Reading Max Porter's Shy, Han Kang's Greek Lessons and Yan Lianke's Heart Sutra with writers (and writers-in-translation, both) Linda Jaivin and Ennis Ćehić

Reading Pip Williams' The Bookbinder of Jericho, Juan Gómez-Jurado's Red Queen and Nicole Flattery's Nothing Special with writers Ashley Kalagian Blunt and Joanna Horton

Savage explorations of the present, using different literary forms, in two new novels. Kate and Cassie are joined by guests film academic Bruce Isaacs and NZ literary leader Claire Mabey, to read Booker Prize winning novelist Eleanor Catton's latest, Birnam Wood, and American writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's Chain-Gang All-Stars.

A journey through the myriad of ways weather presents itself in fiction for this monthly edition of The Book Club.

Reading Julia Langbein's comedic take on Hollywood's ruthless screen industry in American Mermaid, and Stephanie Bishop's The Anniversary, a watery mystery about creative tension and desire.

Reading award-winning novelist Rebecca Makkai's I Have Some Questions For You, along with The Silence Project by Carole Hailey. Plus, an interview with much-loved Irish novelist Sebastian Barry.

Reading Anindita Ghose's bestseller The Illuminated and Is Mother Dead by Norwegian author Vigdis Hjorth with guest reviewers Maria Takolander and Suma Iyer, and an interview with Australian author Alice Nelson.

Novels about infidelity can be cautionary tales but also reveal changing attitudes

Is there a more enduring theme in literature? From the ancient greats to bestseller romances, it's been the subject of both untold anguish and fascination. Why is it that we never seem to tire of this all-too-human experience?

A Sydney WorldPride edition of the Bookshelf, as Kate and Cassie are joined by guests George Haddad and C S Pacat to read Samantha Shannon's A Day of Fallen Night and K Ming Chang's Gods of Want (with comments from both these writers); and Arinze Ifeakandu (God's Children Are Little Broken Things) on queer lives and writing in Nigeria.

Reading Kevin Jared Hosein's Hungry Ghosts, set in 1940s Trinidad (and we hear from the author too); Tom Rob Smith's Cold People, in a reshaped Antarctica, and Cho Nam-Joo's Saha in a corporate city-state, imagined in Korea. Kate and Cassie are joined by writer Shannon Burns and literary facilitator Michaela Kalowski.

Poet Maxine Beneba Clarke and novelist Michael Winkler join Kate and Cassie as they read Ronnie Scott's Shirley, Eleanor Shearer's River Sing Me Home and James Kelman's God's Teeth and Other Phenomena

Unquiet ghosts, disconcerting babies, a shattered bust of a despot and a frontier Western: reading Stefan Hertmans' The Ascent, Ben Hobson's The Death of John Lacey and Laura McPhee Browns Little Plum with guests books writer Nicole Abadee and crime podcaster Ben Herder; and speaking with Paul Dalgarno about the books that shaped his latest, A Country of Eternal Light (hint: hello, Frankenstein)

Kate and Cassie are back with new fiction for 2023: reading Bret Easton Ellis' The Shards and Deepti Kapoor's Age of Vice with guests Geordie Williamson and Sue Turnbull; and Brigitta Olubas on her biography of writer Shirley Hazzard

Hoofbeats, assassins and tracks in the snow. Rereading Gillian Mears’ novel Foal’s Bread;  reading Kári Gíslason's The Sorrow Stone; and speaking to Karen Joy Fowler about her novel Booth and the books that shaped it.

A child is lost in a nineteenth-century landscape carved out of both thousands of years of history, and more recent expectations and misunderstandings. An entire community rallies to find him – but their pathways diverge, overtake, retrace and obliterate each other. What a story! Novelist Fiona McFarlane speaks about The Sun Walks Down with Kate Evans.

Reading Steve Toltz's Here Goes Nothing and Ashley Goldberg's Abomination, and speaking to Tracey Lien (All That's Left Unsaid) and Sue Orr (Loop Tracks) about the books that have shaped them.

