It’s hard to be excited about the future right now. Jess Scully asks, What can we do? The answer is: plenty! All over the world, people are refusing the business-as-usual mindset and putting humans back into the civic equation, reimagining work and care, finance and government, urban planning and communication, to make them better and fairer for all. Meet the care workers reclaiming control in India and Lebanon, the people turning slums into safe havens in Kenya and Bangladesh, and champions of ...
Aug 04, 2020•40 min
Identical twins only look the same … Beautiful twin sisters Iris and Summer are startlingly alike, but beyond what the eye can see lies a darkness that sets them apart. Cynical and insecure, Iris has long been envious of open-hearted Summer's seemingly never-ending good fortune, including her perfect husband, Adam. Called to Thailand to help sail the family yacht to the Seychelles, Iris nurtures her own secret hopes for what might happen on the journey. But when she unexpectedly finds herself al...
Aug 03, 2020•27 min
How far you would you go for love? Franny Stone is determined to go to the end of the earth, following the last of the Arctic terns on what may be their final migration to Antarctica. As animal populations plummet and commercial fishing faces prohibition, Franny talks her way onto one of the few remaining boats heading south. But as she and the eccentric crew travel further from shore and safety, the dark secrets of Franny’s life begin to unspool. A daughter’s yearning search for her mother. An ...
Aug 02, 2020•26 min
Hailed as ‘a fearless exposer of folly, vice and crime’ when it first hit the streets in the 1890s, Truth was later condemned by a High Court Judge as ‘a wretched little paper, reeking of filth, injurious to the health of house servants and young girls’. Adrian Tame knows that better than anyone as he worked for Truth for more than a decade as a reporter and news editor. In the years it was owned by the Murdoch family he worked alongside young Rupert as he cut his teeth on the shock horror scand...
Jul 31, 2020•22 min
Suddenly, when the country caught fire, people realised what the government has not: that climate change is killing us. But climate deaths didn’t start in 2019. Medical officers have been warning of a health emergency as temperatures rise for years, and for at least a decade Australians have been dying from the plagues of climate change – from heat, flood, disease, smoke. And now, pandemic. In this detailed, considered, compassionate book, Paddy Manning paints us the big picture. He revisits som...
Jul 31, 2020•20 min
As a child, Julie dreamed of being somewhere else, of making a difference. Now, she can’t wait to meet the nuns she will live with and the children she will provide physiotherapy for in Ethiopia. But Julie has trouble sticking to convent rules and soon finds herself wondering how much difference a single physio can make anyway. When she takes a teaching role at a university, Julie finally feels closer to fulfilling her dreams – training Ethiopia’s first physiotherapists, treating paediatric pati...
Jul 09, 2020•25 min
Murph Cooper is famous … and he's not happy about it.Kid Normal and the Super Zeroes used to save the day in secret. But suddenly everyone knows who they are. Oily villain Nicholas Knox has told the public that superheroes are dangerous. He wants to lock them all up and take over the world! *Cue evil cackling* Murph must expose Knox's evil plan, or the world of heroes is doomed forever! In this episode, Max Lewis joins Greg and Chris to chat about the 'Kid Normal' series, and it's thrilling fina...
Jun 10, 2020•29 min
In 2015, Eva Holland was forced to confront her greatest fear when her mother unexpectedly had a stroke and passed away. After the shock and grief subsided, Holland was sent on a deep dive into the science of fear, digging into an array of universal and personal questions. On her journey, Holland meets with scientists who are working to eliminate phobias with a single pill, she explores the lives of the few individuals who suffer from a rare disease that prevents them from ever feeling fear, and...
May 31, 2020•25 min
On a night of raging winds and rain, Captain Cook's Endeavour lies splintered on a coral reef off the coast of far north Australia. A small disparate band of survivors, fracturing already, huddle on the shore of this strange land - their pitiful salvage scant protection from the dangers of the unknown creatures and natives that live here. Watching these mysterious white beings, the Guugu Yimidhirr people cannot decide if they are ancestor spirits to be welcomed - or hostile spirits to be speared...
May 28, 2020•26 min
When urban academic Hayley Katzen moves to a remote Australian cattle property to live with her farmer girlfriend, she hopes, at last, to find home. But this is no happy-ever-after tree change. Lecture halls, law reform and the arts are replaced with castrating calves, shovelling manure, fire-fighting and anti-gas blockades. In a place that attracts people who live by their own rules, Hayley must confront her limitations and preconceptions to forge her own identity. Grab a copy of Untethered her...
