In this episode, a conversation with writer, social worker and counsellor Laura McPhee-Browne, author of the novel Worry Doll, a thrilling exploration of love and desire – obsessive, all-consuming, and impossible to look away from.

On an ordinary day, two women meet on a train. Heloise – the older woman – lives with her boyfriend in Melbourne. Lacey – the other woman – is from Aotearoa and studies the clouds. What follows is anything but ordinary, a passionate affair that will consume them both in mismatched and maddening ways. Propulsive and lyrical, Worry Doll examines desire, memory, and the delusion of love.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781761381850/worry-doll--laura-mcphee-browne--2026--9781761381850

In this episode, a conversation with Madeleine Gray, author of Chosen Family – a queer, epic literary novel for all readers by the award-winning author of the internationally acclaimed bestseller Green Dot.

Books about friendship are not often described as love stories, but this is one. Nell Argall and Eve Bowman are both brilliant, odd and friendless. Traumatised in their first year of high school, their lives are changed forever when they meet. Set in Sydney over eighteen years, Chosen Family follows Nell and Eve as they grow into themselves, as they both love and destroy each other. Can the wounds of adolescent betrayal ever really heal? Can we ever really understand what is going on in someone else’s head?

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781761635724/chosen-family--madeleine-gray--2025--9781761635724

In today's episode, a recording taken from the Melbourne launch of Tony Albert’s incredible new art book, Not A Souvenir, a landmark monograph that celebrates an artist, curator and cultural leader, whose work reshapes how we see Aboriginal identity, urging a more honest and hopeful vision of Australia's past and future.

Tony Albert's art reclaims and reframes the imagery of Aboriginal Australia with wit, beauty and force. Across painting, photography, sculpture and installation, his practice explores Aboriginal culture, identity and history through a deeply personal lens. Drawing on individual and collective pasts, Albert transforms the visual language of colonisation – turning objects of prejudice into symbols of resistance, resilience and pride. Not a Souvenir is the most comprehensive publication on the artist to date, tracing his journey as one of Australia's most incisive contemporary voices. Across themes of past, present and future, the book unpacks the many critical questions raised in Albert's work: how do we remember, give justice to and rewrite complex and traumatic histories?

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781760764555/tony-albert--tony-albert--2026--9781760764555

In this episode, we have a conversation with Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, co-authors of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.

Who on earth is Elon Musk and what is he doing? Is he a hero, a villain, or does he swing constantly between those two poles? According to the constant media gush driven by his every act and pronouncement, Musk is best understood in personal terms. This book argues differently. Rather than seeing Musk as an individual, it sees him as an avatar of something called Muskism: a playbook for our new postliberal age. It’s not that Musk himself holds a coherent set of beliefs; you could say his life is one long improvisation. And he’s certainly never used the word Muskism – just as, a century ago, Henry Ford never used Fordism to define his own postliberal modernity.

In exploring the forces that have shaped Musk, from South Africa to Silicon Valley, Space X to DOGE, Slobodian and Tarnoff outline the motifs and practices that have come to dominate our own crisis-ridden world. Muskism, they show, speaks the language of crisis and emergency to invoke a less human future: where humans are purged from the productive process and, through social media and video games, merged with the machine. This is a worldview in which the technocrat is king; which piggybacks on the state to achieve supremacy; and in which only a select few deserve salvation. If you enter, this book warns you, you will grind and you will live in the shadow of one man – but the rewards could be priceless and the alternative might be extinction.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9780241805114/muskism--quinn-slobodian-ben-tarnoff--2026--9780241805114

In this week's episode, we're doing something a little different. As Readings celebrates Australian Fiction throughout June, we're turning to the people who spend every day talking about books: our booksellers. Australian writers have shaped our literary culture and found readers around the world, yet they can still be overlooked in international conversations about great literature. Rather than trying to define a canon, we've asked Readings staff across our Melbourne shops to share the Australian novels they return to, recommend and love. From literary classics to contemporary favourites, these are passionate, personal recommendations celebrating the extraordinary breadth of Australian storytelling.