Stories that are tough and joyful, heartbreaking and beautiful, confronting and worth it:  Kate Evans speaks with New Zealand writer Becky Manawatu about her novel, Aue; and to American writer Leila Mottley about Nightcrawling

Reading Canadian Métis writer Katherena Vermette's The Strangers, Irish writer Louise Kennedy's Trespasses, and speaking to Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet about Case Study and the bookshelf that made it

What is it about Irish storytelling: that combination of poetry and pain, brutality and a wicked laugh or ten? All that lyrical toughness, and a sense of a history punctuated by a drumbeat of violence, is on display in Audrey Magee's novel, The Colony. A conversation with Kate Evans Other books and writers mentioned in this conversation: Emily Dickinson, works Marcel Proust, works James Joyce, works Colette, works Peig: The autobiography of Peig Sayers William Butler Yeats, works

Reading Chris Womersley's The Diplomat, Lauren John Joseph's At Certain Points We Touch and Jonathan Bazzi's Fever – with Nigel Featherstone; and talking to Nigerian-English writer Nikki May about her novel Wahala and the bookshelf that shaped her

Two writers who grapple with crime, with very different style and intent, in conversation with Kate Evans. American writer John Darnielle is also a musician (The Mountain Goats), and his books include Wolf in White Van and Universal Harvester. He speaks with Kate about his latest, Devil House. New Zealand crimewriter Charity Norman had an earlier career in England as a barrister, but now prefers fictional mysteries. Her books include After the Fall, The Secrets of Strangers and – the one to which we've attached this conversation – Remember Me

Four novels about islands: reading Emily Brugman's The Islands, Audrey Magee's The Colony and Eliza Henry Jones' Salt and Skin; and speaking to Tom Watson about his novel Metronome

English novelist Patrick Gale specialises in hidden lives, secret stories, and celebrating queer histories. His books include Rough Music, Notes from an Exhibition, and A Place Called Winter: and in his latest and seventeenth novel, Mother's Boy, he fictionalises the life of Cornish poet Charles Causley. He speaks to Kate Evans for a special Summer edition of The Bookshelf

Four writers speak to Kate Evans at the 2022 Melbourne Writers Festival about a particularly significant book, that shaped or defined them in some way: Abbas Nazari, Maya Hodge, Sarah Holland Batt and Chloe Hooper

Bestselling English novelist Philippa Gregory speaks with Kate Evans about the radical politics of the seventeenth century and how best to capture that in fiction.

Kate and Cassie are joined by guests literary editor Jason Steger, books podcaster Dani Vee and crime aficionado Felix Shannon to talk their favourite books of 2022 (and yes, we have indeed listed them all)

Talking cricket in fiction, with a particular focus on Inga Simpson's new novel, Willowman, with RN's sports specialist Warwick Hadfield, historian Marion Stell and journalist and crime writer Michael Brissenden

Reading Philip Salom's Sweeney and the Bicycles, Arinze Ifeakandu's God's Children Are Little Broken Things and Celeste Ng's Our Missing Hearts with Shakespearean scholar Huw Griffiths and novelist Nova Weetman

Walking the streets and exploring the shadows in 1930s Australia, in Fiona Kelly McGregor's Iris; lost towns and lost souls in Shaun Prescott's Bon and Lesley; and a dreamy not-quite-romance in Yumna Kassab's The Lovers with guests novelist Max Easton and literary studied academic Jodi McAlister

Witnessing a great and terrible event in Gail Jones' Salonika Burning; a life up-ended and re-worked in Alex Miller's A Brief Affair; and careful observations of everyday wonder in Luke Carman's An Ordinary Ecstasy.

