Exit Party, new novel by Emily St. John Mandel

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Exit Party, new novel by Emily St. John Mandel

9 October 2026

Exit Party is the seventh novel by Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel, and was published last month. But savour the trademark mind-altering synopsis:

2031. America is at war with itself, but for the first time in weeks there is some hope: the Republic of California has been declared, the curfew in Los Angeles is lifted, and everyone in the city is going to a party.

Ari, newly released from prison, arrives with her friend Gloria just as a fragile new era begins. But there are people at the party who shouldn’t be there. Something is very wrong…

Years later, living a different life in Paris, Ari remains haunted by that night. Whatever happened at the party fractured her sense of reality — and may hold the key to a very different world.

Mandel’s previous works include Sea of Tranquility, and Station Eleven, which was adapted for television. It’s my guess Exit Party ends up with a screen adaptation of some sort.

The German Ward, a new novel by Australian author Pip Williams

1 October 2026

Adelaide Hills, South Australia, based author Pip Williams‘ third novel, The German Ward, was published recently. Her debut, The Dictionary of Lost Words, and second, The Bookbinder of Jericho, were set in Oxford, England, prior to, and during World War I, and share a few characters.

While The German Ward is a separate work, some events also occur during World War I:

France, 1915. An English nurse and German doctor fall in love. He is a prisoner of war; she has never cared for rules. Their love is visceral and urgent, forbidden and doomed, and it would have gone unrecorded if not for a series of drawings found more than a century later.

At first the drawings seem insignificant, but the woman who finds them glimpses moments of intimacy and can’t look away. The images become part of a puzzle she wants to solve: who were the lovers, what became of them, and what story of war was the artist trying to tell?

Williams is presently travelling across Australia until late November 2026, should you be interested in hearing her talk about her work.

Time Travel for Beginners, a novel by Sydney author Jaclyn Moriarty

8 August 2026

I’ve been talking about time-travel stories recently, so here’s another one, this time a book. Time Travel for Beginners, is the latest novel by Sydney based Australian author Jaclyn Moriarty.

If you can find a shop called the Time Travel Agency, located somewhere in Sydney, then you too may be able to travel through what some people call the fourth dimension:

The guidelines are simple: you can go whenever you wish into the past, and there’s no fear of altering the present. Have tea with Jane Austen, scream at a Beatles concert, witness the Olympics in ancient Greece. Perhaps a more personal trip? Visit your long-lost grandmother, recapture the heady days of your youth, return to the idyllic time when your teen was a babbling baby — or watch yourself make the one decision that changed everything.

Is it a hoax? And if it’s real, what’s the catch?

When single mother Anna is offered a job at the agency, she glimpses the possibility of happiness. Meanwhile, Teddy’s a customer hoping to untangle his recently imploded marriage. And Jade, who has a deeply buried secret, despises the agency for offering false hope.

The line about there being no fear of altering the present (ah, the Grandfather Paradox), reminds me a little of Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s 2015 time travel novel Before the Coffee Gets Cold.

Visitors to a particular cafe in Tokyo, Japan, can, subject to a number of stipulations, travel to the past. They cannot however change anything in the past, and must return to the cafe in the present day before their coffee gets cold. Not too much time to unravel the spacetime continuum there.

Back to Moriarty though. Writing is clearly a talent running through her family. Sisters Liane Moriarty, and Nicola Moriarty, are also accompanied authors.

Touch Grass by Mary Colussi wins Penguin Literary Prize 2025

17 June 2025

Sydney based Australian writer Mary Colussi has been named winner of the 2025 Penguin Literary Prize, with her manuscript Touch Grass. Going by this brief outline of the story, Touch Grass sounds like a work of speculative fiction:

Touch Grass tells the story of a depressed deletion specialist as she starts to leave her body at unexpected moments and finds herself at the surreal centre of a global panic.

Awarded annually, the Penguin Literary Prize was established in 2017 “to discover, nurture and develop literary fiction writers, providing a platform for new and diverse voices to emerge.”

Melbourne journalist and writer Chloe Adams (Instagram page) won the 2024 award, with the manuscript for her novel The Occupation, which will be published next month.

We’ll probably have to wait on a little while before learning more about the synopsis of Touch Grass.

