The five best books to read by the pool this summer
Australian literature is having a real moment, so here’s our pick of the best Australian novels to soak up with the sun this summer.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan
It took Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan 12 years to write this Booker Prize-winning novel, and it’s easy to see why.
Based on his father’s real-life experience, it’s a beautifully written, haunting read about a Japanese Prisoner of War camp on the Thai-Burma death railway during the Second World War.
It focuses on Dorrigo Evans, an Australian surgeon haunted by a love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier, struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, cholera, and brutal beatings.
At times the novel is harrowing, graphic and disturbing, but is ultimately a story of love in the midst of a cruel war.
The Light Between Oceans, M. L Stedman
Read this novel. We could just leave it there, to be honest, it’s that good.
Hollywood movie rights were recently snapped up so, because books are nearly always better than subsequent films, read it quickly! It has won three prestigious ABIA awards, including their 'Book of the Year', and also won the Indie Awards' 'Book of the Year'.
It’s 1926 and Tom Sherbourne is a young lighthouse keeper on a remote island off Western Australia. He and his young wife Isabel live a quiet life, cocooned from the rest of the world.
Fatefully soon after suffering devastating miscarriages, a boat washes ashore carrying a dead man and a crying infant.
Only years later do they discover the devastating consequences of the decision they made that day - as the baby's real story unfolds.
Get your tissues ready. This book will stay with you for life. Promise.
The Night Guest, Fiona McFarlane
Fiona McFarlane’s debut novel has been shortlisted for the Stella prize and the Miles Franklin Award.
One morning Ruth, an elderly widow, wakes thinking a tiger has been in her house in a small coastal town. Later that day a carer, Frida, arrives to look after her. Both Frida and the tiger are here to stay, and neither is what they seem.
The Night Guest is a mesmerising novel about love, dependence, and the fear that the things you know best can become the things you're least certain about.
Eyrie, Tim Winton
Tim Winton’s 25th book follows Tom Keely, whose reputation is in ruins, whose marriage is over and career finished. Holed up in a grim high rise, cultivating his newfound isolation, he reluctantly meets a woman from his past and a boy who will change his life.
Eyrie is heart-warming and human, and reassures the reader that no matter how low you can feel, life will renew itself and take new paths, whether you want it to or not.
The Swan Book, Alexis Wright
This is like nothing you’ve ever read before.
Set in the future, around the time of Australia’s third centenary, we see Aboriginals still living under the Intervention in the north, in a country fundamentally altered by climate change.
The book centres around the life of a mute young woman called Oblivia, the victim of gang-rape by petrol-sniffing youths. We follow her from the displaced community where she lives to her marriage to Warren Finch, the first Aboriginal president of Australia, and her elevation First Lady.
Alexis Wright’s previous novel, Carpentaria, was a prize-winning best-seller and The Swan Book has been short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award.
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