Showing all posts about novels
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin, coming to the big screen
4 June 2026
The news we’ve been waiting for. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, the 2022 novel by American author Gabrielle Zevin, is to be adapted to film.
Daisy Edgar-Jones, who starred in the screen adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People, has been cast in the central role of Sadie Green, a games designer.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow sadly remains on my TBR list all these years later. Maybe I’ll get to experience the screen adaptation of the story instead.
As an aside, and I don’t by any means know the ins and outs here, but I’m surprised it’s taken so long for this to happen, given the interest in the novel when it was published.
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books, film, Gabrielle Zevin, novels, screen adaptations
The Miles Franklin Literary Award 2026 longlist
25 May 2026
The longlist for the 2026 Miles Franklin award was published on Wednesday 20 May 2026, and includes the following ten titles:
- Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah
- Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts
- Fierceland by Omar Musa
- First Name Second Name by Steve MinOn
- I Want Everything, Dominic Amerena
- Little World by Josephine Rowe
- My Heart at Evening by Konrad Muller
- Salt Upon the Water by Lyn Dickens
- Tenderfoot by Toni Jordan
- You Must Remember This by Sean Wilson
Presented annually, the Miles Franklin award recognises Australian novels of the highest literary merit. The shortlist will be announced in June, next month, with the winner being named in August.
If you’re looking for reading ideas, literary award longlists make a good starting place, and are for me, a de-facto TBR list. I need more hours in the day to keep up with the resulting reading though.
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Australian literature, books, literary awards, literature, Miles Franklin, novels
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.
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Amanda Lohrey, Australian literature, books, literature, novels, science fiction
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.
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books, current affairs, literature, novels, Sally Rooney
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.
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books, novels, RSS, syndication, technology
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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Booker Prize, books, literary awards, literature, novels
Authors claim Salesforce used their novels to train AI agents
21 October 2025
American novelists Molly Tanzer and Jennifer Gilmore have launched legal action against Salesforce, accusing the San Francisco based software company of copyright infringement.
Tanzer and Gilmore allege Salesforce used thousands of novels, not just their work, without permission, to train AI agents.
Salesforce want to have their cake and eat it as well. After replacing several thousand workers with AI technologies, presumably saving the company large sums of money, Salesforce want to pay as little as possible to develop the AI agents that displaced the workers in the first place.
What part of any of this is reasonable?
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artificial intelligence, books, copyright, novels, technology
Mind blown: are these the best science-fiction/fantasy books of the twenty-first century?
25 August 2025
Singapore based Australian blogger, and science-fiction writer Skribe, recently asked his Mastodon followers to name one sci-fi/fantasy novel, written this century, that has blown their minds. From those suggestions, he drew up this list of seven titles:
- A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, published in 2020
- Anathem by Neal Stephenson, published in 2010
- Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, published in 2013
- Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published in 2015
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, published in 2020
- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, published in 2021
- The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, published in 2015
In a since closed poll asking people to vote for the title they considered the best, I went for Piranesi. Mainly because it was the only novel from the list that I’d read, but also because British author Susanna Clarke’s tome compelled me to write at length about it afterwards.
Long story short, Piranesi is about someone of the same name, who finds themselves mostly alone in a house of epic proportions. It can literally take days to move from one part of the multi-level structure, to another. The house itself is a character in its own right, and as I read through the story, I almost felt as if I was there with Piranesi, so vivid was Clarke’s description of the sprawling abode.
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books, literature, novels, science fiction, Susanna Clarke
Cure, the fourth novel by Australian author Katherine Brabon
21 July 2025
Cure, the fourth novel by Melbourne based Australia author Katherine Brabon, was published this month. As with most of Brabon’s novels so far, Cure is set outside of Australia, in Italy:
Vera and Thea are mother and daughter. Vera writes for the internet: she constructs identities and scenarios for brands to cater to the ideal consumer. Yet she also consumes the offerings of the online world herself: the addictive pursuit of a cure, the narratives she craves in which mother and daughter find a way out of the shared experience of chronic illness. She becomes preoccupied with a blog written by a woman named Claudia, a mother whose daughter also has a chronic illness.
While on holiday in Italy, Thea writes in her journal. She is also constructing a character: an image of herself as she grapples with having the same illness as her mother, Vera. But gradually another person emerges in her journal, through her imaginings of her mother in the same house, the same city, at the same age. They have come to Italy to see where Vera’s family originates, but also to chase a promised cure in the form of a man said to be able to heal Thea’s illness.
I read Brabon’s second novel, The Shut Ins, which was published in 2021, and explored the Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori, where people shut themselves away from society, as in never leave their room, for sometimes years on end.
I was particularly intrigued by a character known only as M, and wrote a longer piece in 2021, trying to figure out who she was. Some people felt certain they knew who she was, but I wasn’t so sure. It’s not too often a novel piques my curiosity thusly…
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Australian literature, Katherine Brabon, literature, novels, TBR
The Long Night, the new Christian White novel, October 2025
14 July 2025
Victoria based Australian author, Christian White, that raconteur of the redirect, that teller of tantalising thrillers, has a new novel, The Long Night, being published on Tuesday 28 October 2025. His publisher, Affirm Press, describes White’s fifth book, as his “darkest” yet:
Em has lived a quiet life with her complicated mother and is now looking for love and a potential escape from her small hometown. When a masked man kidnaps her in the dark of night, though, she is drawn into a terrifying world.
Jodie has been trying to forget a troubling time in her life, pouring her trauma into her work and out of her mind. Until one night her daughter is kidnapped and Jodie is dragged back into the violence.
As Em and Jodie race into the darkness, the agony of the past rushes up to meet them. It will take all their devotion and courage to escape this night alive.
Here’s hoping White’s good run of form continues. I’ve read all of his novels except (so far) Wild Place, and will be looking out for The Long Night later this year.
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