May 17, 2020•27 min
Anna Austen has always been told she must marry rich. Her future depends upon it. While her dear cousin Fanny has a little more choice, she too is under pressure to find a suitor. But how can either girl know what she wants? Is finding love even an option? The only person who seems to have answers is their Aunt Jane. She has never married. In fact, she's perfectly happy, so surely being single can't be such a bad thing? The time will come for each of the Austen girls to become the heroines of th...
May 08, 2020•29 min
It’s 1972. When hot-headed, impetuous Jack Muir gets off the ship in Durban, he fails to get back on. Instead, he sails into misadventure, fleeing the stifling town of Genoralup to try to lose himself in South Africa at the height of apartheid. But the past has a way of catching up with you, and soon Jack is running again, this time to a kibbutz in Israel. In the course of a lifetime, Jack will travel far, always caught between fleeing from and seeking those things he needs: a mother’s precious ...
Apr 28, 2020•22 min
Lizzie, Megan and Sam became accidental friends over good coffee, banter and wrong-world jokes at school drop off. Lizzie is a part-time midwife with four kids and a secret past. Sam is an ex-chef and stay-at-home dad with an absent, high-flying corporate wife. Megan is an ex-model single mum with a thriving online business and no time for loneliness. None of them have much interest in their school community, but when tragedy deals Baytree Primary's reputation a potentially crippling blow, this ...
Apr 28, 2020•25 min
[CONTENT WARNING: This podcast features discussions of homophobia, mental health and suicide. Furthermore, the intro contains homophobic slurs/language, violence and references to suicide. If you'd like to skip this section, skip to 1:20 in the podcast.] The debut book of Sydney-based Journalist and reporter Shannon Molloy, 'Fourteen' is a story about his fourteenth year of life as a gay kid at an all-boys rugby-mad Catholic school in regional Queensland. It was a year of torment, bullying and b...
Mar 31, 2020•25 min
From the author of 'The Lace Weaver' comes a new historical fiction novel, drawing from the unseen character of a Jonathan Swift's classic 'Gulliver's Travels'. London, 1702. When her husband is lost at sea, Mary Burton Gulliver, midwife and herbalist, is forced to rebuild her life without him. But three years later when Lemuel Gulliver is brought home, fevered and communicating only in riddles, her ordered world is turned upside down. Grab a copy of Gulliver's Wife: http://bit.ly/3adcZH4
Mar 31, 2020•20 min
[CONTENT WARNING: This podcast contains descriptions of war and mental illness that may upset listeners. Discretion is advised. In addition, the intro contains descriptions of violence against a child; skip to 1:34 in the podcast if you'd like to avoid this.] As a boy living in the Dinka tribe in what is now South Sudan, the youngest country in the world, Ayik Chut Deng was a member of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). During his time as a child soldier, he witnessed unspeakable viol...
Mar 31, 2020•31 min
Prague, 1943. Taken from her home in Prague, Hana Lederova finds herself imprisoned in the Jewish ghetto of Theresienstadt, where she is forced to endure appalling deprivation and the imminent threat of transportation to the east. When she attracts the attention of the Czech gendarme who becomes her guard, Hana reluctantly accepts his advances, hoping for the protection she so desperately needs. Sydney, 2010. Manipulated into a liaison with her married boss, Tessa knows she needs to end it, but ...
Mar 31, 2020•31 min
In 1901, the word bondmaid was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of lexicographers are gathering words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day, she sees a slip containing the word bondmaid flutter to the floor unclaimed. E...
Mar 30, 2020•17 min
Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She’s never been good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in an outback wildlife park. And although Jean talks to all her charges, she has a particular soft spot for a young dingo called Sue. As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realises this is no ordinary flu: its chief ...
Mar 29, 2020•23 min
When investigative journalist Chrissie O’Brian lands a senior job at The Argus, she is desperate to escape the nightmares of her past. Her life has become a daily battle to numb the pain. But her job is something she can do better than anyone else – and the only thing that keeps the memories at bay. A face-off on the waterfront between the unions and big business is just the kind of story to get her career back on track. But after a dockworker who confided in her turns up dead, Chrissie becomes ...
