The Bookshelf

Witnessing a great and terrible event in Gail Jones' Salonika Burning; a life up-ended and re-worked in Alex Miller's A Brief Affair; and careful observations of everyday wonder in Luke Carman's An Ordinary Ecstasy.

Exploring the novels of Pakistani and English writer Kamala Shamsie with Maryam Azam and Sonia Nair, with a particular focus on Best of Friends and Home Fire

A brother and sister walk uneasy paths, and plumb both literal and hallucinatory depths in Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger; worlds and characters explode across both space and time in Cole Haddon's Psalms for the End of the World; and nineteenth-century Australia and its mythologies remade in Fiona McFarlane's The Sun Walks Down. Kate and Cassie are joined by guests rock star Tim Rogers, and critic and memoirist Shannon Burns

An all-American edition of the bookshelf, with new fiction from George Saunders, Barbara Kingsolver and John Irving. Both Charles Dickens and Herman Melville also get a look in. Kate and Cassie are joined by novelist Felicity McLean and literary academic David Ellison

Two wildly different sisters are trying to work out how to live and who to love during a sweaty Sydney summer in Diana Reid's hotly anticipated new novel Seeing Other People. In Chris Flynn's short story collection Here Be Leviathans, stories are told from the perspective of animals including a grizzly bear and a family of platypus, as well as inanimate objects like airline seats and hotel rooms. Plus, Ling Ma's Bliss Montage, a dazzling collection of short stories that include a woman who lives with her husband and 100 ex-boyfriends in L.A.

in this episode Jonathan Green joins Cassie McCullagh to talk about three hard hitting new works of fiction from Robbie Arnott, Donal Ryan and Michael Bennett.

In this edition of RN's monthly Book Club, we look at Ian McEwan's extraordinary body of work, paying particular attention to his new novel Lessons, a meditation on history and humanity presented through the span of one man's lifetime.

English writer Hilary Mantel has sadly died, aged 70. The Booker prize winning author spoke to Kate Evans for the Big Weekend of Books in 2020.

Three sisters, locked in their lifelong roles, on a roadtrip, in Peggy Frew's Wildflowers; a London underworld full of betrayal and promise, in Kate Atkinson's Shrines of Gaiety (read by Rohan Wilson); and talking to Adrian McKinty about the differences between noir and thrillers.

Reading Tracey Lien's All That's Left Unsaid, Diane Connell's The Improbable Life of Ricky Bird and Clarissa Goenawan's Watersong – Kate Evans and Elizabeth Flynn with guests George Haddad and Mandi McIntosh.

Kate and Cassie with three new novels: grappling with modernism and creativity in Sophie Cunningham's This Devastating Fever; a young woman caged by intrigue and expectations in Maggie O'Farrell's The Marriage Portrait; and working soldiers bleed across France in Dan Jones' Essex Dogs – with guests Stephen Gapps and Amy Walters

RN's Book Club in a different format to usual: a panel discussion plus a quick reading guide. The big question: Is crime fiction a literature of resistance? Also, a guide to fiction in translation from Korea

A story of three men trying to create a new world, on a craggy island in seventh-century Ireland, in Emma Donoghue's Haven; anxieties about race and migration, in Mohsin Hamid's The Last White Man; and scrappy voices from history, in Selby Wynn Schwartz's fragmentary lesbian colloquy, After Sappho.

Joan of Arc as a capable, scrappy young woman; unmoored on a strange coastline; and trees in both crime fiction and the Australian literary imaginary: reading Scott McCulloch's Basin, Katherine J Chen's Joan (with Prof of Philosophy Karen Green) and crime writer Margaret Hickey's Stone Town on both crime and landscape

Reading Robert Drewe's Nimblefoot, Eliza Henry-Jones' Salt and Skin and Sloane Crosley's Cult Classic with critic and literary judge Susan Wyndham and novelist and funeral director Jackie Bailey

Writers Hayley Scrivenor, Michael Brissenden and Yumna Kassab join Kate and Cassie onstage to talk libraries, stories, trauma, failure, children, Australian identity and more in this Big Weekend of Books edition of The Bookshelf

