The Bookshelf

Apr 10 2025 243 ep. 52 mins 606
The Bookshelf Podcast artwork

What are you reading, loving or being challenged by? We review the latest in fiction for dedicated readers and for those who wish they read more.

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Folk horror, dreams under surveillance, lonely in Guatemala

Apr 10 2025 73 mins  
Cassie McCullagh is on leave this week, so Kate Evans and guests read Lucy Rose’s The Lamb, Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel, and Rachel Morton’s The Sun was Electric Light (with interview extracts from Lucy Rose on body horror and Cumbrian folk traditions, and from Rachel Morton on her move from poetry to prose). BOOKS Rachel Morton, The Sun was Electric Light, UQP Lucy R

Andrea Goldsmith's The Buried Life - and a train steaming towards disaster . . .

Apr 02 2025 54 mins  
Kate and Cassie read three new works of fiction, with the help of two guest reviewers: a novel of ideas, death, love and music, in Australian writer Andrea Goldsmith's The Buried Life; a real train derailment from the 1890s hurtles together rail workers, coffee sellers, anarcho-feminism, art and typewriters in Irish-Canadian writer Emma Donoghue's The Paris Express (read with histo

Curtis Sittenfeld's Show Don't Tell + Tim Rogers and Zan Rowe on two new debuts

Mar 26 2025 54 mins  
Kate and Cassie discuss bestselling American writer Curtis Sittenfeld’s sharp and observant collection of short stories Show Don’t Tell; You Am I frontman Tim Rogers reads First Name Second Name, an excellent debut from Queensland novelist Steve MinOn, and the ABC’s own Zan Rowe (of Triple J, Double J and Take 5 fame) shares her thoughts on Scottish singer-songwriter (from Be

This week’s novels takes us to Zanzibar, Budapest and Renaissance Florence

Mar 19 2025 54 mins  
This week’s novels takes us to Zanzibar, Budapest and Renaissance Florence with Nobel Prize-winning English-Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft; while guest reviewers Tim Ayliffe reads Laurent Binet’s Perspectives; and Siang Lu reads David Szalay’s Flesh. BOOKS Abdulrazak Gurnah, Theft, Bloomsbury Laurent Binet, Perspectives (translated from the French by Sam Ta

On stage at Adelaide Writers' Week with Niall Williams, Charlotte Mendelson and Brian Castro

Mar 12 2025 54 mins  
This edition of the Bookshelf was recorded on stage at Adelaide Writers' Week on Sunday 2 March – with Irish writer Niall Williams (Time of the Child), English writer Charlotte Mendelson (Wife) and all the way from the Adelaide Hills, Australian writer Brian Castro (Chinese Postman). How and when do they do their best reading, what have books meant to them, what are their influen

Australian bestseller Diana Reid returns with Signs of Damage

Mar 05 2025 54 mins  
Four women’s lives intertwined between Africa and the USA in Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count. Plus, secrets and trauma in the South of France in Australian novelist Diana Reid’s new one, Signs of Damage; and into the Swedish wilderness to observe a group of seven unlikely people in indie musician turned novelist Annika Norlin’s Colony. BOOKS Chimama

Irish writer Colum McCann’s Twist dives deep under the ocean and takes on a charismatic mystery

Feb 26 2025 54 mins  
Irish writer Colum McCann’s Twist dives deep under the ocean and takes on a charismatic mystery; 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang’s We Do Not Part explores massacres on Jeju Island during (and after) the Korean War, stories actively repressed by both the South Korean and American governments; and Australian novelist Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore takes us to a fictiona

Mothers and Sons...is the story as fraught as the title suggests?

Feb 19 2025 53 mins  
An examination of family dynamics through three novels...Adam Haslett’s Mothers and Sons reflects on unspoken stories and familial divides; The Boy from the Sea by Garrett Carr, set in 1970s Ireland, tells the story of a family that takes in a child washed ashore, and Robert Lukins’ Somebody Down There Likes Me depicts an uber-rich family who gather together as their wealth and

Alaska, folktales, mothers and daughters

Feb 12 2025 54 mins  
Alaska, folktales and mothers and daughters in Eowyn Ivey's Black Woods Blue Sky. Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Anne Tyler is back with Three Days in June, another novel about mothers and daughters; and Italian novelist Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection, a critique of social media and contemporary life. BOOKS Eowyn Ivey, Black Woods, Blue Sky, Tinder Press Anne Tyler, Three Days

A story of yearning, belonging, secrets and identity from Native America

Feb 05 2025 57 mins  
A story of yearning, belonging, secrets and identity from Native America in Morgan Talty’s Fire Exit; rusted robots, prosthetic limbs, AI and noisy families in Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author; and coercive control and walking on eggshells in Irish writer Roisín O’Donnell’s Nesting; and a brief foray into the world of ‘romantasy’ and the in