The Readings Podcast

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

In this episode, another instalment of the Comics Question, where Bernard Caleo discusses comics, graphic novels, and the place they inhabit within the broader books and publishing world. Bernard was joined by Aki Fukuoka, children’s book illustrator and graphic novelist, who has worked on over 80 children’s books, most notably including Sally Rippin’s beloved Billie B Brown series. The two met to discuss the newest iteration in this series, a first graphic novel collaboration for Rippin and Fukuoka, and how, for Aki, this form of children’s illustration is inextricably linked to another illustrated storytelling tradition, that of Japanese comics, or Manga.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781761216404/spooky-house-volume-1--sally-rippin--2026--9781761216404

In this episode, a conversation with Lenny Robinson, author of And in the Morning, a prismatic gem of a debut novel that reflects the experiences of women across three wars and the damage done to the men they love. In the winter of 1919, Lily and her three-year-old son, Ted, rush through the streets of Melbourne to welcome home Lily’s husband, Bert, who has spent the last four years fighting with the Light Horse in the Middle East. Twenty-three years later, as the same city awaits a Japanese invasion, Frankie, a young servicewoman on a night’s leave, meets an airman, Ed, at a dance. Almost three decades on, as Melbourne convulses with anti-war protests, single mother Fran prepares a funeral for her only son, a young conscript killed in Vietnam. And in the Morning is a novel about war and the ways in which its tragedies, both great and small, transform the intimate lives of the mothers, wives and lovers who must live with its consequences.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9780702268847/and-in-the-morning--lenny-robinson--2026--9780702268847

In today's episode, a conversation with Simon Reynolds, acclaimed music writer and journalist, and author of a new book, Still in a Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984-1994. Twenty years after his acclaimed postpunk best-seller, Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds tells the tale of what happened next: the underground explosion of noisepop, shoegaze, slacker rock and grunge that reverberated through the mid-Eighties into the early Nineties. Capturing the musical exhilaration of the era along with the alienation of youth during a period of ascendant conservative politics and glitzy mainstream pop, Still in a Dream celebrates a golden age of guitar reinvention, a second psychedelia of mind-blowing sounds pioneered by bands like My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth. In Britain, groups like Cocteau Twins and Slowdive escaped into shimmering dreamworlds while American underground rockers like Dinosaur Jr. and Pavement blended apathy and urgency into thrilling noise. A propulsive and personal account from a journalist who covered this music in real time from the frontlines, Still in a Dream vividly recreates a period that was the last blast for the analogue culture of vinyl records and music papers, before the Internet changed everything.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781399618373/still-in-a-dream--simon-reynolds--2026--9781399618373