Australian Fiction From City Blocks to Small Towns

A man slaps another couple’s child at a Melbourne neighborhood barbecue. Eight people who were there get a turn to tell the story. Christos Tsiolkas is at his sharpest when someone you were sure you disliked gets the floor and makes the whole gathering look different.

Zaid is training to be a barrister when an old friend’s sister brings him a diary. It makes him look again at a murder case from his last year of school in western Sydney. Read Zeynab Gamieldien for the mystery and for the awkward return of someone who has learned how to move in a different social world.

Sonny reads secondhand romance novels and watches Cabramatta from her bedroom window. When her childhood friend Vince comes home from juvenile detention, familiarity makes their reunion more awkward. Vivian Pham catches the bravado and humor of two teenagers who have known each other long enough to get each other wrong.

The Lambs and the Pickles move to Perth after two separate calamities and spend twenty years under the same roof. Try Tim Winton for a family saga where the house has almost as much presence as the people arguing and making up inside it.

In 1980s Brisbane, Eli Bell has a brother who doesn’t speak and a notorious criminal for a babysitter. Read Trent Dalton for a boy’s extravagant imagination and the speed with which his family life can tip into a crime story.

Odette Brown has quietly raised her granddaughter Sissy on the edge of a country town. A new sergeant threatens what little freedom they have under laws that allow authorities to remove Aboriginal children. Tony Birch gives a grandmother’s careful reading of other people the speed and tension of a chase.

At a Sydney nursing home, the garden and kitchen are part of a shared life its residents have built. When people outside take aim at it, the stories the residents tell each other take on a new weight. Shankari Chandran makes an institution people are often happy to overlook the busiest room in the neighborhood.

In 1919 Melbourne, a mother rushes through the city with her son to meet a husband returning from war. Decades later, in the same city, a different mother plans her son’s funeral amid protests against the Vietnam War. Read Lenny Robinson for what changes when the city that once welcomed soldiers home has to watch another generation leave.

On a Tasmanian orchard during a summer of World War II, Ned traps rabbits to earn money for a boat while his two older brothers are away at war. Read Robbie Arnott for the work and weather of a growing season, and for how far a boy can get on a plan that seems small to everyone else.

Sydney’s unfinished Opera House draws a Swedish glass artist, while a newspaper reporter is trying to find her brothers before they can be drafted. Choose Kristina Olsson for the contrast between public excitement over a building and the uncertainty of life in the city building it.

Akita has begun to feel settled in Sydney when her family moves to Geelong. Kgshak Akec gives both the girl and her mother Taresai a turn at telling what happens next. The two viewpoints make a family decision feel different depending on who gets to make it.

Jo Breen spends her divorce settlement on a neglected piece of the Byron Bay hinterland, hoping to reconnect with the country of her ancestors. Her daughter and her neighbors have plenty to say about how that plan goes. Melissa Lucashenko finds dark comedy in a property decision that puts several ideas about land in the same room.

A woman retreats to a religious community on the Monaro plains, then a mouse plague interrupts its routines. Read Charlotte Wood for the startling amount of attention a quiet book can give to the business of living together. The mouse infestation is as tangible as the narrator’s memories of her mother.

Hanne meets Thea in Prussia, shortly before religious persecution drives Hanne’s family to board a ship bound for South Australia. Choose Hannah Kent for the bodily detail of a crowded crossing and a love story that begins before anyone knows what the new settlement will ask of them.

Julia returns to her hometown to move her father into care. He has taken in a dog and has no intention of leaving his elaborate 1970s house. Brooke Dunnell makes clearing a family home into a slow mystery about what the people who lived there chose to keep.

In northeastern Arnhem Land, Batjani tries to protect her granddaughter Garritji when Macassan trepang fishers arrive during the wet season. Choose it for the tension of a grandmother who knows the dangers and has to decide who can help. Leonie Norrington, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga, and Djawundil Maymuru draw on Yolŋu oral history.

Aboriginal police officer Renee Taylor returns to the small Queensland town where she grew up and is drawn into a murder investigation. Read Angie Faye Martin for a detective who knows the place well enough to hear what people leave out, even when that familiarity makes her job harder.

Michaela and Eve meet at a university residential college, where a drunken encounter during orientation puts questions about consent and loyalty in the middle of their friendship. Read Diana Reid for the particular pressure of a campus where the people you argue with at night are there again at breakfast.