James Bradley

Toni Morrison once observed that “all water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was”. Morrison was talking about writing, but her thinking was steeped in the fluvial, the tendency of rivers to reassert themselves in …

It’s traditional to blame the Romantics for the conflation of suffering and artistic genius, but irrespective of where the association began, the idea is now one of our basic assumptions about the creative life. Just as truth comes from pain, artists …

More than 50 years after The Beatles broke up, their cultural presence just keeps growing. While the music may have come to an end with the release of the AI-enhanced “Now and Then” in 2023 – the white whale for Beatles-heads, the 14-minute psychedelic …

One of the more perplexing legacies of the British Empire is the continuing separateness of Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand literary culture. Despite the enduring cultural connections and the efforts of a handful of publishers in both countries, books …

Josephine Rowe’s brief and wonderfully elliptical new novel begins with the arrival of the body of a saint in the Kimberley in the years after World War II. A bequest from Norwegian scientist Kaspar Isaksen to his friend, Orrin, the saint is a young …

Michael and James discuss what it means to write into a specific genre and why kindness is so important in both this novel and the world.

In 2020, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel published a study showing that the combined weight of the things that humans have made now outweighs every living thing on Earth. Plastics alone weigh more than twice as much as marine …

Although we often imagine the digital world that surrounds us to be as substanceless and immaterial as light – a notion the tech industry encourages by using terms such as “the cloud” – in fact it is anything but. From the chips that drive them …

A new Western from the writer of The Revenant, American Primeval merely reproduces the violence it claims to critique.

The literature of dementia is not large. There are nonfictional exceptions, such as Annie Ernaux’s wrenching account of her mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s, I Remain in Darkness, Wendy Mitchell’s deeply moving memoir of early-onset …

I’m always uncomfortable nominating just one book as my book of the year, but if I had to then it would probably be Percival Everett’s James (Mantle, 320pp, $34.99). A retelling of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn …

NewSouth’s latest Best Australian Science Writing collection opens with a foreword by Corey Tutt. A Kamilaroi man and the founder of Deadly Science, which provides STEM resources to remote schools, Tutt offers a stark assessment of how far …

Beginning with Olive Kitteridge, in 2008, Elizabeth Strout has published seven books centred on Olive, the writer Lucy Barton, and a shifting cast of characters connected to the two of them in Maine, New England, rural Illinois and New York. …

Water – its primal creativity, fluidity and changeability – is vital to cultures all over the world. This is especially true in Aotearoa New Zealand, where water is an integral part of Māori identity and being, a living force that flows through everything. …

In the opening pages of Kate Kruimink’s new novel, Heartsease, the narrator, Nelly Llewellyn, describes a weekend afternoon at Salamanca, in Hobart/nipaluna. “There is brine, coffee, red wine, whiskey, bread, soup, the yellow of old books, …

Catherine McKinnon’s last novel, the Miles Franklin-shortlisted Storyland, is one of the more striking Australian novels of recent years. Spanning almost a thousand years, from the 1700s to the 28th century, it powerfully captures the links …

Jennifer Croft is perhaps best known as a translator, most notably of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk – in particular Tokarczuk’s kaleidoscopic Flights, which won the International Booker Prize in 2018. But Croft is also a gifted writer in …

Elizabeth Gonzalez James opens the acknowledgements at the back of The Bullet Swallower with the declaration that: “Everything in this book is true except for the stuff I made up.” Her point is partly that the novel draws on her family history, …

“She pulled away. There was something almost too clean about him, as if he had scoured all trace of human biology from his body and replaced it with the scent of unguents and cologne. The hot influx of his breath was the same: clean and minty, but with …”

Melbourne author Myfanwy Jones’s last novel, the 2015 Miles Franklin-shortlisted Leap, was a deceptively complex creation. Emotionally acute and raw in its portrayal of guilt and grief, it was simultaneously oddly elliptical, with an almost …

Early in Leo Vardiashvili’s Hard by a Great Forest, its narrator, Saba Sulidze-Donauri, finds himself in a taxi in Tbilisi. As the taxi winds its way through the darkened streets, Saba begins to realise something is amiss. People are huddled …

Max Easton’s 2021 novel, The Magpie Wing, was a striking debut. Tracing the lives of its characters across almost two decades, it brought a powerful class consciousness to its depiction of the social and physical landscape of Sydney’s west, …

In the opening pages of Charlotte Wood’s new novel, the narrator takes a detour to the cemetery outside the town where she grew up. She is there to visit her parents’ graves for the first time in 35 years, although that process is complicated by her …

Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country was one of the breakout books of 2020. A joyously original collision of science fiction, deadpan humour and linguistic experimentation about a pandemic that allowed humans and animals to communicate, …

As a glance at any bookshop’s shelves demonstrates, Latin American fantastika is in the midst of a remarkable renaissance. From Argentina to Mexico, writers as various as Samanta Schweblin, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mariana Enríquez and Agustina …

Psychologists are concerned about anxiety and depression becoming long-term problems due to the pandemic, with the worst effects felt by the young and the vulnerable.