Melissa Lucashenko didn't want to write a book about First Contact. Lucashenko tells ABC Arts the book is a "First Nations love story about how to try to live a good Aboriginal life as society is being transformed around you". It was praised by prize chair journalist Tony Maniaty as an "ambitious, epic" novel and "a fiercely original exploration of …
Welcome to ABC Arts' monthly book column: a shortlist of new releases read and recommended by The Bookshelf's Kate Evans, The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange, and critics Declan Fry and Cher Tan. "It's a very bare, beautiful landscape," she told ABC RN's The Book Show. The central tension in Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood's seventh novel, is between the longing …