In an unmissable online event for Better Read Than Dead bookstore, Jock Serong and Kate Mildenhall discuss the common themes in their new novels The Burning Island and The Mother Fault. 

These powerful novels provide urgent social commentaries on many aspects of Australian society, looking both to our past and our future, with family relationships front and centre. 

This free event will take place on Zoom. The Zoom meeting details form part of your ticket, emailed to you after registration. 

Join Kylie Maslen, Jacinta Parsons and Sam Twyford-Moore for an inspirational, moving and deeply insightful conversation that will change lives for the better. Invisible illnesses represent the experience of those who have too long been ignored, gaslighted or diminished by medical professionals and the wider community. An eye-opening conversation not to be missed!

This is an online event, hosted by Harry Hartog Booksellers. Please register here.

What if Elizabeth Macarthur—wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in the earliest days of Sydney—had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? And what if novelist Kate Grenville had miraculously found and published it? That’s the starting point for A Room Made of Leaves, a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented.

Marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her heart, the search for power in a society that gave women none: this Elizabeth Macarthur manages her complicated life with spirit and passion, cunning and sly wit. Her memoir lets us hear—at last!—what one of those seemingly demure women from history might really have thought.

At the centre of A Room Made of Leaves is one of the most toxic issues of our own age: the seductive appeal of false stories. This book may be set in the past, but it’s just as much about the present, where secrets and lies have the dangerous power to shape reality.

Kate Grenville’s return to the territory of The Secret River is historical fiction turned inside out, a stunning sleight of hand by one of our most original writers.

Join Claire Christian in-conversation with Michelle Law for the launch of her novel It's Been a Pleasure, Noni Blake.

Michelle Law calls It's Been a Pleasure, Noni Blake 'a laugh-out-loud romantic comedy about learning to fall in love with yourself, first and foremost'.

'Noni Blake is the flirtatious, foul-mouthed, and flawed heroine you’ve been searching for—think Bridget Jones meets Queer as Folk. Claire Christian writes with fierce kindness and protectiveness over her readers; there’s no way you’ll finish this story without feeling better about yourself. This book is an antidote to complacency; Noni will inspire you to fight for the life and love you deserve, even if who you’re fighting against is yourself.'

How might the origins of our species inform the way we think about our planet? At a point of unparalleled crisis, can human ingenuity save us from ourselves? 

Much-loved writer and journalist Ramona Koval travels the globe in a quest for answers, and encounters the unexpected. The result is A Letter to Layla: Travels to our deep past and near future a kaleidoscopic portrait of humanity, written with Ramona's signature warmth, insight and curiosity. 

Ramona appears in conversation with Lee Kofman. 

This is a Better Read Than Dead online event. Please register here.

Join theatre-maker and writer Claire Christian for a chat about her joyful new novel, It’s Been A Pleasure, Noni Blake, hosted by Brodie Lancester.

A quirky, feel-good romantic comedy, It’s Been A Pleasure, Noni Blake is the story of a woman who knows what she wants – more adventures, more joy, more romance, more orgasms, more pleasure, more everything… Now she just has to figure out how to get it.

This is an online event and free to attend. Please book and you will be sent a unique Zoom link.

Ramona Koval is known for her wit and wisdom. Although she pursued studies in science, during her celebrated career as a broadcaster she made interviews with significant writers her signature. She presented The Book Show on Radio National for six years and before that, Books and Writing for thirteen years.

She has written for newspapers and international journals, and had her interviews published in book form.

Ramona will be discussing the Wordfest theme of Spoken, Written, Crafted in relation to her most recent book, A Letter to Layla: Travels to Our Deep Past and Near Future.

This is a free event but please register here.

In this online event, the Wheeler Centre speaks with two international authors with major works recently published in English. Mieko Kawakami is the author of several books in Japanese. Her first full-length work to be translated into English is Breasts and Eggs, a bold novel about fertility, cosmetic surgery and bodily autonomy, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd. Fernanda Melchor is a Mexican journalist and novelist, whose powerful English-language debut about femicide in Mexico, Hurricane Season, was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, translated by Sophie Hughes. 

Hosted by Roanna Gonsalves , these exceptional authors will discuss radical representations of womanhood in fiction, and the limitations and possibilities of translation today.

A Letter to Layla is an enthralling deep dive into what makes us human. Inspired by her ever-engaging granddaughter Layla, writer and broadcaster Ramona Koval travels the globe and across time to ask difficult questions about our past and our future. Koval will chat about her research for the book and what she learned with literary journalist Jane Sullivan.

This is a Readings online event and free to attend. Please register here.

Our Shadows tells the story of three generations of family living in Kalgoorlie, where gold was discovered in 1893 by an Irish-born prospector named Paddy Hannan, whose own history weaves in and out of this beguiling novel.

Join Gail Jones as she discusses her new novel with Avid Reader's Krissy Kneen.

This is an online event. Please register here.