Reviewing the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award winner, Jennifer Down's Bodies of Light, and shortlist with theatre writer Tom Wright and literary critic and interviewer Nicole Abadee

Reading Chris Womersley's The Diplomat and Anjali Joseph's Keeping in Touch plus a guide to Sri Lankan fiction from Smriti Daniel and what's coming out later this year with independent bookseller Mark Rubbo. Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh, bringing you new fiction

Contact history and its 'saviour' mythologies turned upside down in Paul Daley's Jesustown; inside-out fairytales and an invented gothic world in A G Slatter's The Path of Thorns (read by Elizabeth Flynn); and a guide to middle-grade fiction from writer Tristan Bancks. Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh, bringing you new fiction

Australian dystopias, historical shipwrecks and women's lives in Oman: reading Claire G Coleman's Enclave, Jokha Alharthi's Bitter Orange Tree and Jess Kidd's The Night Ship with guests novelist Sally Piper and essayist Eda Gunaydin; and Jane Rawson on her A History of Dreams and its influences

Reading Alexis Wright's Carpentaria and Patrick White's The Vivisector with critic Geordie Williamson - and with words from the writers themselves, as well as other voices and commentators from the ABC Archives

Vale Frank Moorhouse, journalist, essayist, shortstory writer and novelist. Remembering the writer with his friend, Angelo Loukakis, and with archival interviews from 1980 (The Everlasting Secret Family) and 2000 (Dark Palace, the second in the Edith Campbell Berry trilogy, which went on to win the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award)

A tough and poetic family story of the Métis (Michif) people of Canada in Katherena Vermette's The Strangers; and exclusion and compassion in Australian history, with a novel set in a lazaret, in Eleanor Limprecht's The Coast (read by historian Dr Ian Hoskins)

Three books by Australian authors: crime in Sydney in Matthew Spencer's Black River; rewriting a sidelined character from a classic of modernism, in Michelle Cahill's Daisy and Woolf, and friendship and exile in an Orthodox Jewish community in Melbourne in Ashley Goldberg's Abomination, with guests writer Kari Gislason and literary interviewer Michaela Kalowski

Reading Geraldine Brooks' Horse, Leila Mottley's Nightcrawling and Zaheda Ghani's Pomegranate and Fig with journalist, music writer and memoirist Mawunyo Gbogbo (Hip Hop and Hymns) and CEO of the Australian Muslim Women's Centre for Human Rights, Diana Sayed

Reading Gillian Mears' 2011 novel Foal’s Bread and Craig Sherborne's recent release The Grass Hotel with critic and biographer Bernadette Brennan and writer and cultural historian Luke Stegemann

Reading Brendan Colley's The Signal Line, Louise Kennedy's Trespasses, Lauren John Joseph's At Certain Points We Touch and Jonathan Bazzi's Fever with novelists Nigel Featherstone (My Heart is a Little Wild Thing) and Ellie O'Neill (Family Matters)

Why do we read and reread? And how does rereading read us? From the Sydney Writers Festival, Kate was onstage with bibliomemoirist Ruth Wilson and scholar Bernadette Brennan

In front of an audience, and with plenty of book recommendations, Kate and Cassie are onstage with historian and biographer Jackie Huggins and novelists Damon Galgut and George Haddad

Reading Steve Toltz's Here Goes Nothing, Emiliano Monge's What Goes Unsaid and Dominique Wilson's Orphan Rock with Lauren Chater (The Winter Dress) and Jonty Claypole (Words Fail Us: In Defence of Disfluency)

Reading Paddy O’Reilly's Other Houses, Patrick Gale's Mother’s Boy and Norman Erikson Pasaribu's Happy Stories, Mostly with writers Ennis Ćehić (Sadvertising) and Hilde Hinton (A Solitary Walk on the Moon)

Reading Jennifer Egan's 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad and her newly-released The Candy House, with rock'n'roll reader Tim Rogers and novelist Rhett Davis

Cassie is away this week, so Kate is joined by the ABC's Tiger Webb: reading Emily St John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility, Steven Carroll's Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight, and Mona Awad's All’s Well, with novelist Rhett Davis and critic Nicole Abadee

Reading Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo, Julian Barnes' Elizabeth Finch and Charmian Clift's Sneaky Little Revolutions: Selected Essays with writers Nadia Wheatley and Ruth Wilson (The Jane Austen Remedy)

Reading Jessica Au's Cold Enough for Snow, John Darnielle's Devil House and Julie Otsuka's The Swimmers with novelists Anna Downes and Diana Reid.