Mar 23, 2020•16 min
In 'When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father's War and What Remains', Ariana Neumann dives into the secrets of her father’s past: years spent hiding in plain sight in wartorn Berlin, the annihilation of dozens of family members in the Holocaust, and the courageous choice to build anew. Ariana Neumann joined Gregory Dobbs to chat about how the process of uncovering her father's past. Grab a copy of When Time Stopped: http://bit.ly/3cmDsUB
Mar 02, 2020•25 min
John Kinsella's memoir of his rural life takes us deep into the heart of what it means to belong and unbelong. The joys and travails of childhood, adult addictions, missteps and changing directions are acutely captured in poignant and poetic detail. In his most intimate prose work to date, Kinsella never shies from writing about the violence and intolerance of those scared of difference, and the ways in which his ethics have sometimes been met with disdain or outright hostility. But with nuance ...
Mar 01, 2020•30 min
1703: The wild east coast of Scotland. Returning to her home town of Pittenweem, fishwife and widow Sorcha McIntyre knows she faces both censure and mistrust. After all, this is a country where myth and legend are woven into the fabric of the everyday, a time when those who defy custom like Sorcha has are called to account. Based on the shocking true story of the witch hunt of Pittenweem, 'The Darkest Shore' is a beautifully written historical tale of the strength of women united against a commo...
Feb 23, 2020•30 min
Below Deck is the highly anticipated debut contemporary novel from author Sophie Hardcastle. A heartbreakingly poetic and haunting story about the vagaries of consent, about who has the space to speak and who is believed. In this episode, Greg Dobbs chats to Sophie about the themes of consent and reclaiming the body, and how her Synesthesia influenced the novel's vivid prose. Grab a copy of Below Deck: http://bit.ly/3ad6zYu
Feb 18, 2020•19 min
In December 1932, as the Depression tightened its grip, the body of a woman was found in Queens Park, Sydney. It was a popular park. There were houses in plain view. Yet this woman had been violently murdered without anyone noticing. Other equally brutal and shocking murders of women in public places were to follow. Australia's first serial killer was at large. Tanya Bretherton is the acclaimed author of The Suitcase Baby and The Suicide Bride, and her latest book The Killing Streets unpacks Aus...
Feb 17, 2020•25 min
When a stand-off with her best friend sees nineteen-year-old Emily Clements stranded in Vietnam, she is alone for the first time and adrift in a new environment. With seemingly nothing to lose, she makes the biggest decision of her life – to stay. But Emily's attempts to bridge a yawning loneliness spur a downward spiral of recklessness, as she hurtles from one sexual encounter to the next. It will take a truly terrifying experience for her to'It understand that sex is both a weapon and a wound ...
Jan 30, 2020•32 min
In 1946 two young Hungarian refugees arrive in Naples after losing everyone they loved before the war. Vera Frankel and her best friend, Edith Ban, are haunted by their terrifying escape from a train headed for Auschwitz after their mothers threw them from the carriage, promising they would follow. But instead the girls find themselves alone in a frozen, alien land. Anita Abriel based 'The Light After The War' on her mother Vera's experiences of surviving the holocaust and carving out a new life...
Jan 30, 2020•12 min
What if the baby you gave birth to belonged to someone else? Grace and Dan are in their forties and have been on the IVF treadmill since the day they got married. Priya and her husband Nick are being treated at the same fertility clinic, and while they don't face the same pressure as the Ardens, the younger couple have their own problems. A year on, one of the women learns her embryo was implanted in the other's uterus and must make a devastating choice: live a childless life knowing her son is ...
Jan 28, 2020•27 min
In a peaceful coastal town, a young woman is found brutally murdered, a piece of scripture held tightly in her hand. Local detective Charlotte Callaghan is put on the case, and she’s glad for the distraction – Gull Bay can be a hard place to keep a secret, and she’s holding on to a few. A gripping crime novel about murder, betrayal and the monsters who hide in plain sight, The Devil Inside examines the line between good and evil, and how circumstance can alter a person’s life in the blink of an ...
Jan 07, 2020•16 min
Critically acclaimed and bestselling author of the ‘Caleb Zelic’ series, Emma Viskic, is back with book three: ‘Darkness for Light.’ In this episode of the Good Reading podcast, Emma shares the challenges of writing a deaf detective, Sulari Gentill’s favourite travel snack, and why she steers clear of supernatural horror. 'Darkness for Light,' is out now: bit.ly/38RPF1R
Dec 19, 2019•23 min
