Adele Dumont is a writer, and a critic. Her essays are well-regarded, having been published in prestigious literary journals including Meanjin, Griffith Review, Southerly and more. Her first novel, No Man is an Island, was an account of her experiences teaching English to asylum seekers in detention. But there is one thing about her that…
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David Finkel is an award winning American journalist known for his bestselling book The Good Soldiers (2009), a recounting the USA-Iraq war, which secured the title ‘New York Times Best Book of the Year’. The Washington Post editor and writer won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 along with other awards throughout his career reporting across…
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With Christmas less than a week away, at the AU we’ve got to the task of agonising and arguing over our end of year lists – best albums, best films, best games, and of course best books. The Books team have taken a look over the year’s releases and compiled a list of some of…
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You’re All Talk is a book about just what it sounds like – talking, language and its ties to our identities. Sociolinguist Rob Drummond takes us through how we perceive others (and ourselves) through the way we talk, offering a fascinating dive into the world of accents, slang and code-switching. It may seem like a…
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Rachel Louise Snyder’s most recent memoir – Woman We Buried, Woman We Burned – is the follow-up to the critically acclaimed book No Visible Bruises. The book is an account of Synder’s journey from teenage runaway to award-winning journalist. The often heartbreaking account begins with the death of the author’s mother, when Snyder was eight years…
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Exploring motherhood and care-giving in the midst of a terrifying algae-borne disease, Fernanda Trías’ latest book Pink Slime is an atmospheric and unforgettable read. The story follows an unnamed woman, living on the coast close to the danger the algae and disease presents. As the area gradually worsens and the people abandon the town, she…
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Owls are a bird that have fascinated humans for a very long time, appearing all over the world and finding significance almost everywhere. It’s the question of why we love them so much that Jennifer Ackerman explores in her new book What an Owl Knows. Ackerman’s book serves as something of a comprehensive overview of…
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Happy New Year! 2023 is already in full swing and we in the AU Books Team are back and ready to look ahead at some of this year’s most anticipated books. With so many books published each week, month and year, it’d be impossible to read them all. So this is only the briefest snapshot…
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In his memoir What Goes Unsaid, critically acclaimed Mexican author Emiliano Monge has turned his attention to his own family tree and decided that it’s time to write about his grandfather’s deceit, and the affect it had on his family. In March 1958, Carlos Monge McKay drives to a quarry and fakes his own death. Four…
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Though Becky Manawatu’s debut novel Aue was originally released in 2019, readers may not have been surprised to see it on the new release shelves this past March. After its original publication by small NZ based publishers Makaro Press, the book went on to win the Jan Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, the MITOQ Best First…
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After her parents die in a car accident, physicist Ruth Schwarz sets off for their hometown of Greater Einland to begin preparations for their funeral. But Greater Einland is a stubborn sort of place, determined to remain hidden from outsiders, with even Austrian officials denying all knowledge of the place. But Ruth is stubborn too…
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Beowulf is one of those stories that a lot of people think they know. That’s because it’s an iconic work of early English literature. Not only that, there have been countless translations and adaptations in the intervening centuries since the heroic tale was first uttered by a bard. Amongst its translators and adaptors are some…
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Clarissa Goenawan‘s second novel The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida may tread familiar ground for her fans. While Goenawan is an Indonesian-born Singaporean writer, both this and her debut novel Rainbirds are set in Tokyo. Perhaps it is only fitting, then, that Sharlene Teo compares Goenawan’s writing to that of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, calling this novel…
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Kathy O’Shaughnessy‘s In Love with George Eliot is subtitled ‘A Novel’. Thank goodness for that, because if not, booksellers and librarians probably would not know where to shelve it. While readable and intensely interesting, the book reads more like a bibliomemoir, more akin to previous George Eliot studies like The Road to Middlemarch and last year’s…
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In the summer of 1968, Evelyn Lynden and her husband Lenny move to Evergreen Valley, California so that Lenny can work as an orderly in an asylum- part of the agreement he has made as a conscientious objector, so that he does not have to go over and fight in the Vietnam War. Their arrival…
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If you’ve stepped into any store over the last couple of weeks you’d probably have noticed that the countdown for Christmas is well and truly on. This also means there are no shortage of new books being released into the world. Earlier this month, on the so-called “Super Thursday” there were 544 new books released…
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After a two-month semi-self-imposed hiatus (life got in the way a bit there!) we’re back with another month of recommended reads. Now, the absence of these articles in June and July is not to suggest there was nothing of note published. On the contrary, there were many great books released in those intervening months. If…
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