The longlist for the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction has been announced, and with Australia’s M.L. Stedman and Carrie Tiffany being joined by New Zealand’s Emily Perkins, the diversity of the list has been applauded the world over. Formerly The Orange Prize for Fiction, the longlist for The Women’s Prize for Fiction will be cut down to a shortlist at the London Book Fair ... Read more

An IT consultant in his 50s decides to write his first novel. The novel is sold to 30 different countries and advances exceed $1 million. And that’s just the About The Author section, imagine how good the story inside the book is. Don Tillman  needs a wife. He has evaluated data and it’s obvious that this is all that is required in his life. He is a professor of genetics, physically... Read more

Rarely does a blurb prepare you so perfectly for what you are about to read. The Childhood of Jesus is not like any other novel you have read. And it is with the same forthright vagueness, if there is such a thing, that J.M. Coetzee tells a beautiful tale of love, loss, and everything in-between. Let’s address the elephant in the room. J.M. Coetzee was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize for Lit... Read more

Booktopia’s Andrew Cattanach reveals his Five Favourite Australian Novelists ————————————————— I’ve been lucky enough to have a bit to do with our ‘Australia’s Favourite Novelist poll. At the start of the month we sat around a table, discussing it’s potential popul... Read more

2012 has been an incredible year for the arts. We had the sublime documentary series The Shire, the whimsical adaptation of a board game not played since the 50’s, Battleship, and the welcome introduction of dubstep into every song on every radio station across the world. I don’t know how they do it. Actually, I’m pretty sure they just turn a knob clockwise….. …genius is born in many ways. But ... Read more

Mortal souls, our time on earth is rapidly coming to a close. As most of you know, the Mayan Calendar predicts the world as we know it will come to an end on the 21st of December, 2012.  When trouble hits there’s no better place to turn than your very own port in the storm, the book. Literature has always been obsessed with the apocalypse and the anarchy that follows. Some of the great works th... Read more

We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practiced discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. Today marks the 10th anniversary of one of the most important speeches in modern politics in Australia, if not the world. On December 10th, 1992 the then Prime Minister of Australia Paul Keating took to the stage in Redfern, Sydney, and delivered ... Read more

The upcoming debut novel from author Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, has been given a huge boost with the announcement this week that it has been selected as the new read for Oprah’s Book Club. The talk-show juggernaut has relaunched her book club, called Oprah’s Book Club 2.0,  after some controversies with 1.0. In 2006 she laid a smackdown on the fibbing James Frey for ... Read more

This is Andrew. Andrew works at Booktopia. A generous heart is not strong in this one, a veritable Scrooge is he. Unfortunately for him it’s time to buy presents for his parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews. Solution, books. They’re cheap as chips these days and yet still have the aura of a luxury item. Andrew would like to share his selections with you, and ... Read more

DISCLAIMER: THIS POST CONTAINS GRATUITOUS MAN LOVE. Imagine two men. One capable of changing history with drift and turn from the rough, the other capable of making it riveting to those who think drift and turn from the rough was illegal in Tasmania until 1997. Imagine they meet, one as artist, the other his subject. Imagine no longer. I will say from the outset that I think Gideon Haigh is the... Read more