In this episode, a conversation with two contributors to Griffith Review 92. Griffith Review is a quarterly literary journal, with every edition exploring a different theme, bringing together long-form critical and analytical non-fiction and creative writing from the finest emerging and established writers from Australia and overseas.

In his piece ‘Encircling the flames,’ Raeden Richardson reflects upon his time at Yale-NUS College, Singapore, and in her own work, ‘The limits of authenticity,’ Mindy Gill asks the reader to contemplate, just as she does, on literary culture, inclusion and the commodification of identity. The two writers were joined in conversation by Darby Jones, a writer and editorial assistant at Griffith Review, to discuss the themes of these essays more broadly.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781923213197/griffith-review-92--2026--9781923213197

In this episode, a conversation with Steve Toltz, Booker-shortlisted author, and the writer of a new audacious, comic lament for a world that no longer knows itself – a novel titled A Rising of the Lights.

In a reeling world of fraudsters and hypnotists, sleep talkers and estranged twins, false alibis and second chances, Rusty Wilson is beset on all sides by mysteries. Why was his childhood decided by a throw of dice, why has his wife confessed to a lover, and why do his parents no longer wish to see him? When Rusty loses his job to an AI system, Edwina, the mercurial friend of his youth, finds him a new role as an oracle to the young. But how can he advise anyone on what it means to be human when artificial consciousness appears within reach? If it's all just one more con, it's not clear who's scamming who. Besides, should any of it matter to Rusty, when all he wants is for those he loves to love him back?

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781761355936/a-rising-of-the-lights--steve-toltz--2026--9781761355936

In this episode, a conversation with writer and comedian Patrick Marlborough, author of Nock Loose.

Set in the fictional coastal town of Bodkins Point, where an annual ultra-violent medieval festival has warped local history and identity for generations, it follows retired Olympian archer and former Tokusatsu stunt performer Joy as she embarks on a revenge quest through a landscape of grifters, weirdos, colonial ghosts and spectacular violence.

Equal parts satire, thriller and fever dream, it’s a feral, funny and surprisingly heartfelt novel unlike anything else in contemporary Australian fiction.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781760997441/nock-loose--2026--9781760997441

In this episode, a conversation with Y.M. Abdel-Magied, author, writer, commentator and the mind behind a new book, At Sea.

Expert driller Zainab is called to take charge of a high-stakes oil rig operation. Unable to resist the opportunity, she leaves behind her pregnant sister and heads offshore for the job of her life. But there's a catch. The rig is teetering on the edge of disaster – and Zainab is the only woman amongst a crew of hardened men who want absolutely nothing to do with her. At the helm but forced to prove herself at every turn, Zainab labours to investigate the rig's imminent collapse. She quickly grasps that the real danger lies in the cold calculations and base desires of the men she is forced to spend every waking moment with.

As tensions rise and secrets unravel, Zainab races to uncover the truth bubbling below and fend off the looming catastrophe. Explosive and thought-provoking, At Sea is an exhilarating story about the clash of ambition, principle and prejudice, and the unexpected consequences of our choices.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781837267095/at-sea--ym-abdel-magied--2026--9781837267095

In this episode, a conversation with award-winning poet and writer Doireann Ni Ghriofa, author of a new book, Said the Dead.

In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had she lived in another time, she too might have found herself held within those walls. Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE. It is the first of many signs. Guided by an irresistible impulse, she follows them. Soon, she is trespassing, stealing, absconding from the routine of mother, spouse, daughter, as she uncovers a chorus of startling voices: those of the women who knew the hospital best. They murmur from archives and old records. They haunt from stairwells and walls. In them – and in one figure in particular – she may find meaning and solace, righteous anger, salvation even. Or her final vanishing?

A work of sublime intensity and tenderness, Said the Dead breaks the boundaries between worlds – past and present, imagined and real, fact and fiction – to make something new and lasting: an experience full of danger, full of love and full of truth.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9780571396177/said-the-dead--doireann-ni-ghriofa--2026--9780571396177