Liane Moriarty
Nine Perfect Strangers
Macmillan
Tell us about your book in your own words: This book is about nine strangers who go to a health resort hoping to change their lives. It turns out to be a very different experience to what they imagined.
What you were reading when you wrote it: I wouldn’t say I was reading one particular book. I can list favourite authors – Kate Atkinson, Maggie O’Farrell, Anne Tyler, Ashley Hay – I could go on and on. But BM Carroll’s The Missing Pieces of Sophie McCarthy, I know that I would have read that when I wrote Nine Perfect Strangers.
The next Australian book you’ll read: I’m reading Toni Jordan’s The Fragments. I love all of Toni’s books and I’m already halfway through and I’m loving it. She’s a just a great Australian writer.
Gabrielle Chan
Rusted Off: Why Country Australia Is Fed Up
Penguin
Tell us about your book: Rusted Off is a mix of memoir and slow journalism that charts my move from a city upbringing and a political reporter’s career to a small farming town west of the Dividing Range. I talk to ordinary people in my main street to discover why people are so fed up with politics and why formerly rusted-on country voters are rusting off major parties at a greater rate than city voters. After more than 20 years in my community, I wanted to give a fresh voice to rural people who have no lobby group in parliament and understand how politics crosses their lives. While trust is just about broken for the ordinary voter, from that discontent communities are starting to organise outside formal politics to progress their own issues.
What were you reading while you wrote it? I was reading Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance – the hit memoir prior to the Trump show – which showed me that small personal stories could explore national and international themes.
What’s the next Australian book you’ll read? Having just read Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, I can’t wait to read Welcome to Country by Marcia Langton. Rusted Off recounts the reconnection to country by a local Indigenous family with local farmers so I can’t wait to understand more about local Indigenous customs, history and etiquette.
Robyn Williams
Turmoil: Letters from the Brink
NewSouth
Tell us about your book: My life began as the world agonised in unimaginable turmoil. Hitler had a year to go, the bomb was about to hit Hiroshima, and the metastases of war spread everywhere. Then, as I grew up, life began to to settle and shine. We flourished as both sides of politics seem to cooperate to make life better.
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP
I write this in Hull, right next to Philip Larkin’s old office. But it wasn’t too late for ME.
After what seems like a charmed life, we hit the crunch about five years ago. Everything is uncertain, the hope of progress has vanished and this makes me cross. I am certain we can banish this new turmoil and quell the forces of darkness. Those forces are few, but very noisy. This book is about “not going gentle”.
What were you reading while you wrote it? The Museum of Words, and Between a Wolf and a Dog, both by Georgia Blain. I was moved by her depiction of cancer, of course, being in recovery, but those books above all showed me great writing and made me want to try again myself.
What’s the next Australian book you’ll read? Robert Drewe’s latest collection of short stories, The True Colour of the Sea.
Krissy Kneen
Wintering
Text
Tell us about your book: Wintering is a gothic thriller about mystery, myth and the subtle dangers of domestic relationships set in the deep south of Tasmania. Jessica’s partner, Matthew, disappears one midwinter night. As she tries to piece together the scant information about his disappearance she realises that there is a lot she doesn’t know about him and the close-knit community she lives in. In eight years doing scientific research in Tasmania, Jessica has made no friends or connections. Matthew has kept her safe, isolated and deeply insecure about her own life and work. She is approached by a group of local women who tell her that they have all lost their husbands. And they say she will see Matthew again, but he will be fundamentally changed.
A woman of science, Jessica is plunged into a world of myth, mystery and menacing danger.
What were you reading while you wrote it? I did a deep dive into Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and the gothic mood infiltrated my writing in the nicest way.
What’s the next Australian book you’ll read? I have lined up Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip which promises to be a wild and hilarious literary look at an Aboriginal family, land issues and culture.
Peter Mares
No Place Like Home: Repairing Australia’s Housing Crisis
Text
Tell us about your book: No Place Like Home draws on storytelling, interviews and data to try to get to grips with Australia’s housing crisis and what we can do about it. It goes beyond tired conversations about Gen Y indulging in too much smashed avocado, or one-shot solutions like scrapping negative gearing. The issues go deeper, right to the heart of the great Australian dream.
