language groups, many of them still isolated from the outside world. In Australia, this complex region tends to make the news only in times of crisis – military coups in Fiji, Kanak unrest in New Caledonia, rioting in Solomon Islands. Melanesia offers readers a deeper insight into the people and places behind these headlines, combining travelogue, history and astute political analysis.

In this episode, a recording taken from the launch of historian Lisa MacKinney’s book, Dressed in Black: The Shangri-Las and Their Recorded Legacy. MacKinney marshals an impressive array of new evidence to tell the story of the Shangri-Las, one of the most significant-and most misunderstood-pop groups of the 1960s.

Sisters Mary and Betty Weiss, together with twins Mary Ann and Marguerite Ganser, were schoolgirls when they formed the Shangri-Las in 1963, and had a meteoric rise to fame with songs like "Leader of the Pack" and "Remember (Walking in the Sand)." Their career was cut short for reasons largely beyond their control, derailed by the machinations of Mafia-linked record executives, and heartbreak and tragedy followed.

Equally importantly, Dressed in Black radically rewrites the accepted narrative of the Shangri-Las' place in rock history. As young women, they were permitted little agency within a male-dominated industry that viewed teenagers as fodder to be manipulat-ed and exploited by producers, songwriters, and label owners. For decades, this has served as an excuse for critics to deny the musical input of the group members, to trivialize the Shangri-Las as a "girl group," and to assign their work a lesser rank in the canon of "authentic" rock and roll. MacKinney's great achievement here is to foreground the Shangri-Las' considerable abilities and musicality, and establish the centrality of their performance of their songs to the group's underappreciated artistic achievement.

In this episode, a recording taken from the launch of Irma Gold's novel Shift.

Gusty and gripping, tender and deeply compassionate, Shift is a compulsively readable story about the messy process of art-making, and the mess of love and family. It is an unflinching, insightful and immersive novel that takes the reader inside the inner life of one township in South Africa, beyond the hyperbole of newspaper headlines, to offer bold, big-hearted hope.

In the year of the 70th anniversary of the Freedom Charter which outlined the principles of democracy and freedom in South Africa comes a novel set in the township where it was signed. Shift asks us to examine both the world around us, and ourselves.

In this episode, a recording taken from the launch of the anthology, Someone Like Me. In the book, edited by Clem Bastow and Jo Case, 25 Autistic gender-diverse and women writers explore their experiences – and explode stereotypes.

This groundbreaking anthology ranges from sex, living room dance parties and the natural world to eating disorders, all-encompassing passions and religion. Autistic people of all kinds are invited to find company in these pages – and maybe even see themselves, too.

The book was launched by ABC Radio National’s Hilary Harper and the event featured readings from several contributors.

In this episode, a conversation with a Readings favourite, Diana Reid, author of the new novel, Signs of Damage.

The Kelly family’s idyllic holiday in the South of France is disturbed when Cass, a thirteen-year-old girl, goes missing. She’s discovered several hours later with no visible signs of injury. Everyone present dismisses the incident as a close brush with tragedy. Sixteen years later, at a funeral for a member of the Kelly family, Cass collapses. The present and the past start to collide as buried secrets come to light and old doubts resurface. What really happened to Cass in the South of France? And what’s wrong with her now?

A gripping tale of unravelling memories and moral ambiguities, Signs of Damage wrestles with the difference between understanding other people, and trying to explain them.

In this episode we have a conversation with acclaimed author, Kate Grenville, to discuss her most recent book, Unsettled.

Grenville is no stranger to the past. Her success and fame as a writer exploded when she published The Secret River in 2005, a bestseller based on the story of her convict ancestor, an early settler on the Hawkesbury River. More than two decades on, and following the defeat of the Voice referendum, Grenville is still grappling with what it means to descend from people who were, as she puts it, “on the sharp edge of the moving blade that was colonisation”. So she decided to go on a kind of pilgrimage, back through the places her family stories happened, and put the stories and the First People back into the same frame, on the same country, to try to think about those questions. This gripping book is the result of that journey.

In this episode, a conversation recorded at the launch of Shapeshifting, a wide-ranging collection of nonfiction by First Nations writers co-edited by Jeanine Leane and Ellen van Neerven. With Evelyn Araluen and contributors.

These lyric essays push the boundaries of nonfiction beyond the biographical or the academic, with pieces that experiment with form and embark on carefully crafting and re-crafting interventions that both challenge and expand existing genre structures.