Tsundoku
Welcome to Tsundoku – the podcast for addicted readers. Tsundoku is the Japanese word for that pile of books by your bed – the ones you fully intend to read – sometime! If you can’t resist a good story, are endlessly curious about new books and love nothing better than discussing an old favourite – this is the podcast for you. In Tsundoku we’ll talk to the authors of the moment, we’ll pull out the ‘hits and memories’ from years past and chat them back into life, and we’ll talk to readers from all walks of life about how they acquired their reading passion, their all time favourites … and what books they have waiting in their Tsundoku.
Episodes
In “The Seeker and the Sage” a traumatised journalist is given a dream assignment - track down the mayor of a mysterious town whose citizens are the happiest people on Earth. She wants to learn how to live a good life but the town’s mayor wants to protect his dominion from the modern world. In what is an allegory for our times; Delaney poses the question: can the ancient philosophy of Stoicism help us create our o...
Miriam Webster makes her literary debut with a sharp, funny and often dark collection of short stories about love, loss and very modern dilemmas. With an eye for what isn’t said and that which is said by accident, the collection is named for the Freudian slip.
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New publishers on the block, Margot Lloyd and Emily Hart, are publishing exciting debut authors, re-releasing irresistible classics and teaching the rest of us how to...
Since shooting to fame with “The Rosie Project”, Graeme Simsion has formed a successful writing partnership with his psychiatrist wife, Anne Buist. Here they share with Annie why the mental health system provides such fertile ground for their creativity, the change they hope to see in that world…and the nuts and bolts of working together.
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Can a murder mystery warm your heart? Cath thinks Zane Lovitt has pulled ...
Brian Castro's “The Chinese Postman” is a meditation on old age with a central character whose life mirrors his own. The story strays into fiction when the protagonist, Abe Quin, begins a correspondence with a woman seeking refuge from the war in Ukraine. This acclaimed work of autofiction is short-listed for this year’s Miles Franklin Award.
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In Bronwyn Rivers’ menacing thriller “The Reunion” f...
James Bradley introduces his latest novel; one of crime in a time of climate crisis. The desperate search for a missing child is set against a terrifying Sydney of the future, where sea levels are rising with the temperature and the social divide has become a chasm.
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Catherine Jinks, known for her children’s fiction, has turned her deft writer's hand to adult thrillers. In ‘Panic’ her main character Bronwyn leave...
Kate Grenville is best known for her book “The Secret River” published in 2005 which became an analogy for white settlement of Australia. More than two decades on, and following the defeat of the Voice referendum, Grenville has taken another journey through that same country which her ancestors settled, resulting in her latest book, “Unsettled”. In this episode, Kate Grenville chats to Annie Hastwe...
Cath discovers the people in Damien Wilkins’ life who inspired his latest novel, “Delirious”. It’s an emotionally powerful novel about families, ageing and the surprising ways second chances come around.
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Annie visits Orchard Books in the Adelaide Arcade where she receives a masterclass in styling a warm, inviting and delightfully idiosyncratic second-hand bookshop.
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Our random reader recommends “Tim...
Sarah is joined by Candice Fox who reflects how her “scrappy” upbringing in Bankstown and her Dad’s work in the local prison informed her crime writing. It still makes her a magnet for people willing to share their dark and strange story ideas.
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Annie takes you to the launch of “Splinter”, a new literary journal, to meet its editor, Farrin Foster. In the tradition of such journals Splinter will ...
Cath and Sarah delight in sharing what they loved about Booker Prize winner Samantha Harvey’s short novel, “Orbital”
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Cath then settles into a cosy chat to author Melanie Cheng. She’s created a delicate and wise novella in which a family’s grief is articulated and haltingly addressed with the adoption of a pet rabbit.
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Michaela enjoys revisiting Margaret Atwood’s enigmatic classic “Alias ...
Catherine McKinnon’s tense but tender tale, “To Sing of War”, immerses the reader in the lives of three characters strung across the globe during the dying days of World War II …as the days tick towards the detonation of the first nuclear weapon on Hiroshima.