Chasing the dream of home ownership has got us record levels of household debt, increased homelessness, and a dramatic rise in stressed-out tenants who fork out a third or more of their income on rent. Worst of all, it has cemented intergenerational inequality into bricks and mortar. But the flipside of housing unaffordability for some is housing wealth for others, and the flipside of generation rent is generation landlord. In other words, as a society we have the financial resources to repair Australian housing.
What were you reading while you wrote it? The three books that most influenced me were Home Truths by Andrew Beer and Blair Badcock, In Defence of Housing by David Madden and Peter Marcuse and Andrew O’Hagan’s novel, Our Fathers, on the hopes and disappointments on Glasgow’s public housing schemes. I also read a tonne of reports from organisations like the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute and the Grattan Institute.
The next Australian book you’ll read: I am looking forward to reading Tony Birch’s latest short story collection, Common People. He is a masterful storyteller and when I heard Tony talking about the stories at the Brisbane writers festival I was immediately hooked.
Madonna King
Fathers and Daughters
Hachette
Tell us about your book: Fathers and Daughters is a book that gets inside the heads of 1,300 girls, aged 10 to 17, and 400 dads, as well as dozens of school principals, wellbeing experts and teen psychologists, to look at that tricky fracturing of the relationship that often happens around puberty. Researching and writing it was delightful and heartbreaking in equal measure. Girls have so many questions they want to ask, but struggle to articulate them – simple questions like “Dad, can we go camping, once?” and more difficult ones like “Dad, I’m struggling and I don’t know what to do”. Fathers, on the other side of the fence, are craving a relationship like the one they had when their daughters were younger but they are really unsure how to approach it. With two teenage girls, I learnt so much researching it, and hope it helps both girls and their fathers.
What were you reading when you wrote it? Wake Up: The Nine Hashtags of Digital Disruption by David Fagan. A disclaimer: he’s my husband, but it’s a terrific and captivating look at how the digital age is upending our home, work and leisure lives – and where it’s headed. Our children understand this because it’s the new world, but so many adults believe they don’t need to be part of it. They do!
What’s the next Australian book you’ll read? The Ones You Trust by Caroline Overington. I can’t wait to dive into it after a long month on the road with my book. I’ve now owned three copies of Caroline’s book, and have actually hidden the last one after the first two were stolen by friends – who then had the audacity to tell me they couldn’t recommend it highly enough.
David Sornig
Blue Lake: Finding Dudley Flats and the West Melbourne Swamp
Scribe
Tell us about your book: There’s always an air of inevitability when another huge factory blaze breaks out in Melbourne’s west. Chemical fires, tyre fires and industrial waste have long been grudgingly tolerated in this part of the city. Blue Lake wonders about the origins of this tolerance as it recounts the largely forgotten 18-decade colonial history of a huge tract of land, a Tarkovskian “Zone”, immediately adjacent to Melbourne’s central business district. What began as a wetland, including the eponymous lake, was progressively reshaped and reduced to a muddy swamp that became home to noxious industries, to a string of official and unofficial rubbish tips and for 30 years, beginning with the Great Depression, to the Dudley Flats shantytown.
The book pieces together the biographies of three of the shantytown’s most marginalised and remarkable residents – the scrapmonger Jack Peacock, the stranded German sailor Lauder Rogge and the Afro-Caribbean singer, Elsie Williams. Just like the place, all three were somehow broken and Blue Lake tries to restore them, and the Zone, to coherence.
What were you reading while you wrote it? I often returned to James Boyce’s 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia, which locates in time and place the fracture that delivered up the legal fiction of terra nullius. While this fiction supported the myth of colonial progress, that myth never properly took hold on the West Melbourne Swamp and rendered it a blind spot.
