The Bookshelf - podcast cover

The Bookshelf

ABC listenwww.abc.net.au
What are you reading, loving or being challenged by? We review the latest in fiction for dedicated readers and for those who wish they read more.

Episodes

A Renaissance wedding, a Mediaeval war and the ghosts of Modernism: three new novels

Kate and Cassie with three new novels: grappling with modernism and creativity in Sophie Cunningham's This Devastating Fever; a young woman caged by intrigue and expectations in Maggie O'Farrell's The Marriage Portrait; and working soldiers bleed across France in Dan Jones' Essex Dogs – with guests Stephen Gapps and Amy Walters

Sep 09, 20221 hr

Three monks in a boat, the last white man, and wild wild women

A story of three men trying to create a new world, on a craggy island in seventh-century Ireland, in Emma Donoghue's Haven; anxieties about race and migration, in Mohsin Hamid's The Last White Man; and scrappy voices from history, in Selby Wynn Schwartz's fragmentary lesbian colloquy, After Sappho.

Aug 26, 20221 hr

Paul Daley's Jesustown, A G Slatter's The Path of Thorns, and a guide to books for kids

Contact history and its 'saviour' mythologies turned upside down in Paul Daley's Jesustown; inside-out fairytales and an invented gothic world in A G Slatter's The Path of Thorns (read by Elizabeth Flynn); and a guide to middle-grade fiction from writer Tristan Bancks. Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh, bringing you new fiction

Jul 16, 202254 min

Frank Moorhouse from the ABC Archives: podcast special

Vale Frank Moorhouse, journalist, essayist, shortstory writer and novelist. Remembering the writer with his friend, Angelo Loukakis, and with archival interviews from 1980 (The Everlasting Secret Family) and 2000 (Dark Palace, the second in the Edith Campbell Berry trilogy, which went on to win the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award)

Jun 27, 20221 hr 6 min

The Book Club: Horses and their Riders

Reading Gillian Mears' 2011 novel Foal’s Bread and Craig Sherborne's recent release The Grass Hotel with critic and biographer Bernadette Brennan and writer and cultural historian Luke Stegemann

Jun 04, 20221 hr

Ireland, Italy, England and Oz: four bold new works of fiction

Reading Brendan Colley's The Signal Line, Louise Kennedy's Trespasses, Lauren John Joseph's At Certain Points We Touch and Jonathan Bazzi's Fever with novelists Nigel Featherstone (My Heart is a Little Wild Thing) and Ellie O'Neill (Family Matters)

May 28, 202254 min

New fiction from Ireland and New Zealand

Reading Irish novel The Colony by Audrey Magee, and two New Zealand novels, Becky Manawatu's Auē and Sue Orr's Loop Tracks, with guests publisher Jemma Birrell and novelist Lyn Yeowart

Mar 11, 202257 min

The Book Club: Monica Ali's Brick Lane and Love Marriage

Reading Monica Ali's 2003 debut novel, Brick Lane and latest release, Love Marriage with guests writer Roanna Gonsalves and RN's Richard Aedy. Love, marriage, migration, displacement, drama, storytelling.

Mar 04, 202256 min