Review by Emily Meredith Etta Spencer is a violin prodigy preparing to make her debut in the professional music world. But her performance doesn’t go to plan, she loses focus, and then she wakes up in 1776 in the middle of a sea battle. Etta comes from a line of families with the ability to travel through time. However, her mother ran away from this world, and neglected to tell Etta anyth... Read more

This slim volume is hard to describe and to categorise. It appears to be about nothing much and yet it has a haunting quality. Smith is a poet in every phrase and every cadence. Fuelled by superhuman coffee intake (fourteen cups a day!) she goes in search of the best beans on the planet, drifting, digressing, dreaming and reading. Seemingly directionless and flimsy, this is a marvellously seduc... Read more

Booktopia’s Editorial Director, Caroline Baum reviews Shirley Barrett’s Rush Oh! which features in The Buzz as Caroline’s Book of the Month. It’s unusual to move from writing films to writing novels. Most people try to go in the other direction. Shirley Barrett made her reputation with the film Lovesong Serenade, demonstrating her comic sensibility and ability to write charact... Read more

Booktopia’s Editorial Director, Caroline Baum reviews Lucy Treloar’s Salt Creek which features in The Buzz as Caroline’s Book of the Month. If, like me, you thought you did not need another story about hardship in colonial Australia, with the TV adaptation of The Secret River fresh in your mind, think again: Lucy Treloar’s intensely dramatic saga of the downfall of a family se... Read more

Looking for the winners of our Facebook competition? Scroll to the bottom of the post… All the Bright Places is a heartbreaking and touching novel exploring a wide range of issues such as depression, mental disorders, suicide, coping with the loss of a loved one and finding hope. The book begins with Theodore Finch – an outsider with his own unique brand of coolness –standing on his... Read more

First of all the cover: this has to be one of the most stylish and eye-catching jackets of the year, signposting both the amorous subject matter but also a kind of sexily suave Mad Men Don Draper silhouette that suggests surface sleekness concealing enigmatic multiple identities. The sophisticated packaging delivers on its promise – and then some. This is one of the big books of the year.... Read more

Early in 2013, I wrote a Booktopia review of The Rosie Project, the home-grown literary phenomenon that has gone on to be published in thirty-eight languages and sell over a million copies worldwide. I had originally approached Graeme Simsion’s debut novel with trepidation, being the mother of a boy on the autism spectrum and thus a little thin-skinned on the subject. Could Simsion create a por... Read more

David Duchovny wrote a book. Yes, that David Duchovny. Sure, he’s known for being an actor, but did you know he has a Masters in English Literature from Yale? Booktopia’s Ben Hunter takes a closer look at his debut novel Holy Cow. When the X Files were on in the 90s, few of us thought that the man behind Agent Fox Mulder would publish a book twenty years later written entirely from ... Read more

Do you remember polio? Perhaps you don’t, but when I was growing up there were children who wore callipers (metal contraptions bolted to their leg below the knee) at my school or limped along wearing an awful tall shoe. Joan London has chosen child polio victims as her subject for this beautiful, tender and gently moving novel set in The Golden Age, a home for polio sufferers called in nineteen... Read more

This anticipated debut has already been sold into twenty one countries and seems destined to be one of this year’s big favourites. It’s a truly original and charming story originating in the author’s own tragic loss at the early death of her mother. She’s translated her own grief into a fantasy fable that asks big existential questions with a very light touch. When seven... Read more