Maggie Nolan

An unknown woman – traumatised, amnesiac, unable to speak – is found just north of Broken Hill in western New South Wales. Who she is and what happened to her is the question that drives Gail Jones’s twelfth novel, The Name of the Sister. Angie is a journalist in inner-city Sydney, recently gone freelance, and Bev, her oldest and dearest friend, is leading the police investigation. Their fr ... (read more)

Say, you’re a school teacher in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, and you’re looking for a play for your class to perform that is set in Broome. Or maybe you’re a crime writer playing with the idea of writing a novel set in Sydney and want to check out what other crime novels have been set there. Perhaps you just found out that your great aunt once wrote a series of poems, and you w ... (read more)

It is 1992, the year of the Mabo judgment, and Helen, a scholarship student from Tasmania, is undertaking a PhD at Cambridge, writing a thesis titled ‘Cryptomodernism and Empire’. It is on Joseph Conrad, a writer about whom her peers are contemptuous. Helen is dealing with a forlorn and dismissive supervisor, and the disappointment that her experience abroad was not what she had expected. Her ... (read more)