Australian authors recommend

We asked Australian creators to share a recent book they have read and loved – and why.

Newly minted Miles Franklin winner Siang Lu is ready to build up your reading pile. His novel Ghost Cities (UQP) is described by the Miles Franklin judging panel as ‘shimmering with satire and wisdom, and with an absurdist bravura’ and a ‘genuine landmark in Australian literature’. Lu shares his recommendations:

I’m reading Raeden Richardson’s The Degenerates (Text, 2024), which was longlisted for both the Miles Franklin and the ALS Gold Medal this year. It’s an ambitious work of literary fiction that, among other things, strives to honour all the author’s geographies. There were many moments, reading its lines and characters, in which I recognised some artistic impulse of my own reflected back. Wonderful to read a book that makes you want to write.

And I will never shut up about David Szalay’s Flesh (Jonathan Cape, 2025), which was recently and rightfully announced on the Booker longlist. Flesh is a book that so beguiled and mystified me with its literary mastery – without any obvious clue as to how it had achieved such a feat, filled as it is with simple prose, an unsympathetic and sullen protagonist with zero interiority or agency over his life – that I read the book twice, and then immediately read Szalay’s previous novel, the Booker-shortlisted All That Man Is (Vintage, 2017), in order to try to work out all his talents. They are plentiful.

Bonus note for folks who are inspired to read this book based on this recommendation: Once you are done reading Flesh, go and watch Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and marvel at the ghostly blueprint that the former has traced from the latter. (more…)

Originally published by Books and Publishing (Read More)