The Bookshelf
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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.
സമീപകാല എപ്പിസോഡുകൾ
252 എപ്പിസോഡുകൾ
Four new memoirs: Mandy Sayer/Elizabeth Gilbert/Arundhati Roy/S. Shakthidharan
We look at some compelling new memoirs, including Mandy Sayer’s No Dancing in the Lift, a tribute to her jazz drummer father, capturing the grit of Ki...
Top Poems of the 21st Century
What are your favourite poems of the last 25 years? The ones that you turn to, couplets memorised and shared, the lines that leapt from the page or st...
Patricia Lockwood's auto-fiction-ish Will There Ever Be Another You + The Buffalo Hunter Hunter + The Original
This week’s episode explores three new books. First up, Patricia Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You, a third-person autofiction-ish tale that i...
Ian McEwan's What We Can Know + new work from Olga Tokarczuk and Miranda Darling
We get stuck into some new fiction, starting with Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know, a meditation on a future shaped by climate disaster and memory. We’re...
Still Turning Heads at 250: Jane Austen’s Enduring Charm
In the year of Jane Austen’s 250th birthday, this lively and thought-provoking discussion explores her life, legacy, and literary brilliance — her nov...
Superstar children's author Andy Griffiths reviews! Plus, Omar Musa's Fierceland and Geoff Dyer's Homework
Australian poet, artist, hip hop musician and author, Omar Musa, tells a story of Australia and Borneo, forests and fathers, in his new novel Fiercela...
Greyhounds, dark academia and an Amish community in new fiction by Toni Jordan, R.F. Kuang and Ron Rindo
An Australian story of the tender, eager lives of greyhounds and their owners in Tenderfoot by Australian author Toni Jordan. Dark academia in Yellowf...
A simmering summer in Greece, rare snails, dystopia with a twist: new fiction by Amy Taylor, Leif Enger and Maria Reva
The Bookshelf continues to explore new fiction, beginning in this episode with Ruins by Amy Taylor, a plunge into holiday chaos during a simmering sum...
AI in America, a kidnapping in Corsica, the transformative power of boxing: books by Gary Shteyngart, Darrow Farr, and Lucas Schaefer
Kate and Cassie discuss Vera, or Faith, Gary Shteyngart’s new novel about a ten-year-old Korean-American girl growing up in a dystopian United States....
People turning into trees, mythical rivers rising...new novels by Rhett Davis and Gurnaik Johal (plus, Irish fiction with Colm Tóibín)
Australian author Rhett Davis re-imagines the everyday in his novels. In his latest, Arborescence, ordinary people begin transforming into trees. Is i...
2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award assessed
A critical assessment of the shortlist and winner of Australia’s most prestigious literary award, The Miles Franklin Literary Award. Kate and Cassie a...
Parties, scandals, sex, love: new novels by Nell Zink, Amy Bloom and the controversial James Frey
Parties, scandals, sex, love, families, friendship, death – these books have, as they say, all the things. Nell Zink’s Sister Europe moves through one...
New Australian crime + hungry ghosts and a great white whale
Stories of the sea – and a great white whale in Xiaolu Guo's Call Me Ishmaelle; Hungry ghosts and kitchen mishaps in Daria Lavelle's NYC set novel Aft...
Sydney Writer's Festival: The State of the Art of the Novel
What’s the state of fiction today? Four brilliant minds—Samantha Harvey (UK), Rumaan Alam (USA), Torrey Peters (USA), and Robbie Arnott (AUS)—tackle t...
Mystery in new fiction from Ben Okri, Sameer Pandya and Anjet Daanje
The same question is at the heart of three very different international novels on The Bookshelf this week, “What really happened”…
To a WWI sold...
Sweat, sport and sharp Australian satire; And the 2025 International Booker Prize winner
What would make a great Australian sporting novel? Our guests discuss translating the love of the game, footy nicknames, and intense team culture in e...
Popular fiction across space and time, and queer bush doof thriller in Thomas Vowles' Our New Gods
The latest best-selling novels from Taylor Jenkins-Reid (Atmosphere) and Fredrik Backman (My Friends) explore 1980s astronauts, ambition and romance;...
Reading James Joyce's Ulysses for Bloomsday (and new fiction galore)
A guide to James Joyce from Irish writer Mary Morrissy, ahead of Bloomsday (16 June); New Zealand writer Becky Manawatu continues to explore howls of...
New fiction from Gail Jones, S A Cosby and Seán Hewitt
Fiction from all over the world, crossing genres, borders and ideas in American crime writer S A Cosby's King of Ashes, a gripping tale of family, smo...
