The Book Club: Reading Kamila Shamsie
Exploring the novels of Pakistani and English writer Kamala Shamsie with Maryam Azam and Sonia Nair, with a particular focus on Best of Friends and Home Fire
Nov 04, 2022•1 hr
The Bookshelf
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.
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Episodes
New fiction from Cormac McCarthy, Fiona McFarlane and Cole Haddon
A brother and sister walk uneasy paths, and plumb both literal and hallucinatory depths in Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger; worlds and characters explode across both space and time in Cole Haddon's Psalms for the End of the World; and nineteenth-century Australia and its mythologies remade in Fiona McFarlane's The Sun Walks Down. Kate and Cassie are joined by guests rock star Tim Rogers, and critic and memoirist Shannon Burns
Oct 28, 2022•1 hr
George Saunders, Barbara Kingsolver, John Irving: an American Bookshelf
An all-American edition of the bookshelf, with new fiction from George Saunders, Barbara Kingsolver and John Irving. Both Charles Dickens and Herman Melville also get a look in. Kate and Cassie are joined by novelist Felicity McLean and literary academic David Ellison
Oct 21, 2022•1 hr
Sisters at breaking point, a grizzly bear on the run and living with 100 ex-boyfriends
Two wildly different sisters are trying to work out how to live and who to love during a sweaty Sydney summer in Diana Reid's hotly anticipated new novel Seeing Other People. In Chris Flynn's short story collection Here Be Leviathans, stories are told from the perspective of animals including a grizzly bear and a family of platypus, as well as inanimate objects like airline seats and hotel rooms. Plus, Ling Ma's Bliss Montage, a dazzling collection of short stories that include a woman who lives...
Oct 14, 2022•1 hr
A whale gone mad, fierce Irish love and a Māori detective
in this episode Jonathan Green joins Cassie McCullagh to talk about three hard hitting new works of fiction from Robbie Arnott, Donal Ryan and Michael Bennett.
Oct 07, 2022•1 hr
The Book Club: The ouevre of Ian McEwan
In this edition of RN's monthly Book Club, we look at Ian McEwan's extraordinary body of work, paying particular attention to his new novel Lessons, a meditation on history and humanity presented through the span of one man's lifetime.
Sep 30, 2022
Pod extra: Hilary Mantel, the Booker prize-winning author of the Wolf Hall trilogy has died
English writer Hilary Mantel has sadly died, aged 70. The Booker prize winning author spoke to Kate Evans for the Big Weekend of Books in 2020.
Sep 26, 2022•50 min
Siblings, revelry and fear: Peggy Frew, Kate Atkinson and Adrian McKinty
Three sisters, locked in their lifelong roles, on a roadtrip, in Peggy Frew's Wildflowers; a London underworld full of betrayal and promise, in Kate Atkinson's Shrines of Gaiety (read by Rohan Wilson); and talking to Adrian McKinty about the differences between noir and thrillers.
Sep 23, 2022•1 hr
Drugs, gangs, racism and reputation: three new works of fiction
Reading Tracey Lien's All That's Left Unsaid, Diane Connell's The Improbable Life of Ricky Bird and Clarissa Goenawan's Watersong – Kate Evans and Elizabeth Flynn with guests George Haddad and Mandi McIntosh.