Exploring the novels of Pakistani and English writer Kamala Shamsie with Maryam Azam and Sonia Nair, with a particular focus on Best of Friends and Home Fire

A brother and sister walk uneasy paths, and plumb both literal and hallucinatory depths in Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger; worlds and characters explode across both space and time in Cole Haddon's Psalms for the End of the World; and nineteenth-century Australia and its mythologies remade in Fiona McFarlane's The Sun Walks Down. Kate and Cassie are joined by guests rock star Tim Rogers, and critic and memoirist Shannon Burns

An all-American edition of the bookshelf, with new fiction from George Saunders, Barbara Kingsolver and John Irving. Both Charles Dickens and Herman Melville also get a look in. Kate and Cassie are joined by novelist Felicity McLean and literary academic David Ellison

Two wildly different sisters are trying to work out how to live and who to love during a sweaty Sydney summer in Diana Reid's hotly anticipated new novel Seeing Other People. In Chris Flynn's short story collection Here Be Leviathans, stories are told from the perspective of animals including a grizzly bear and a family of platypus, as well as inanimate objects like airline seats and hotel rooms. Plus, Ling Ma's Bliss Montage, a dazzling collection of short stories that include a woman who lives with her husband and 100 ex-boyfriends in L.A.

in this episode Jonathan Green joins Cassie McCullagh to talk about three hard hitting new works of fiction from Robbie Arnott, Donal Ryan and Michael Bennett.

In this edition of RN's monthly Book Club, we look at Ian McEwan's extraordinary body of work, paying particular attention to his new novel Lessons, a meditation on history and humanity presented through the span of one man's lifetime.

English writer Hilary Mantel has sadly died, aged 70. The Booker prize winning author spoke to Kate Evans for the Big Weekend of Books in 2020.

Three sisters, locked in their lifelong roles, on a roadtrip, in Peggy Frew's Wildflowers; a London underworld full of betrayal and promise, in Kate Atkinson's Shrines of Gaiety (read by Rohan Wilson); and talking to Adrian McKinty about the differences between noir and thrillers.

Reading Tracey Lien's All That's Left Unsaid, Diane Connell's The Improbable Life of Ricky Bird and Clarissa Goenawan's Watersong – Kate Evans and Elizabeth Flynn with guests George Haddad and Mandi McIntosh.

Kate and Cassie with three new novels: grappling with modernism and creativity in Sophie Cunningham's This Devastating Fever; a young woman caged by intrigue and expectations in Maggie O'Farrell's The Marriage Portrait; and working soldiers bleed across France in Dan Jones' Essex Dogs – with guests Stephen Gapps and Amy Walters

RN's Book Club in a different format to usual: a panel discussion plus a quick reading guide. The big question: Is crime fiction a literature of resistance? Also, a guide to fiction in translation from Korea

A story of three men trying to create a new world, on a craggy island in seventh-century Ireland, in Emma Donoghue's Haven; anxieties about race and migration, in Mohsin Hamid's The Last White Man; and scrappy voices from history, in Selby Wynn Schwartz's fragmentary lesbian colloquy, After Sappho.

Joan of Arc as a capable, scrappy young woman; unmoored on a strange coastline; and trees in both crime fiction and the Australian literary imaginary: reading Scott McCulloch's Basin, Katherine J Chen's Joan (with Prof of Philosophy Karen Green) and crime writer Margaret Hickey's Stone Town on both crime and landscape

Reading Robert Drewe's Nimblefoot, Eliza Henry-Jones' Salt and Skin and Sloane Crosley's Cult Classic with critic and literary judge Susan Wyndham and novelist and funeral director Jackie Bailey

Writers Hayley Scrivenor, Michael Brissenden and Yumna Kassab join Kate and Cassie onstage to talk libraries, stories, trauma, failure, children, Australian identity and more in this Big Weekend of Books edition of The Bookshelf

Reviewing the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award winner, Jennifer Down's Bodies of Light, and shortlist with theatre writer Tom Wright and literary critic and interviewer Nicole Abadee

Reading Chris Womersley's The Diplomat and Anjali Joseph's Keeping in Touch plus a guide to Sri Lankan fiction from Smriti Daniel and what's coming out later this year with independent bookseller Mark Rubbo. Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh, bringing you new fiction