Pictures of You, a collection of short stories by Tony Birch⁠

7 June 2025

The image features the cover of a book titled 'Pictures of You: Collected Stories' by Tony Birch. The cover is dark with the title in large, prominent letters. Below the title is a black-and-white photograph of two children, one of whom is wearing a dark coloured hat.

Hailing from Melbourne, Australian author Tony Birch has been writing books since 2006. Pictures of You, being published on Tuesday 30 September 2025, is a retrospective of his best short stories written over the last twenty years. I should think that will be quite a few.

Cherrypicking from across his oeuvre, this anthology showcases his skills at finding the extraordinary in ordinary lives, and the often-unexpected connections and kindnesses between strangers. His work is by turns poignant, sad, profound and funny — and always powerful. Throughout this stellar collection, Birch’s preoccupation with the humanity of those who are often marginalised or overlooked, and the search for justice for people and the natural environment shines bright.

Vortex by Rodney Hall wins The Age Book of the Year fiction prize

10 May 2025

Vortex, by Queensland based Australian author Rodney Hall, has won the fiction prize in The Age Book of the Year award for 2025.

The two times winner of the Miles Franklin literary award, says the basis for his latest novel were some pages for a book he started writing, but later gave up on, in 1971. It pays to hold onto those old manuscripts, even the ones you don’t like, or thought you didn’t.

Lech Blaine, also living in Queensland, won the non-fiction prize, with his memoir Australian Gospel.

The announcement of the winners coincided with the opening of this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF), on Thursday. The Age Book of the Year awards have a story worthy of a novel themselves. They were first presented in 1974, by The Age newspaper, for fiction and non-fiction writing. In 1993 a poetry award, the Dinny O’Hearn Prize was added.

In 1998, the awards became a feature of the MWF, until they were ceased all together in 2013. However, in 2021 the award was rebooted, but for fiction only. Then in 2022, an award for non-fiction was introduced (or should that be reintroduced?).

Are more first time authors struggling to get published?

18 June 2024

Kate Dwyer, writing for Esquire:

Almost everyone mentioned that debut fiction has become harder to launch. For writers, the stakes are do or die: A debut sets the bar for each of their subsequent books, so their debut advance and sales performance can follow them for the rest of their career.

It might be harder today to launch a debut novel than in past decades, but people still succeed in doing so. What sort of sales might be generated by a “successful” debut novel, is another matter though. Spoiler: probably not a whole lot, unless the title is the next Harry Potter, or has enjoyed some sort of celebrity endorsement.

Promotional channels are more fractured, and maybe the number of people who want to write a book is greater. Everyone has a book has in them, after all. It could be tools such as word processors, and access to helpful resources online, empower more to try getting published.

So what to do, to help debut authors? Encourage more people to read newer fiction? Place less emphasis on the classics? Why not? If people are reading books that are centuries old, when is there time to read contemporary work? For my part, I rarely look at anything over ten years old nowadays.

I tried though. Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen. Both cornerstones of Western literature, no doubt. How many novels feature a key character, having been out of the country on a prolonged absence, returning home, unexpectedly, late at night? We can thank Mansfield Park for that.

But despite my interest in these novels, I finished neither. I’m sure they’re both great books, but they’re just not for me. Ditto Vanity Fair. So contemporary fiction it is. Call me shallow and uncultured, but hopefully I’m helping a new or emerging author at the same time.

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Will Vision Pro change or enhance the book reading experience?

8 June 2023

A few days ago Apple unveiled its much anticipated spatial computer headset device, Vision Pro. According to Apple, the product is “a revolutionary spatial computer that seamlessly blends digital content with the physical world, while allowing users to stay present and connected to others.”

This assertion is borne out by American Apple/tech blogger John Gruber, who briefly tried out a test version of the Vision Pro, on the sidelines of this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC):

First: the overall technology is extraordinary, and far better than I expected. And like my friend and Dithering co-host Ben Thompson, my expectations were high. Apple exceeded them. Vision Pro and VisionOS feel like they’ve been pulled forward in time from the future. I haven’t had that feeling about a new product since the original iPhone in 2007. There are several aspects of the experience that felt impossible.

