The first time I did this to my neck, I’d been carrying you home on my shoulders. I’d carried you everywhere on my shoulders, until that day. Swung you up over my neck and grabbed your toes. You clamped your chubby thighs around me and clutched at my eyes. The last time, you were holed up in the caravan, texting your friends to come get you because I had nosed out your drug habit. The sink was full of dishes. I had done my neck again. We yelled at each other through the rattly aluminium door. I yelled with worry and pain; you yelled with worry and pain.

Shorts David Malouf’s The Complete Short Stories may have been published in 2008 (Vintage) but I’m including it in my favourite Australian fiction picks for 2011 because it’s one of my best literary investments this year. (That and Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, but that book is so far […]

My Dog Gave Me the Clap Adam Morris Fremantle Press Personally I feel sorry for the dog. Maybe dogs don’t care about these things but if someone gave me the clap, I reckon they’d be mortified if I wrote a book about it. Thankfully, Adam Morris deals with Feathers the dog and his main character […]

The Waterboys Peter Docker Fremantle Press In a radical reimagining of Western Australian history, Peter Docker presents a land 300 years after colonisation, where the West’s most sought-after resource is not iron ore but water. The Aboriginal people are waging a guerrilla war against the eastern states Water Board, who have been controlling the West […]

Ali Abdul v The King, Muslim stories from the dark days of White Australia Hanifa Deen UWA Publishing Ali Abdul v The King is an engaging foray into the lives of the Afghan cameleers, as seen through the archives. ‘Australian Muslims had left behind a paper trail and underneath … lay a hidden history.’ Hanifa […]

Rohan Wilson has won the 2011 Vogel prize for his historical novel The Roving Party. In the story, John Batman, who later founded the settlement that became Melbourne, hires an Aboriginal man called Black Bill, some Dharug trackers and a ragtag, shoeless mob of convict assignees and sets out across Tasmania to track down and […]