The celebrated Australian author’s ‘Collected Stories’ sets private desperation in the cosmopolitan Europe she revered

Cave systems, mines, urban sewers, mycelial networks, moulins and more

Forty years on, the author’s second novel is reunited with its lost half

Richard Flanagan explores a different kind of darkness in ‘First Person’

JM Coetzee’s ‘The Schooldays of Jesus’ is defined by its strangeness

Rediscovering the novels of Randolph Stow

Black Inc.; $32.99

A long-lost novel sees the light after 40 years

  Some writers’ imaginations are roused most strongly by the view from their doorsteps. John Updike created a literary cosmos from the small-town, middle-class Protestant America of his youth. Irishman John McGahern spent a lifetime turning …

The clown v. the critic

Let’s prick the bubble of contemporaneity for once. Two lost books by a centenarian author were published in 2012. Happy Valley is the first reissue of Patrick White’s 1939 debut, a novel that was later so effectively quashed by its creator …

JM Coetzee - ‘Summertime’, 2009

Sonya’s Hartnett’s ‘Midnight Zoo’

On meeting Marie King, the heroine of Fiona McGregor’s fourth novel, I was reminded of Brett Whiteley’s painting of an ageing society hostess. His subject is impeccable at first glance – coiffed and glossy, as though time itself is being held back …

“In tragic life,” wrote George Meredith in Modern Love, a savage poetic account of the breakdown of his marriage, “No villain need be! Passions spin the plot.” Alex Miller’s eighth novel also tells the story of a marriage, in this instance …