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Fiction

At the 2016 Melbourne Writers Festival, Maxine Beneba Clarke received a standing ovation for her opening address in which she pushed for greater diversity in literature. ‘Something ...

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Potiki by Patricia Grace

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November 2016, no. 386

At the outbreak of World War II, the British novelist Anna Kavan began a journey around the world that brought her, ultimately, to New Zealand. Her two years there in a ...

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Fine by Michelle Wright

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October 2016, no. 385

All thirty-three short stories in Michelle Wright's Fine echo the powdery residue and hairline fractures printed on the cover. Silt and grit and cinders: Wright writes of people navigating ...

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Ruins by Rajith Savanadasa

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October 2016, no. 385

Ruins is the impressive début novel of Rajith Savanadasa, born in Sri Lanka and now living in Melbourne. He is founder and primary contributor to Open City Stories, a website ...

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Rain delays at sporting events are not reserved exclusively for reading Australian literature, which I think is a great shame. For example, in July 2016, Alex James, a cricket fan from ...

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Life, one of Commonwealth's minor characters remarks, is a series of losses. Teresa Cousins acknowledges that life is also other, better things, but that it is the losses that define us ...

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After reading her début novel about Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last person to be executed in Iceland, no one is likely to pick up a book by Hannah Kent expecting a frothy comedy ...

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In order to grasp the complexity of allusions in J.M. Coetzee's new novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, you need to have your wits about you. On the other hand, as with its prequel ...

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Mr Unpronounceable and the Infinity of Nightmares is the third volume of Tim Molloy's stories featuring Mr Unpronounceable, a modern-day shaman ...

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Kate Tempest's début is the expansion of a story she threaded through her 2014 album of protest hip-hop, Everybody Down. In its transformation to novel form ...

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