A vibrant gay coming-of-age story set in Geraldton
Kate and Cassie read W.A. writer Holden Sheppard's King of Dirt, a vibrant, gay coming-of-age story set in Geraldton. Plus, Australian author Jennifer...
Sydney Writers' Festival: Top 100 Books launched with Alan Hollinghurst, Catherine Chidgey, Mariana Enriquez, Afra Atiq
What books have shaped the 21st century so far? Recorded live at the 2025 Sydney Writers’ Festival, literary heavyweights Catherine Chidgey (NZ), Mari...
On stage at Melbourne Writers' Festival with Hannah Kent and Beejay Silcox
A live recording from Melbourne Writers' Festival as Hannah Kent and Beejay Silcox sit down with Kate Evans and Jonathan Green to discuss the latest f...
A woman falls through the cracks of time in the first of Solvej Balle's seven-novel-series
One day lived over and over again with humour, despair and self-improvement is what we’re up against in Danish novelist Solvej Balle’s On The Calculat...
A beach holiday told four ways in Luke Horton's Time Together
Old friends gather together on the coast in Australian writer Luke Horton’s Time Together, Kate and Cassie take a look. Plus, Jo Harkin’s The Pretende...
James Bradley's Landfall reveals a flooded, baked and dilapidated city
Cities that are both flooded and on alert for the next storm in James Bradley’s Landfall. The body of a saint, dreamily and weirdly listening to every...
The Bookshelf Easter Special: Irish writer Niall Williams
Irish writer Niall Williams with Kate Evans at the 2025 Adelaide Writers Week — with a focus on his Faha novels, History of the Rain, This is Happines...
A love triangle set against the beauty of Montana in Eric Puchner's Dream State
Families, secrets, mysteries, war...Kate and Cassie read Eric Puchner’s Dream State, an American saga that spans fifty years and is set against the ex...
Folk horror, dreams under surveillance, lonely in Guatemala
Cassie McCullagh is on leave this week, so Kate Evans and guests read Lucy Rose’s The Lamb, Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel, and Rachel Morton’s The Su...
Andrea Goldsmith's The Buried Life - and a train steaming towards disaster . . .
Kate and Cassie read three new works of fiction, with the help of two guest reviewers: a novel of ideas, death, love and music, in Australian writer A...
Curtis Sittenfeld's Show Don't Tell + Tim Rogers and Zan Rowe on two new debuts
Kate and Cassie discuss bestselling American writer Curtis Sittenfeld’s sharp and observant collection of short stories Show Don’t Tell; You Am I fron...
This week’s novels takes us to Zanzibar, Budapest and Renaissance Florence
This week’s novels takes us to Zanzibar, Budapest and Renaissance Florence with Nobel Prize-winning English-Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft...
On stage at Adelaide Writers' Week with Niall Williams, Charlotte Mendelson and Brian Castro
This edition of the Bookshelf was recorded on stage at Adelaide Writers' Week on Sunday 2 March – with Irish writer Niall Williams (Time of the Child)...
Australian bestseller Diana Reid returns with Signs of Damage
Four women’s lives intertwined between Africa and the USA in Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count. Plus, secrets and trauma in the S...
Irish writer Colum McCann’s Twist dives deep under the ocean and takes on a charismatic mystery
Irish writer Colum McCann’s Twist dives deep under the ocean and takes on a charismatic mystery; 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang’s We Do Not Part exp...
Mothers and Sons...is the story as fraught as the title suggests?
An examination of family dynamics through three novels...Adam Haslett’s Mothers and Sons reflects on unspoken stories and familial divides; The Boy fr...
Alaska, folktales, mothers and daughters
Alaska, folktales and mothers and daughters in Eowyn Ivey's Black Woods Blue Sky. Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Anne Tyler is back with Three Days in...
A story of yearning, belonging, secrets and identity from Native America
A story of yearning, belonging, secrets and identity from Native America in Morgan Talty’s Fire Exit; rusted robots, prosthetic limbs, AI and noisy fa...
Sweden, France, New Zealand: books from around the world
Cassie and Kate read Marie-Hélène Lafon’s The Son’s Story, a family story that spans the twentieth-century, full of melancholy beauty and secrets. Cri...
A medical crisis brings one man close to love, art, and beauty
Kate and Cassie are back for 2025!
In this episode, a discussion of Panic by Catherine Jinks, about a young woman looking for a fresh start afte...
Summer Reading: Quick, give me a recommendation!
Reading Percival Everett's James, Dylin Hardcastle's Language of Limbs and James McBride's The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
Cassie and literar...