Giramondo: 40 books

Battarbee and Namatjira is the biography of two artists Rex Battarbee and Albert Namatjira, one white Australian from Warrnambool in Victoria, the other Aboriginal, of the Arrernte people, from the Hermannsburg Mission south of Alice Springs. From their first encounters in the early 1930s, when Battarbee...

Street to Street is one of Brian Castros best books yet, a comic-tragic enactment of the anxieties of the writing life, in which the early twentieth-century Sydney poet Christopher Brennan plays a major role. A legendary figure, with a commanding knowledge of classical and European poetry, Brennan wrote...

Michael’s older brother dies at the beginning of the summer he turns 15, but as its title suggests The Incredible Here and Now is a tale of wonder, not of tragedy. Presented as a series of vignettes, in the tradition of Sandra Cisneros’ Young Adult classic The House on Mango Street, it tells of...

Alis father is a Turkish circus musician performing in Kabul when Alis mother, a young pediatrician from Melbourne, meets him in a bar. He plays the trumpet, the saz, the flute, hears voices that urge him to violence, sees angels in the skies and djinns in the street, inscribes prayers and invocations...

Chi Vu takes the central figure in a traditional Buddhist folktale, a deranged killer who wears his victims’ fingers in a garland around his neck, and turns him into a menacing abbatoir worker who carries bloody chunks of meat home to his lodgings in plastic bags, in this suburban Gothic tale set in...

The Dark Wet is the first collection of short stories by Jess Huon. Rich, lyrical and deeply felt, it explores the struggle towards a sense of self and belonging, expressed in three sequences of stories: that of Jed Harp, his lover Danny Hess, and his poet sister Alexandra; of Bell and Oliver, a couple...

One of the strangest and most appealing novels you will read this year!Tom Lee’s first novel is about a young jogger who is in a relationship with an older woman. She is both his coach and his mentor. Coach Fitz, as he calls her, seeks to instil a philosophy of running which combines ‘controlled...

The Sydney Review of Books is Australia’s leading space for longform literary criticism. Now celebrating five years online, the SRB has published more than five hundred essays by almost two hundred writers. To mark this occasion, The Australian Face collects some of the best essays published in...

The drama begins with a body dumped in south-western Sydney skinned, with no face. Lewis Lin, taxi driver, photographer, recent arrival from Beijing, happens to be at the scene. With detectives Ginger Rogers and Shelley Swert in pursuit, Lin finds himself drawn into a deadly immigration racket, with...

Nicholas Jose was Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing from 1987 to 1990, at a vital moment in China’s history, and has played an important role in artistic relations between the two countries since then. The title of his new collection of stories refers to an unusual kind of Chinese...

We’re alone together, for the first time. I have to touch him now. I try stroking a foot, then a shoulder. But no current lifts in me, nothing pulls at my chest they way they said it would.A new mother holds her month-old son for the first time, but her body betrays her. Disoriented, she trails...

Jennifer Maidens poems are like verse essays, subjecting the political issues of our time, and the figures who dominate them, to a fierce scrutiny, while allowing the personal aspects of experience to be portrayed in the most delicate and imaginative ways. This is the quality of liquid nitrogen which...