Dženana Vucic

This gothic masterpiece by one of Australia’s most esteemed authors plumbs the depths of internalised shame and lesbian longing.

Jumaana Abdu’s startling debut novel doesn’t explain Islam but explores its depths.

Master storyteller Tony Birch pushes the use of extraneous detail to new limits in his latest exploration of the lives of the working class.

New Critic: Amid the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people, Sara M Saleh’s multigenerational saga melds fiction and activism in haste to illuminate the diasporic condition.

New Critic: Award-winning writer Anna Funder inserts her own story into that of the overlooked literary wife. Yet in a book ostensibly concerned with patriarchy and gendered labour, how much—perhaps intentionally—is left out?

New Critic: In Aleksandar Hemon’s masterful novel, two men meet amid the brutality of WWI. Forgotten victims are brought into focus in this epic saga about connection amid displacement.

New Critic: Exploring the complex negotiations between migrant parents and their diaspora children, Zoya Patel’s first novel is a bold move against the conservative impetus toward familial unity at all costs, and a frank acknowledgement that often there is no easy reconciliation of cultural perspectives.

How to Be Between, Root & Branch, Daisy & Woolf, Abomination

A quarter-century on from one of the worst massacres in modern European history, the Oscar-nominated Bosnian film Quo Vadis, Aida? explores what happens when we ignore atrocities even as they unfold right in front of us.

Even with recent changes, Australian law still privileges landlords’ profits over tenants’ rights to modify and live comfortably in their home. But renting on the other side of the world showed me things don’t have to be this way.

We think nothing of actively pursuing romantic and sexual partners, but why is finding new friends still so awkward? Lonely in a new city, I turned to dating apps—and found among its users a yearning for intimacy more platonic than erotic.

Donating eggs to my best friends, I am constantly asked how I will feel when I hold ‘my’ baby. Is the Western emphasis on genetic relationships preventing us from experiencing more inclusive and radical forms of family?