We all know that the season of winter is really the season of reading (books are the perfect companion to your slippers and hot chocolate!) so keep warm and curl up with some winter-worthy books.
Waiting for Elijah by Kate Wild
In country NSW, 24-year-old Elijah Holcombe was shot dead by police. This is the story of that shooting, a flawed system, and a family’s grief. Both heartbreaking and compassionate, this is an account of a tragedy that didn’t have to happen. A riveting true-crime story from an award-winning journalist.
Wild’s prose is evocative and personal.
The Saturday Paper
The Bridge by Enza Gandolfo
In 1970s Melbourne, 22-year-old Italian migrant Antonello is newly married and working as a rigger on the West Gate Bridge. When the bridge collapses one morning, his world crashes around him. In 2009, Jo and her best friend, Ashleigh, are on the verge of finishing high school but one terrible mistake sets Jo’s life on a radically different course. A profoundly moving novel of family, life and loss centred around Melbourne’s Westgate Bridge.
My book of the year so far, brilliant writing.
Kerrie, Dymocks Melbourne
Ironbark by Jay Carmichael
Markus Bello’s life has stalled. Living in a small country town, mourning the death of his best friend, Grayson, Markus is isolated and adrift. As time passes, and life continues around him, Markus must try to face his grief, and come to terms with what is left. An elliptical and beautifully evoked contemporary coming-of-age story.
Carmichael paints an exquisitely tender portrait of doomed adolescent longing and love.
The Monthly
Between a Wolf and a Dog by Georgia Blain
Ester is a family therapist with an appointment book that catalogues the anxieties of the middle class: loneliness, relationships, death. She spends her days helping others find happiness, but her own family relationships are tense and frayed. Taking place largely over one rainy day in Sydney, and rendered with the evocative and powerful prose Blain is known for, Between a Wolf and a Dog is a celebration of the best in all of us — our capacity to live in the face of ordinary sorrows, and to draw strength from the transformative power of art.
2017 Australian Book Industry Awards, Literary Fiction Book of the Year
2017 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, Shortlisted
2017 Indie Book Awards, Fiction, Shortlisted
2017 Stella Prize, Longlisted
2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, Shortlisted
2016 The University of Queensland Fiction Book Award, Winner
The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker
Both outsiders, Sharon and Mel become fervent friends, bonding over their love of classic cartoons, their dysfunctional working-class families, and — above all — their craft: drawing. A funny, heartbreaking, and dazzling story of female friendship, the cost of a creative life, and the secrets that can undo us.
The Animators crackles with intelligence; Whitaker’s remarkable ear for dialogue reads as if Aaron Sorkin wrote an episode of Girls.
The Guardian
The Bootle Boy by Les Hinton
In this brilliantly evocative memoir from the golden age of newspaper publishing, Hinton depicts the upheavals that swept his trade. With widescreen perspective and sharp colours he shows us how politicians from Clinton to Blair, from Brown to Cameron, alternately canoodled and raged inside their arranged media marriages.
An epic story … and a penetrating insight into the mind of Murdoch.
Daily Mail
