Capture, a new novel by Australian author Amanda Lohrey

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Capture, a new novel by Australian author Amanda Lohrey

7 May 2026

The tenth novel by the Tasmania based author, and previous winner of the Miles Franklin literary award, was published last week:

James Mather is a psychiatrist in his sixties. He is invited to take on a new group of patients. All he knows about them is that each one claims to have been abducted by aliens.

His wife, Deborah, is sceptical, but he gets going anyway. His patients tell mesmerising stories. There’s Anthony, for instance, who was camping one night by the Aral Sea; or Mary, the owner of a beauty salon, confronted by a ball of light moving towards her in her bedroom.

James’s research assistant Lucy Cheng sits in on each session. She’s an attractive young divorcee, who has made a study of anxiety, and who takes notes about each conversation.

With the sci-fi tinge, Capture seems worlds removed — no pun intended — from Lohrey’s 2021 title The Labyrinth, winner of the Miles Franklin that year. But who knows, maybe it isn’t.

Copyright is meaningless in the face of an AI ‘arms race’

7 May 2026

American author Scott Turow, in conjunction with five publishing houses, claims Meta used material protected by copyright to train its AI agent, Llama.

They make the suggestion the Facebook owner chose not to obtain permission to access the copied texts as they wanted to get ahead of the competition in what’s being called “AI arms race.”

Meta, however, sees their use of the copyrighted material as fair use, and claims courts have ruled this to be the case in the past. What will the court determine this time?

If there is indeed an AI “arms race” in progress, which is undoubtedly the case, I can’t see any developer of AI technologies doing anything that will compromise their industry standing. Even if that means doing the right thing by copyright holders.

Bricks and mortar bookshops making a comeback in the United States

30 April 2026

Andy Hunter, CEO and founder of indie bookseller Bookshop.org, talking recently with Shannon Cudd of Fast Company:

“People are really galvanizing around bookstores as a force for good in our culture,” he says. “You see that in the fact that there are about 70% more bookstores now than there were six years ago in the United States. After 20 years of declining numbers, they’re coming roaring back.”

This can only be a good thing.

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America, books, bookshops, trends

The 2026 Global Book Crawl is in progress

23 April 2026

Nearly missed this, staying focused can be tricky, to say the least, at times like these. The book crawl was established just last year by Federico Lang, who works at Librería Luces, an independent bookstore in the Spanish city of Málaga.

I’m told this year about one-hundred-and-fifty Australian booksellers are involved. The full list of shops taking part globally can be seen here. If book crawl participants collect five stamps in a crawl “passport” — obtainable from any bookshop involved — they become eligible for a reward.

The 2026 event concludes on Sunday 26 April 2026.

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Australia, books, events

Spotify partners with Bookshop.org to sell paper books

21 April 2026

Spotify members in the United States and United Kingdom will soon be able to buy paper, or physical books, through the music streaming app, by way of a partnership with Bookshop.org, supporters of local and indie bookstores.

With just over seven-hundred-and-fifty million monthly active Spotify users, the partnership will surely be a shot in the arm for authors and book publishers.

It would of course be ideal if the joint venture (I hesitate to say deal, the word seems a little overused at present) more favoured indie and small publishing houses, but sales of any book, by any author, can only be a good thing.

Hopefully Spotify members worldwide will be able to buy paper books through the app eventually.

The Titanic Story of Evelyn, a biography by Lisa Wilkinson

13 April 2026

Evelyn Marsden, a steward and nurse on the Titanic’s doomed 1912 maiden voyage, became known as the only Australian woman to survive the tragic sinking of the ocean liner.

Marsden helped distressed passengers, before eventually being told to get into a lifeboat.

Growing up, Marsden used to row in the Murray River, during family holidays, and would set herself the challenge of rowing against the tide. The skill proved invaluable as she helped row the lifeboat she was aboard, with forty other people, against the pull the sinking Titanic exerted on them.

Marsden was born in Stockyard Creek, South Australia in 1883. After the sinking, she married William James, a doctor who also worked for the White Star Line, owner of the Titanic.

They lived in South Australia for some years before moving to Bondi. Marsden died at age fifty-four in 1938, and is buried in Waverley Cemetery, with her husband, who died a short time afterwards.

Marsden’s life is now the subject of a biography, The Titanic Story of Evelyn, written by Australian TV presenter and journalist, Lisa Wilkinson, which is being published tomorrow, Tuesday 14 April 2026.

Get listed in the 2026 Internet Phone Book

14 March 2026

The second edition of the Internet Phone Book is in the works, and publishers of personal websites are being invited to submit their URL.

I was stoked to be included in the inaugural edition, compiled last year by Kristoffer Tjalve and Elliott Cost, and you can still call me on 492.

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blogs, books, publishing

Sally Rooney books may be withdrawn from sale in UK bookshops

2 December 2025

The Irish author, whose titles include Intermezzo and Conversations with Friends, wants United Kingdom royalties from her novels, and any screen adaptations made there, to go to Palestine Action, a British pro-Palestinian organisation.

The British government however considers Palestine Action to be a terrorist group, and banned them earlier this year.

In sending Rooney royalty payments, her UK publishers, and the BBC, who co-produced the 2020 TV adaptation of Normal People, Rooney’s second novel, would be breaking terrorism laws. The author says this could result in her novels being withdrawn from sale in the UK.

Read a chapter of a book daily in your RSS reader

17 November 2025

Made by Las Vegas based software developer Pablo Enoc, who’s also behind indie RSS aggregator powRSS, lettrss will send a chapter of the book you’re reading to your RSS reader each day.

Here’s an idea with merit.

Reading novels is just about the last thing I get to each evening, and I don’t usually cover much ground before falling asleep. If a chapter of whatever I was reading appeared in my RSS feed though, I might make more progress since I read a lot of what takes my interest there. This idea might get a few more of us reading more regularly, since a chapter at a time usually isn’t too onerous.

At the moment only books in the public domain (or those out of copyright) can be read with lettrss. But this idea has possibilities. Imagine if book publishers were to make recent titles available this way, through possibly a subscription model of some sort.

Children’s Booker Prize hopes to encourage younger people to read more books

17 November 2025

The Booker Prize, which recognises English language novels published in the United Kingdom and Ireland, has unveiled a new award: the Children’s Booker Prize, which will be awarded for the first time in 2027.

The Children’s Booker Prize, which will launch in 2026 and be awarded annually from 2027, will celebrate the best contemporary fiction for children aged eight to 12 years old, written in or translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland. The aim of the prize is to engage and grow a new generation of readers by recognising and championing the best children’s fiction from writers around the world.

This is good news all around. Not only will the Children’s Booker encourage more younger people to read, it will also support authors with an enticement to write more stories for children. The more literary awards there are, the better it is for literature, writing, and reading, as a whole.

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