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Jo Case
Jo Case is senior writer/editor for the Wheeler Centre. Her previous roles have included editor of Readings Monthly, the newsletter for Readings Books & Music, books editor of The Big Issue, co-editor of their annual fiction edition, and associate editor of Kill Your Darlings. Her reviews, essays and opinion pieces have been published in The Age, The Australian, and The Sydney Morning Herald, and her short stories have been published in the Sleepers Almanac and Best Australian Stories. Her first book, Boomer and Me: A memoir of motherhood, and Asperger’s, was published by Hardie Grant in Australia (April 2013).
Debates about the balance between life and work are currently running hot in the media, government and the publishing world. Don Edgar, foundation director of the Australian Institute of Family Studies, delivers a passionately argued and engagingly written analysis of the various issues currently affecting work culture and the family. He focuses on women juggling motherhood and work, the masculine ... (read more)
This marvellous first novel may be historical fiction, but its themes and concerns are by no means limited to the past. Sara Knox interweaves questions of gender and identity, sexuality, class and the overarching issue of morality in times of war.
England during World War II proves the perfect setting for exploring these issues, and for the relationships at the heart of the novel. Olive and Evely ... (read more)
This highly ambitious first novel exists within a fine web of literary influences and allusions. The publisher invites comparisons to The Secret History, Donna Tartt’s novel set in a university Classics department. The novel’s narrator, Julia, a student enthralled by the glamorous, moneyed family of a classmate, echoes that of Brideshead Revisited. Self-conscious references to detective noir a ... (read more)
Travellers’ tales have long starred curious misfits eager to sample different ways of life in faraway places. In On the Road (1957), Jack Kerouac writes of fleeing his cultured, sedentary New York milieu for the company of the insatiable ‘Dean Moriaty’, who, rather than analysing the world from the sidelines, ‘just raced in society, eager for bread and love’. Dharma Bums, published a yea ... (read more)
Malcolm Knox told Kill Your Darlings in 2012 that with The Life (2011), his celebrated surfing novel set on the Gold Coast, he wanted to write a historical novel about the Australian coastline and ‘that moment when one person could live right on the coast on our most treasured waterfront places, and then all of a sudden they couldn’t’. In Bluebird, set on a northern beach a ferry ride from ... (read more)
Between a Wolf and a Dog is Georgia Blain's eighth book: it follows five previous novels, an acclaimed short-story collection (The Secret Lives of Men, 2013) and Births, Deaths, Marriages (2008), a sublime memoir-in-essays. Blain has an affinity for domestic realism with a dark edge and an unstinting eye: she is fascinated by the faultlines in relationships and the turning points in individual liv ... (read more)
Sonya Hartnett writes for all ages, her work spanning children’s picture books to novels for young adults and adult readers. Her adult novels have been widely acclaimed; Of a Boy (2002) won the Age Book of the Year award and has been canonised as a Penguin Classic. In many ways, though, her pedigree as a much-awarded children’s writer has always characterised her career.
Golden Boys belongs w ... (read more)
In 2013, Asperger’s Syndrome will no longer officially exist – according to the updated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American psychiatric manual used as a diagnostic bible around the world. Ironically, just as it begins its slow fade from the cultural landscape, Asperger’s attracts its own romantic comedy. The Rosie Project joins Toni Jordan’s Addition in this ... (read more)
Lloyd Jones’s Booker-shortlisted ‘breakthrough’ novel Mister Pip (2006) began life as a collection of random memories and myths written on a wall, designed to be actively pieced together by the reader. ‘I was trying to avoid narrative because, when you write it, sometimes it’s like a runaway bloody thing, it’s voracious,’ Jones told The Age’s Stephanie Bunbury in 2008. ‘The story ... (read more)