Contact history and its 'saviour' mythologies turned upside down in Paul Daley's Jesustown; inside-out fairytales and an invented gothic world in A G Slatter's The Path of Thorns (read by Elizabeth Flynn); and a guide to middle-grade fiction from writer Tristan Bancks. Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh, bringing you new fiction

Australian dystopias, historical shipwrecks and women's lives in Oman: reading Claire G Coleman's Enclave, Jokha Alharthi's Bitter Orange Tree and Jess Kidd's The Night Ship with guests novelist Sally Piper and essayist Eda Gunaydin; and Jane Rawson on her A History of Dreams and its influences

Reading Alexis Wright's Carpentaria and Patrick White's The Vivisector with critic Geordie Williamson - and with words from the writers themselves, as well as other voices and commentators from the ABC Archives

Vale Frank Moorhouse, journalist, essayist, shortstory writer and novelist. Remembering the writer with his friend, Angelo Loukakis, and with archival interviews from 1980 (The Everlasting Secret Family) and 2000 (Dark Palace, the second in the Edith Campbell Berry trilogy, which went on to win the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award)

A tough and poetic family story of the Métis (Michif) people of Canada in Katherena Vermette's The Strangers; and exclusion and compassion in Australian history, with a novel set in a lazaret, in Eleanor Limprecht's The Coast (read by historian Dr Ian Hoskins)

Three books by Australian authors: crime in Sydney in Matthew Spencer's Black River; rewriting a sidelined character from a classic of modernism, in Michelle Cahill's Daisy and Woolf, and friendship and exile in an Orthodox Jewish community in Melbourne in Ashley Goldberg's Abomination, with guests writer Kari Gislason and literary interviewer Michaela Kalowski

Reading Geraldine Brooks' Horse, Leila Mottley's Nightcrawling and Zaheda Ghani's Pomegranate and Fig with journalist, music writer and memoirist Mawunyo Gbogbo (Hip Hop and Hymns) and CEO of the Australian Muslim Women's Centre for Human Rights, Diana Sayed

Reading Gillian Mears' 2011 novel Foal’s Bread and Craig Sherborne's recent release The Grass Hotel with critic and biographer Bernadette Brennan and writer and cultural historian Luke Stegemann

Reading Brendan Colley's The Signal Line, Louise Kennedy's Trespasses, Lauren John Joseph's At Certain Points We Touch and Jonathan Bazzi's Fever with novelists Nigel Featherstone (My Heart is a Little Wild Thing) and Ellie O'Neill (Family Matters)

Why do we read and reread? And how does rereading read us? From the Sydney Writers Festival, Kate was onstage with bibliomemoirist Ruth Wilson and scholar Bernadette Brennan

In front of an audience, and with plenty of book recommendations, Kate and Cassie are onstage with historian and biographer Jackie Huggins and novelists Damon Galgut and George Haddad

Reading Steve Toltz's Here Goes Nothing, Emiliano Monge's What Goes Unsaid and Dominique Wilson's Orphan Rock with Lauren Chater (The Winter Dress) and Jonty Claypole (Words Fail Us: In Defence of Disfluency)

Reading Paddy O’Reilly's Other Houses, Patrick Gale's Mother’s Boy and Norman Erikson Pasaribu's Happy Stories, Mostly with writers Ennis Ćehić (Sadvertising) and Hilde Hinton (A Solitary Walk on the Moon)

Reading Jennifer Egan's 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad and her newly-released The Candy House, with rock'n'roll reader Tim Rogers and novelist Rhett Davis

Cassie is away this week, so Kate is joined by the ABC's Tiger Webb: reading Emily St John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility, Steven Carroll's Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight, and Mona Awad's All’s Well, with novelist Rhett Davis and critic Nicole Abadee

Cassie is away this week, so Kate is joined by the ABC's Tiger Webb: reading Emily St John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility, Steven Carroll's Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight, and Mona Awad's All’s Well, with novelist Rhett Davis and critic Nicole Abadee

Reading Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo, Julian Barnes' Elizabeth Finch and Charmian Clift's Sneaky Little Revolutions: Selected Essays with writers Nadia Wheatley and Ruth Wilson (The Jane Austen Remedy)

Reading Jessica Au's Cold Enough for Snow, John Darnielle's Devil House and Julie Otsuka's The Swimmers with novelists Anna Downes and Diana Reid.

