The start of a new month means that there's a new issue of Readings Monthly available online and in our shops. Below you can read Alison Huber's column from the latest issue – and keep an eye on the blog for more updates and recommended new releases throughout the month!
I could have sworn I just hit send on my March mega-column, but here we are already in April, with a new round of releases with which to contend. How does this work? The physical experience of time can seem to me like it stands still or repeats itself, stretches or compresses, sometimes in unpredictable ways, hence my strong feeling that I’ve just written to you.
I’ve been thinking about time more than usual (which is already quite often) since reading On the Calculation of Volume: Book I by my new favourite Danish author, Solvej Balle. I’ve been completely obsessed with this book since I finished it, and you can read my longer impression/rant here. Incidentally, I’ve randomly read three books on this year’s longlist for the International Booker Prize (this is one, the other two are also great: Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico and Eurotrash by Christian Kracht), and it’s already clear to me that it’s going to be a great year for that excellent prize. I sincerely wish I could find some more hours in my reading week and get to the whole longlist this year.
Our Fiction Book of the Month is the hugely impressive The Sun Was Electric Light by my new favourite local debut author, Rachel Morton. This book was discovered in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards of 2024, winning the coveted unpublished manuscript award. I know I’m repeating myself because I say each year that this prize uncovers some amazing talent, but I keep saying it because it’s true: this book is genuinely original and very finely written. It’s hard to believe it’s the author’s first published novel. I wonder who the new writer is that this year’s prize will turn up (announced a few days from my time of writing).
Kate Grenville’s Unsettled: A Journey Through Time and Place is our Nonfiction Book of the Month. This is a major work from one of our best-known writers, and is an important book for non-Indigenous Australians to read right now: all of us whose lives on this land have been enabled by the violent dispossession of its first inhabitants. This is the truth of modern Australia’s foundations and the circumstances that made it possible for us to be here in 2025 doing whatever it is that we do (me, sitting at my computer upstairs in Lygon Street in a building that used to be a bank but is now the bookshop where I work, on Wurundjeri Country), and in this book, Grenville asks what is to be done with this knowledge, and in the wake of the failed referendum for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. For her thinking, Grenville revisits the places and stories of her own family whose lives inspired her bestselling 2005 book, The Secret River, and this thoughtful and seeking book might inspire a lot of productive reflection.
On another topic, though speaking of another of our legendary literary greats, have you been following the northern hemisphere’s burgeoning love for Helen Garner? It has been building for some years now, growing steadily since she was awarded the prestigious Windham Campbell Prize in 2016, but she’s in the reviews pages again because her collected diaries have recently been published in one volume in the UK (here, they are still published by Text Publishing in three parts: Yellow Notebook, One Day I’ll Remember This, and How to End a Story). A recent piece in The Guardian called them ‘the greatest journals since Virginia Woolf’. I’m not sure how I feel about this description because on the one hand Our Helen doesn’t need to be compared to anyone for us to know how good she is – but on the other it’s very gratifying to see her brilliance being appreciated across the globe in such a glorious way.
And finally, dear Reader, I love cookbooks. Really, I do. If I had another kind of living space, one that had any more room than our modest (tiny!) flat whose bookshelves reached capacity before we even moved in, I’d have a lot more of them (but don’t worry, family, I promise I’m not bringing any more home right now). This is the month for you to build your collection on my behalf: for the month of April through until Mother’s Day we are offering 20% off a selection of some of our favourite bestsellers at all of our shops, including at our fabulous new shop, Readings Chadstone.
