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.

Books are one-hundred-percent AI free. No, maybe not

2 October 2026

E-books (not paper/print books) seem set to start shipping with extra AI features, akin to the bonus features that once came with film and TV DVDs:

Google recently announced a partnership with Bloomsbury, De Gruyter Brill, Johns Hopkins University Press, Macmillan, O’Reilly Media, and Penguin Random House to enhance e-books from its Google Play store with AI, allowing readers to interact with the text of the books directly, ask questions and get answers, and develop tools such as quizzes and slideshows.

These add-ons may not be all bad. I like the idea of being able find out more about parts of a book I’m reading. There could be any number of reasons for doing this.

For instance, in Sally Rooney’s 2021 novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, two characters discuss the Late Bronze Age collapse, which occurred over three-thousand years ago. I’d not heard of it before, even though I visited ruins of the Hittite Empire, whose demised was hastened by the collapse, when I was in Türkiye. I paused reading the novel to find out more about this period of history.

Having access to this information through an e-book would save the bother of looking up a search engine. No surprise then Google wants to be at the forefront of this development.

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.

A Piece of Red Cloth wins 2026 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction

18 September 2026

A Piece of Red Cloth, written by Leonie Norrington, Djawundil Maymuru, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, and Djawa Burarrwanga, has been named winner of the fiction category in the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for 2026.

Australian works of literature are recognised annually across six categories: Australian history, children’s, young adult, poetry, non-fiction, and fiction. A full list of recipients in all categories is here.

Unmasking Italian author Elena Ferrante, because we must

10 September 2026

There’s been yet more speculation as to the identity of the Italian author known as Elena Ferrante.

The writer of novels including the Neapolitan Quartet, and The Lying Lives of Adults, has always been upfront about their use of a pseudonym. And despite writing novels since 1992, her identity, their identity, has, so far, remained a mystery.

Nonetheless, the resolve to unmask the person, or persons, behind the works written under the name of Elena Ferrante, refuses to wane.

Of course people want to know who the author really is. For sometime there has been a consensus that Anita Raja, an Italian literary translator, writes the novels attributed to Ferrante.

In a more recent twist though, suspicion has moved towards Italian author and screenwriter Domenico Starnone, who is also Raja’s husband.

The plot thickens.

Starnone has denied the claim. For my part, I couldn’t care less. So far, I’ve enjoyed every of the novels attributed to Ferrante that I’ve read, and hope the writer continues publishing.

Although I’m sure someone will figure it out eventually, learning the identity of the actual writer (or writers) would be an anticlimax. A let down even.

Great going though, for keeping everyone guessing all this time.

Mine, by Adam Ouston, a novel length story written as one sentence

31 August 2026

That’s Mine, by Hobart based Australian author Adam Ouston (Instagram page), which features one incredibly, outrageously, long sentence of perhaps eighty-five thousand words. No full-stops, chapters, or even a few lines of space to break up the text it seems.

I can’t find an official word count for the novel, so made a guess. The hardback version of Mine has two-hundred-and-eighty-eight pages, and if each has perhaps three-hundred words each, then the total number of words would be well north of eighty-thousand.

Whatever the exact number, that’s one long sentence. The synopsis however perfectly suits the seemingly endless flow of words, written in stream-of-consciousness prose:

While searching for inspiration for what will be his final work, an unnamed poet and defender of Tasmania’s wild places finds himself trapped down an abandoned mine in the island’s mountain rainforests. In the darkness he is visited by memories and voices both from his own past as well as the tortured history of the pillaged landscape to which he has devoted his life and work.

That’s quite the predicament to be in. I imagine my thoughts would run into each other ceaselessly, relentlessly, were I in the same situation.

AI slop exposes fraudulent publishing offer to Australian author Mary Colussi

18 August 2026

Touch Grass, the debut novel of Sydney based Australian author Mary Colussi, was published in June this year. And a fraudulent publishing deal was not too far behind. In this instance though AI slop played a part in giving the scam away.

An email sent to Colussi, apparently from a representative of a well-known publishing house in the UK, was full of praise for Touch Grass. Curiously though comments about the novel’s plot were limited only to what had been published online in its synopsis.

This despite claims by the publishing house rep that they’d read the book. Their AOL (once America Online) email address was also something of a give away, to say nothing of the request for money in exchange for a publishing deal.

While this wasn’t the best executed fraud attempt, as AI agents evolve their efforts will no doubt become more convincing. But asking an author to pay to be published would still arouse suspicion.

Traditional publishing houses do not ask writers for money, rather they pay out in the form of an advance. The objective of these scams though is catch people — particularly newcomers to the industry — off guard, and this is where they might succeed.

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.

To read more, pick up a book not your phone, no wait…

23 July 2026

Hobart, Tasmania, based Australian software engineer Elia Scotto:

First of all, you don’t have to make time to read. What you need to do is read every single time you are not doing something else. In today’s world, most people pick up their phones as soon as they get a moment of inactivity. Serious readers pick up their books instead.

I’ve been having difficulty finding time to read books recently, for various reasons, and am still working on a way to resolve this.

Since removing most of the social media apps from my phone though, I’m not spending so much time looking at it. That’s eventually going to free up some time to read.

Ironically though, I’ll probably end up reading e-books, on my phone. I know that isn’t the idea, but it’s better than not reading at all. Besides, I don’t like hauling physical media around.

But, if you feel you don’t have enough time to read books, whether print or electronic, try deleting the social media apps from your phone, as a first step.

Reading books has to be more fulfilling than doomscrolling social day-in and day-out.

Reading was something we used to do before AI came along

13 July 2026

Rose Horowitch, writing for The Atlantic (gift link):

Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.)

I used to read a lot. But that was when for a couple of years I wasn’t doing too much writing here. Once blogging resumed, reading, or finding time to read, became more challenging.

There’s a correlation here. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Nothing to do with AI. One activity increases, the other decreases. There’s only so much time in the day, after all.

It’s a poor excuse not to read though. And then there are book bloggers, who need to read in order to blog meaningfully about what they say they’ve read.

The example of the Harvard (how can that be?) student who was struggling to read A Clockwork Orange is another matter though. I don’t know anything about the individual in question, but I suspect blogging wasn’t holding them back from reading.

Maybe they simply didn’t like the novel, even if it was required reading for their course.

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