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Poet Ken Bolton makes a good case for why British writer Beryl Bainbridge should not be forgotten.
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ABC Broadcaster and poet Mike Ladd shares what&...
Michaela talks to one of her favourite writers, Robbie Arnott, about “Dusk”; a beautiful and beguiling tale of siblings, so down on their luck they embark on an impossible quest to slay a puma in the Tasmanian highlands and claim a life-changing bounty.
Sarah chats to stand-out millennial Hannah Ferguson about her second book, “Taboo: Conversations we never had about sex, body image, work and relationships”
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Markus Zusak uses words like “challenging” and “ complex” to describe his three dogs, Reuben, Archie and Frosty. In this interview Zusak recounts the joy of remembering his hounds in all their unvarnished glory for this, his first memoir. Also, the challenge of recording his own audio books, the old favourites he likes to read and re-read “forensically”, and which of his favourite books piqued Archie’s literary tastebuds!
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Our bel...
Sean Williams, author of 5 million words, is famous for his hugely successful forays into the worlds of Star Wars, Dr Who, the Marvel Universe, but did you know he also writes ghost stories for young readers? ”Honour Among Ghosts” and “Her Perilous Mansion” are exciting, mysterious, witty and clever reads, officially for 8-12 year olds, but really for anyone who enjoys a rollicking adventure.
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Read more
As Mills and Boon Australia celebrates 50 years of taking readers on journeys of love and lust, Annie speaks with Barbara Hannay about her latest novel, "The Wife's Secret", and Michaela discusses medical romance with Amy Andrews, author of "The Outback Doctor's Surprise Bride".
Guests :
Barbara Hannay, author of "The Wife’s Secret"
Amy Andrews, author of "The Outback Doctor's Surprise Bride" and co-founder of the "How to Write ...
Amy Stewart paints a powerful portrait of the human passion for plants in “The Tree Collectors” with fifty different tales of people who, for one fascinating reason or another, devote their life to trees. The book is illustrated with Amy’s vibrant watercolours of the trees and their idiosyncratic owners.
Compared in his heyday to Brett Whitely, painter, printmaker, teacher, writer and ornithologist Don Binney (1940–2012) was an ar...
A story that is difficult to pin down to a narrative, playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer’s debut novel explores arrivals and departures, time and space, through the experiences of a curious cast of characters.
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Annie Warburton explores why we read the works of old writers, dissecting the work of Nancy Mitford in the context of her era and the happenings in the world around her.
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Cath carries this episode with two great chats; the first with author Sophie Cunningham and the other with self-professed “book snob”, Ron Hoenig.
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Ostensibly a novel about Alice, a woman who’s spent the last 20 years writing the biography of Virginia Woolf’s husband, Leonard, “This Devastating Fever” is an insightful, moving and witty tale of what it’s like to live through a time that feels like the end of days, and how we can fi...
Peeling back the veneer of the New York art scene, Bri Lee takes readers into the background world that fuels the industry. ‘The Work’ follows the lives of two protagonists from vastly different backgrounds: gallery owner, Lally, and antiquities dealer, Patrick, as they each follow a path to success, but at what cost?
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Victoria Purman takes readers back to the golden years of radio broadcast...
When a car veers off the road with devastating consequences, the small wheatbelt town of Garringarup is left reeling, but no one's worlds are more shattered than those of Hannah and Freya, the partners of the passengers. On a day when wedding bells should have been ringing, their lives are torn apart by the web of lies the accident has exposed.
Think Jodi Picoult meets Liane Moriarty and you have an idea of the fast-paced, page tur...
The outwardly comfortable life of mother and wife, Winona Dalloway, has dark currents running beneath. "Thunderhead" is her interior monologue as she navigates the everyday acts of collecting the children from school, shopping and preparing for a dinner party when in fact she is a woman in peril. A homage to Virginia Woolf’s "Mrs Dalloway", "Thunderhead" is a reminder of the terror that can lurk unseen in the lives of others.
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Bet...
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