Reading Jessica Au's Cold Enough for Snow, John Darnielle's Devil House and Julie Otsuka's The Swimmers with novelists Anna Downes and Diana Reid.

Reading Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo, Julian Barnes' Elizabeth Finch and Charmian Clift's Sneaky Little Revolutions: Selected Essays with writers Nadia Wheatley and Ruth Wilson (The Jane Austen Remedy)

Children, violence, landscape, and powerful and strange writing: we're talking fiction from New Zealand with the director of Wellington's Verb Writers' Festival Claire Mabey and novelist Sam Coley. Rereading Keri Hulmes' The Bone People from 1984 and the newly-released The Fish by Lloyd Jones. Passion, laughter, and even some tears

Reading Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor's Paradais, Australian Toni Jordan's Dinner with the Schnabels and English debut novelist Tom Watson's Metronome

Reading Robert Lukins' Loveland, Kári Gíslason's The Sorrow Stone and Harlan Coben's The Match with crime writer Loraine Peck (The Second Son) and mediaeval Icelandic literature specialist Lisa Bennett

Reading Irish novel The Colony by Audrey Magee, and two New Zealand novels, Becky Manawatu's Auē and Sue Orr's Loop Tracks, with guests publisher Jemma Birrell and novelist Lyn Yeowart

Reading Monica Ali's 2003 debut novel, Brick Lane and latest release, Love Marriage with guests writer Roanna Gonsalves and RN's Richard Aedy. Love, marriage, migration, displacement, drama, storytelling.

Reading Monica Ali's 2003 debut novel, Brick Lane and latest release, Love Marriage with guests writer Roanna Gonsalves and RN's Richard Aedy. Love, marriage, migration, displacement, drama, storytelling.

Western Sydney, coastal Victoria and nineteenth-century America: reading Omar Sakr's Son of Sin, Karen Joy Fowler's Booth and Aoife Clifford's When We Fall with guests historian Ethan Blue and crime afficionado Felix Shannon

Reading Sequoia Nagamatsu's How High We Go in the Dark, Juhea Kim's Beasts of a Little Land and Claudia Durastanti, Strangers I Know with guests Melissa Fulton from The Big Issue and literary studies academic Julian Novitz

Reading Emily Brugman's The Islands, Vanessa Len's Only a Monster and Hélène Gaudy's A World With No Shore (translated by Stephanie Smee) with writers Michelle Law and Molly Murn

Reading Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel, Rebecca, and Graeme Macrae Burnet's Case Study (which includes a character in the mid 1960s who takes on a Rebecca persona in direct response to du Maurier's novel) - with guests literary lecturer Susannah Fullerton and crime writer Chris Hammer

Reading Hanya Yanigahara's To Paradise, Gary Shteyngart's Our Country Friends and Nikki May's Wahala with novelist and critic Jessie Tu and poet and performer Geoff Forrester (whose alter ego, Tug Dumbly, also offers up a poem)

A special edition of The Bookshelf, with writer Pip Williams speaking to Kate about her career, research, year in Italy, and interest in the history of words and their visibility, leading to the novel The Dictionary of Lost Words (a conversation from the 2021 Brisbane Writers Festival, online).