If you have even the slightest interest in the Apple headset, I suggest you read Gruber’s article in full. While the device is capable — or eventually will be — of doing all sorts of things, including offering an almost immersive movie watching experience, the rendering of (could we call them) fantasy scenarios caught my eye:

Then, a dinosaur — a velociraptor-looking thing, seemingly about 9 or 10 feet tall — approached the “portal” in the wall and came halfway through into the room. I was invited to stand up from the couch and approach it. […] The dinosaur was not pre-recorded. It reacted, live, to me, keeping eye contact with me at all times. It was spooky, and a significant part of my own lizard brain was instinctively very alarmed. I got extremely close to the dinosaur’s head, and the illusion that it was real never broke down.

Aside from the dinosaur simulation, Gruber also saw an excerpt of James Cameron’s 2022 movie Avatar: The Way of Water. I’m not really a fan of 3D films, I sometimes think they’re an eye-straining gimmick, but Vision Pro sounds like the platform 3D movies have been waiting for:

Cameron shot Avatar 2 with state-of-the-art 3D cameras, and the 3D effect was, as promised, better than anything I’ve ever seen in a theater or theme park. I don’t generally like 3D feature-length movies at all — I find myself not remembering them afterwards — but I might watch movies like Avatar this way with Vision Pro. But even though Avatar is 3D, it’s still a rectangular movie. It’s just presented as a very large rectangle with very compelling 3D depth inside that rectangle.

While a completely different medium from dinosaur simulations and 3D films, the possibilities Vision Pro presents made the book reader in me wonder how, or if, books, or novels, could be consumed on the platform. Books don’t exactly constitute digital content in this context, but still, could the way they’re “read” be somehow augmented, or enhanced, on a headset like this?

Might a book optimised for Vision Pro consumption combine an audiobook experience with visuals other than (but not excluding) pictures or illustrations. “Video” vignettes perhaps? And then audio. What about some background sound? Or might that be something book readers would resist?

While not every novel published would be adapted for Vision Pro — for obvious reasons, cost being one — I can’t imagine ebooks, which one or two people will read on their Vision Pros, not ever being altered or embellished, in some way for the platform.

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Deadly Game, the debut novel of British actor Michael Caine

8 June 2023

Book cover of Deadly Game, written by Michael Caine.

At the age of ninety, British actor Michael Caine has turned his hand to novel writing. His debut title, Deadly Game — set to be published in Australia by Hachette on Tuesday 28 November 2023 — quite possibly draws a certain amount of inspiration from some of Caine’s acting roles:

DCI Harry Taylor has no respect for red tape or political reputations — but he’s great at catching criminals. And all his unorthodox skills will be needed as an extraordinary situation unfolds on his doorstep: a metal box of radioactive material is found at a dump in Stepney, East London, but before the police can arrive it is stolen in a violent raid.

With security agencies across the world on red alert, it’s Harry and his unconventional team from the Met who must hit the streets in search of a lead. They soon have two wildly different suspects, aristocratic art dealer Julian Smythe in London and oligarch Vladimir Voldrev in Barbados. But the pressure is on. How much time does Harry have, and how many more players will join the action, before the missing uranium is lighting up the sky?

Copy on the Hachette page describes Deadly Game as hero Harry Taylor’s “first adventure”… does this mean more thrillers written by Caine are in the works?

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The 2023 Miles Franklin longlist

18 May 2023

The 2023 Miles Franklin longlist was unveiled yesterday. Considered to be one of Australia’s most prestigious literary awards, the Miles Franklin honours works of fiction by Australian writers, and is made up of the following eleven titles:

Hopeless Kingdom by Kgshak Akec
Limberlost by Robbie Arnott
Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au
Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran
Enclave by Claire G. Coleman
Losing Face by George Haddad
Forty Nights by Pirooz Jafari
Madukka The River Serpent by Julie Janson
The Lovers by Yumna Kassab
Iris by Fiona Kelly McGregor
Waypoints by Adam Ouston

In being included on this year’s longlist, Melbourne based author Jesscia Au continues on her upward trajectory, while Tasmanian writer Robbie Arnott is possibly only two steps away from garnering another accolade. But there’s also a number of not so familiar authors present, which is positive. This is looking like a wide open contest at the moment.

It’s also been another good year for independent publishers, particularly Sydney based Ultimo Press, who have three titles in the 2023 longlist. On the other hand, Allen & Unwin, one of Australia’s biggest publishing houses, is conspicuous by absence. In the past, being published by Allen & Unwin was considered a precursor of success in Australian literary awards.

The Miles Franklin shortlist will be announced on Tuesday 20 June 2023.

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