D ark Horse is the latest book from Victorian author Honey Brown. The novel tells of lust and lies between two strangers who come together in an appropriately secluded rural location.

Sarah Barnard has recently left an unhappy marriage, and is spending the Christmas period camping with her horse, Tansy. Sarah’s solitu ...

Seamlessly extending from the French occupation of Cambodia to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge and the current tourism industry, Laura Jean McKay’s début short story collection, Holiday in Cambodia, is a powerful portrait of a country long-affected by war and poverty. McKay’s knowledge of the Cambodian landscape underpins the collection. She evokes ...

Our instinctual reaction to parents who leave their children is one of suspicion. ‘Child abandonment’ elicits such images as a swaddled foundling in the woods, a parent in a train station losing hold of her child’s hand and disappearing into the crowd, or an anonymous baby hatch in a hospital. The presumption is that a mother (fathers are usually spared ...

Towards the end of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift (1975), at the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher’s funeral on an April day in Chicago, Menasha Klinger, one of three mourners, points to a spring flower and asks Charlie Citrine, the novel’s narrator, to identify it. ‘Search me,’ Citrine replies, ‘I’m a city boy myself. They must be crocuses.’ ...

The writing of a novel, Alex Miller has said, ‘is a kind of journey of the imagination in which there’s the liberty to dream your own dream … There’s always got to be a model located somewhere in fact and reality … But some of your best characters are what you think of as being purely made up, just characters that needed to be there.’

The past two decades have seen Richard Flanagan stride confidently into the first rank of Australian writers. His novels are notable for their historical reach, the boldness of their conception, and their willingness to tackle big subjects. They have won him many admirers. But they have also tended to divide opinion, often quite sharply, and this would seem to ...

The Swan Song of Doctor Malloy, a novel about addiction, compulsion, and recovery, is set within a fast-moving thriller. Traversing the worlds of health research, drug cartels, world politics, and corporations, it is a conspiracy novel that manages to stay just within the realms of credibility due to the specialist knowledge the author brings t ...

Cass Lehman keeps to herself – her mother and grandmother tell other residents of sleepy Jewel Bay that she is agoraphobic. Her real reason for staying in her house for the past nine years is that she has a terrifying kind of ‘retrocognition’: if Cass passes over a place where someone has died, she experiences their death. And death, as it turns out, is ...