Fiction

The novel does not unfold so much as it crawls – the way a bot can run through two hundred password combinations a second: by failing again and failing better.

Limberlost is a tender study of the dangers of averting our gaze, and of how we might go through life with very little involvement.

There’s something stimulating about seeing into other people’s houses. We’ve all glanced through an open window or door as we pass by on our walks.

There is this often-quoted adage about internet comment sections, probably you’ve heard it. It’s called Godwin’s Law and it predicts…

And I think this is where I was previously mistaken. I thought Strout’s books are about class, and they are, but in a much more specific sense – they are really about social mobility.

Toltz’s loquacious and rambling style seems, in isolation, to carry an aphoristic indictment of our techno-saturated society. But put together, what does it mean? Do they even belong together?

The Books of Jacob is a book about the internet. That is to say, it’s a response to the experience of encountering information online, and realising as a result that ‘many things remain quietly connected’, as Tokarczuk writes in her postscript. This realisation in turn gives rise to the notion of the system as a whole, a kind of totality – everything that has happened ‘alongside all that might have happened as well or instead.’

Where will you go? Will you follow Lili, an Australian young woman of Asian heritage in 1980s France, or Lyle, a middle-aged man who also migrated from Asia in post-pandemic Australia?

Kassab presents a full and rich account of life outside of major cities, and, continuing the moral project begun in her debut work, House of Youssef, she draws us into this world to separate myth from reality.

The Last One takes us with Fatima as she builds both an individual and collective identity through old and new connections and orientations.