Children, violence, landscape, and powerful and strange writing: we're talking fiction from New Zealand with the director of Wellington's Verb Writers' Festival Claire Mabey and novelist Sam Coley. Rereading Keri Hulmes' The Bone People from 1984 and the newly-released The Fish by Lloyd Jones. Passion, laughter, and even some tears

Reading Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor's Paradais, Australian Toni Jordan's Dinner with the Schnabels and English debut novelist Tom Watson's Metronome

Reading Robert Lukins' Loveland, Kári Gíslason's The Sorrow Stone and Harlan Coben's The Match with crime writer Loraine Peck (The Second Son) and mediaeval Icelandic literature specialist Lisa Bennett

Reading Irish novel The Colony by Audrey Magee, and two New Zealand novels, Becky Manawatu's Auē and Sue Orr's Loop Tracks, with guests publisher Jemma Birrell and novelist Lyn Yeowart

Reading Monica Ali's 2003 debut novel, Brick Lane and latest release, Love Marriage with guests writer Roanna Gonsalves and RN's Richard Aedy. Love, marriage, migration, displacement, drama, storytelling.

Western Sydney, coastal Victoria and nineteenth-century America: reading Omar Sakr's Son of Sin, Karen Joy Fowler's Booth and Aoife Clifford's When We Fall with guests historian Ethan Blue and crime afficionado Felix Shannon

Reading Sequoia Nagamatsu's How High We Go in the Dark, Juhea Kim's Beasts of a Little Land and Claudia Durastanti, Strangers I Know with guests Melissa Fulton from The Big Issue and literary studies academic Julian Novitz

Reading Emily Brugman's The Islands, Vanessa Len's Only a Monster and Hélène Gaudy's A World With No Shore (translated by Stephanie Smee) with writers Michelle Law and Molly Murn

Reading Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel, Rebecca, and Graeme Macrae Burnet's Case Study (which includes a character in the mid 1960s who takes on a Rebecca persona in direct response to du Maurier's novel) - with guests literary lecturer Susannah Fullerton and crime writer Chris Hammer

Reading Hanya Yanigahara's To Paradise, Gary Shteyngart's Our Country Friends and Nikki May's Wahala with novelist and critic Jessie Tu and poet and performer Geoff Forrester (whose alter ego, Tug Dumbly, also offers up a poem)

A special edition of The Bookshelf, with writer Pip Williams speaking to Kate about her career, research, year in Italy, and interest in the history of words and their visibility, leading to the novel The Dictionary of Lost Words (a conversation from the 2021 Brisbane Writers Festival, online).

Kate and Cassie read Hannah Kent's Devotion; RN's Daniel Browning reads Caleb Azumah Nelson's Open Water; novelist Rashida Murphy reads Sunjeev Sahota's China Room; and novelist Aravind Adiga on Australian fiction

Reading, writers, family, art and mentors in Siri Hustvedt's essay collection, Mothers, Fathers and Others; and dissipating ghosts, cities and stories in Jennifer Mills' The Airways

Kate and Cassie read Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This; Eugen Bacon on Suyi Davies Okungbowa's Son of the Storm; a story from Ann Patchett's These Precious Days; Simon Winchester discussing Anthony Trollope in remote China; and Jay Kristoff on the books that shaped his latest, Empire of the Vampire

Tilly Lawless on her debut novel Nothing but My Body, and her reading inspiration; and Jon McGregor on aphasia and Antarctica, in his Lean Fall Stand