What’s the next Australian book you’ll read? It feels almost shameful to count Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison as an Australian book. But, given the treatment that’s been meted out to him and thousands of other asylum seekers like him in this country’s name, it promises to be the most Australian book I’ve read in a while. The way you treat outsiders speaks volumes about what’s on the inside.
Fiona Patten
Sex, Drugs and the Electoral Roll
Allen & Unwin
Tell us about your book: It is a series of stories that track the path that led me to parliament. I think it’s a love story as it is a journey that Robbie Swan and I travelled together. The fact that a path opened up for a former sex worker and sex industry rights advocate to form her own party and then get elected to a parliament says a lot about the changing nature of politics and society in general. The book is a candid look at sex and politics in Australia over the last few decades from someone who, unlike most politicians, knows a bit about sex. From this perspective the political landscape is littered with corruption, depravity and most of all hypocrisy – although humour plays an important role in these stories.
I wrote this book because no one else had ever travelled this road before. Not here or anywhere else. It might not have been like climbing Everest but in some ways it was! Most people have no idea of the discrimination, the stereotyping, the bigotry and the violence that is directed towards sex workers.
What were you reading while you wrote it? I read the wonderful series of short stories – Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke – because one of my colleagues complained that it was on a school reading list, which she thought was inappropriate. I also read The List by Michael Brissenden. In very different ways they gave me a view to the impact of fear politics.
What’s the next Australian book you’ll read? I am looking forward to the The Yellow House by Emily O’Grady. I have read the first chapter and already can feel a sense of foreboding. I listened to Emily on radio recently and it will be my book to celebrate the end of the state election, whether I win or not.
Royce Kurmelovs
Boom and Bust
Hachette
Tell us about your book: Boom and Bust tells the story of the mining boom of the previous decade through the eyes of the people who lived it. It is a story about class, about money and about greed, all told from Western Australia, the engine of the boom. What I wanted to know was: happens when an entire society wins the lottery, is told it will last forever, and then it goes away again?
The mining boom pretty much rewrote the Australian social order. Politically, it ensured the stability of the Howard years and the chaos of the Rudd-Gillard years. Economically, the whole country grew rich on easy money and cheap credit. In global terms, it offered a buffer against the global financial crisis, but contributed to gutting Australia’s manufacturing base.
I bring all this back to the people by profiling those who might not get their stories told in the ordinary course of the news cycle. From a pawnbroker in Perth to a fight over land rights in Karratha, what you get is the story of the mining boom from street level.
What were you reading while you wrote it? Work and Other Sins by Charlie LeDuff. LeDuff’s most unappreciated book is a masterpiece and one that taught me not only how to write profiles, but where to look for the story.
What’s the next Australian book you’ll read? Rusted Off by Gabrielle Chan. Without question. Our work is often complementary: I’ve written about populism within de-industrialising communities on the edges of major Australian cities, while Chan has covered the story from the heart of regional towns. She gets it and I want to hear what she has to say.
Rick Morton
100 Years of Dirt
Melbourne University Press
Tell us about your book: One Hundred Years of Dirt is part family memoir, part collection of essays about the real outsiders in Australia, not the confected anti-elite of commentators. Dirt tells the story of a family plagued by trauma, emotional and physical violence, and how one mother tried to love enough for the failures of everyone else around her. It’s funny, too, I am told. Despite the content, I have long bent toward absurdism in my outlook because it makes the pain bearable, and sometimes even the dark can be funny. In a way, it is a love letter to my mum, Deb, and, more broadly, the power of love in all its forms to reshape whole universes. There is mental illness, drug addiction, abuse, poverty and the sting of sexuality in remote Australia covered in its pages but there is hope, too. It is a peculiar kind of hope. You have to squint a bit, but it is there.
What were you reading while you wrote it? I read quite a bit while writing this, including Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance, which is similar but takes an entirely different view. But the real influence was Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, which had such a zest for life despite being, ultimately, a book about death. That mattered a lot to me.
What’s the next Australian book you’ll read? Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe. This book has followed me around during my book tour and I’m genuinely excited to learn a bit more about the most fascinating culture on earth and the places in Australia with which I have such a connection.
