The Bookshelf

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.