Sep 16, 2022•1 hr
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, 2022•1 hr
The Book Club: Is crime fiction a literature of resistance? (plus a guide to Korean lit)
RN's Book Club in a different format to usual: a panel discussion plus a quick reading guide. The big question: Is crime fiction a literature of resistance? Also, a guide to fiction in translation from Korea
Sep 02, 2022•1 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, 2022•1 hr
Joan of Arc re-imagined, dystopian coastlines and trees in the Oz literary imagination
Joan of Arc as a capable, scrappy young woman; unmoored on a strange coastline; and trees in both crime fiction and the Australian literary imaginary: reading Scott McCulloch's Basin, Katherine J Chen's Joan (with Prof of Philosophy Karen Green) and crime writer Margaret Hickey's Stone Town on both crime and landscape
Aug 19, 2022•1 hr
A champion pedestrianist, an island haunted by grief and running into all your exes
Reading Robert Drewe's Nimblefoot, Eliza Henry-Jones' Salt and Skin and Sloane Crosley's Cult Classic with critic and literary judge Susan Wyndham and novelist and funeral director Jackie Bailey
Aug 12, 2022
Big Weekend of Books at the State Library of NSW: writers special
Writers Hayley Scrivenor, Michael Brissenden and Yumna Kassab join Kate and Cassie onstage to talk libraries, stories, trauma, failure, children, Australian identity and more in this Big Weekend of Books edition of The Bookshelf
Aug 07, 2022•54 min
Reviewing the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award winner and shortlist
Reviewing the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award winner, Jennifer Down's Bodies of Light, and shortlist with theatre writer Tom Wright and literary critic and interviewer Nicole Abadee
Jul 30, 2022•54 min
An urn full of memories, an everlasting lightbulb and what to read next: Chris Womersley's The Diplomat and Anjali Joseph's Keeping in Touch
Reading Chris Womersley's The Diplomat and Anjali Joseph's Keeping in Touch plus a guide to Sri Lankan fiction from Smriti Daniel and what's coming out later this year with independent bookseller Mark Rubbo. Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh, bringing you new fiction
Jul 23, 2022•54 min
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, 2022•54 min
Dystopias, ship's monsters and trees: Claire G Coleman, Jokha Alharthi, Jess Kidd and Jane Rawson
Australian dystopias, historical shipwrecks and women's lives in Oman: reading Claire G Coleman's Enclave, Jokha Alharthi's Bitter Orange Tree and Jess Kidd's The Night Ship with guests novelist Sally Piper and essayist Eda Gunaydin; and Jane Rawson on her A History of Dreams and its influences
Jul 09, 2022•58 min
The Book Club: Celebrating Australian literature for the ABC's 90th
Reading Alexis Wright's Carpentaria and Patrick White's The Vivisector with critic Geordie Williamson - and with words from the writers themselves, as well as other voices and commentators from the ABC Archives
Jul 02, 2022•54 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, 2022•1 hr 6 min
A Métis family tree and a Sydney Leprosarium: Katherena Vermette's The Strangers and Eleanor Limprecht's The Coast
A tough and poetic family story of the Métis (Michif) people of Canada in Katherena Vermette's The Strangers; and exclusion and compassion in Australian history, with a novel set in a lazaret, in Eleanor Limprecht's The Coast (read by historian Dr Ian Hoskins)
Jun 25, 2022•54 min
Abomination, modernism and crime: new fiction from Ashley Goldberg, Michelle Cahill and Matthew Spencer
Three books by Australian authors: crime in Sydney in Matthew Spencer's Black River; rewriting a sidelined character from a classic of modernism, in Michelle Cahill's Daisy and Woolf, and friendship and exile in an Orthodox Jewish community in Melbourne in Ashley Goldberg's Abomination, with guests writer Kari Gislason and literary interviewer Michaela Kalowski
Jun 18, 2022•1 hr
Racecourses, race, sex work and exile: new fiction from Geraldine Brooks, Leila Mottley and Zaheda Ghani
Reading Geraldine Brooks' Horse, Leila Mottley's Nightcrawling and Zaheda Ghani's Pomegranate and Fig with journalist, music writer and memoirist Mawunyo Gbogbo (Hip Hop and Hymns) and CEO of the Australian Muslim Women's Centre for Human Rights, Diana Sayed
Jun 11, 2022•58 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, 2022•1 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, 2022•54 min
From the Sydney Writers Festival: The Joy of Re-reading
Why do we read and reread? And how does rereading read us? From the Sydney Writers Festival, Kate was onstage with bibliomemoirist Ruth Wilson and scholar Bernadette Brennan
May 25, 2022•52 min
From the Sydney Writers Festival: with Jackie Huggins, Damon Galgut and George Haddad
In front of an audience, and with plenty of book recommendations, Kate and Cassie are onstage with historian and biographer Jackie Huggins and novelists Damon Galgut and George Haddad
May 21, 2022•54 min
Making umbrellas in the afterlife: New books from Steve Toltz, Emiliano Monge and Domonique Wilson
Reading Steve Toltz's Here Goes Nothing, Emiliano Monge's What Goes Unsaid and Dominique Wilson's Orphan Rock with Lauren Chater (The Winter Dress) and Jonty Claypole (Words Fail Us: In Defence of Disfluency)
May 14, 2022•58 min
Soap, silences and happy stories (maybe): new fiction from Paddy O'Reilly, Patrick Gale and Norman Erikson Pasaribu
Reading Paddy O’Reilly's Other Houses, Patrick Gale's Mother’s Boy and Norman Erikson Pasaribu's Happy Stories, Mostly with writers Ennis Ćehić (Sadvertising) and Hilde Hinton (A Solitary Walk on the Moon)
May 07, 2022•54 min
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