Jan McGuinness

Who is the I in Helen Garner’s work? This is the question Bernadette Brennan probes by canvassing more than forty years of Garner’s writing and her seventy-four-year existence ...

In his introduction to Bob Ellis: In his own words, Bob’s son Jack says of his father that ‘writing was his reason for being ... and through his writing he saw himself in conversation ...

With James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch grinning smugly on its cover, Killing Fairfax: Packer, Murdoch and the Ultimate Revenge projects a strong message that they are indeed the company’s smiling assassins. Pamela Williams mounts a case that these scions of Australia’s traditional media families ...

Andrea Goldsmith, in her seventh novel, plunges once more into a world of characters whose ideas and relationships swirl and churn around a psychological trigger. This time it is memory in all its errant, bewitching manifestations. Memory plays tricks as the old adage goes, and for the novel’s main characters it is the trick of emersion in an idealised but ruptured past.

Two sisters (Zoe and Nina) live next door to two brothers (Ramsay and Sean) in a Melbourne suburban court of Howard Arkley ordinariness, where they are free to roam, play, and imagine at will, form a gang and dream up adventures under the care of relaxed and indulgent parents. It is an enchanted childhood enhanced by music-making, at which Zoe, Sean, and particularly Ramsay excel. While Nina loves music, she never masters an instrument. This sets her apart.

Reading two books about Gina Rinehart back to back is far from edifying. So rich, so controlling, so opinionated, so entitled – and these are among her less objectionable qualities, as described in the two biographies published since she burst into the headlines amid reports of family litigation, media buy-ins, and escalating wealth. Indeed, whatever she did would captivate widespread interest, given that her worth ballooned from a tidy $900 million in 2006 to $20 billion this year.