The venue was Readings in Carlton which was the perfect setting as I went into that bookstore on my very first night in Melbourne and loved it from that moment. This week I had my launch for All These Perfect Strangers. Special bonus is Iain Maguire’s The Abstainer.

She is such an incredible writer of beautiful prose. Their interactions are at times humorous, fascinating and ultimately tragic. Different families are staying in cabins by a loch. Sarah Moss’s Summerwater is a short, perfectly written book about a wet day in Scotland. This is such an inventive story, so wildly imaginative, and has been winning awards and readers in Australia and beyond. Would you want to hear what your pet was thinking? What about a crocodile? A mouse? A dingo? There is a pandemic of zoo flu and a woman and dingo go on a dangerous journey to save her family. This is a stunning book and frontrunner for my personal book of the year but then we’ve still got half the year to go.Ī book I thought about so much last year - Laura Jean McKay’s Animals in That Country.

It’s a book for our times - concerned with Artificial Intelligence, loneliness, kids stuck at home unable to socialise, parents only wanting the best for their children but facing terrible choices about how to achieve it and at its heart it is about love and connection. I love Kazuo Ishiguro as an author and Klara and the Sun, his latest, confirms his genius. Recorded last week so hot off the press - sure you’ve heard of James Ellroy and Lisa Taddeo but why not pick the Jon McGregor novel - Lean, Fall, Stand - beautifully written, it travels the globe from Antartica, Chile, to the United Kingdom and is full of heart, wisdom and perfect sentences. In these uncertain times with so many people in lockdown/isolation/restricting contact with the outside world, everyone could do with a great book - so here are some links of my latest interviews if you are looking to escape into a book. While every week I get to recommend books to people as a bookseller, sometimes I do so for a wider audience on ABC Radio National’s The Bookshelf.

When We Fall by Aoife Clifford