Kate and Cassie read Hannah Kent's Devotion; RN's Daniel Browning reads Caleb Azumah Nelson's Open Water; novelist Rashida Murphy reads Sunjeev Sahota's China Room; and novelist Aravind Adiga on Australian fiction

Reading, writers, family, art and mentors in Siri Hustvedt's essay collection, Mothers, Fathers and Others; and dissipating ghosts, cities and stories in Jennifer Mills' The Airways

Kate and Cassie read Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This; Eugen Bacon on Suyi Davies Okungbowa's Son of the Storm; a story from Ann Patchett's These Precious Days; Simon Winchester discussing Anthony Trollope in remote China; and Jay Kristoff on the books that shaped his latest, Empire of the Vampire

Tilly Lawless on her debut novel Nothing but My Body, and her reading inspiration; and Jon McGregor on aphasia and Antarctica, in his Lean Fall Stand

Kate and Cassie on James Ellroy's Widespread Panic; Debra Oswald on Jhumpa Lahiri's Whereabouts; Robert Gott on Guillermo Martinez' The Oxford Brotherhood and Charlotte McConaghy with the Bookshelf that Made Me (and her book, Once There Were Wolves)

Crime writers R W R McDonald (The Nancys, Nancy Business) and Jacqueline Bublitz (Before you Knew My Name) on the books that they are writing against, in concert with, inspired by, and so on (it's a complicated business).

Biographer Bernadette Brennan on why we should read and know Australian writer Gillian Mears; music writer Mark Mordue on Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Malibu Rising, and mediaevalist Louise D'Arcens on a new translation of Beowulf

A fictional biography of German Nobel Prize winning writer Thomas Manne (and his extraordinary family) by Irish writer Colm Tóibín, with The Magician; and a roadtrip across America in Emily Gale's Wild Abandon. But what do these writers read?

A new interview with Elizabeth Strout about Oh, William! and the Bookshelf that Made Her; and favourite review discussions from the year about Jane Austen, Joan Silber and Kevin Barry with readers Ruth Wilson and Michael McGirr

Writers and their bookshelves. Sarah Winman's Still Life moves between England and Florence, while Nick Earls' Empires travels from Brisbane to Alaska, London, Vienna and Hong Kong. But what are the books that shaped these novels and these writers?

What are the books that have shaped these writers and (in particular) their latest works? Ken Follett, Rose Tremaine, Amie Kaufman & Jaclyn Moriarty

Reading recommendations from writer and critic Beejay Silcox, crime writer Christian White and memoirist Lech Blaine. What are the books they have especially admired this year?

Actor Claudia Karvan speaks to Kate Evans about her reading life and the Books That Made Us

Reading John Hughes' The Dogs and Kate Grenville's The Secret River with historian David Hunt and writer and philosopher Michael McGirr

Introducing Classic Australian Novels. A collection of interviews from the ABC Archives with Australian authors about their most significant work. In 2007 Alexis Wright won the Miles Franklin Award for her epic novel Carpentaria, set in and around the mythical town of Desperance in Queensland’s Gulf Country.

Introducing Classic Australian Novels. A collection of interviews from the ABC Archives with Australian authors about their most significant work. In True History of the Kelly Gang Peter Carey took a mythic Australian story and turned it into a Booker Prize winning novel.

Introducing Classic Australian Novels. A collection of interviews from the ABC Archives with Australian authors about their most significant work. With his first two novels Richard Flanagan had already garnered a reputation as great author. But then in 2001 the Tasmanian writer consolidated his literary reputation, and his gift for great titles, with Gould's Book of Fish.

Introducing Classic Australian Novels. A collection of interviews from the ABC Archives with Australian authors about their most significant work. The politics and philosophy of tourism are at the core of Michelle de Kretser’s book Questions of Travel which charts the lives of two characters living worlds apart.

Introducing Classic Australian Novels. A collection of interviews from the ABC Archives with Australian authors about their most significant work. Monkey Grip ushered in a new voice in Australian Literature. Released in 1977 it was Helen Garner’s first novel and the first time Australians had read such a frank account of bohemian life in Melbourne's inner north.

Introducing Classic Australian Novels. A collection of interviews from the ABC Archives with Australian authors about their most significant work. That Deadman Dance was published in 2010 and is the third novel from Miles Franklin winner Kim Scott. Set in the Western Australian whaling port of Albany in the early 1800's it's an exploration of culture, first impressions, and the so called 'friendly frontier'.