Have you ever wondered what your favourite Australian authors read?

In October 2024, The Queen’s Reading Room took part in its first international moment in Sydney, Australia. This landmark event, attended by authors and members of the local community, showcased our commitment to promoting the appreciation of literature worldwide.

A year on, we return to Australia to launch:

Curated exclusively by journalist, author, commentator and friend of The Queen’s Reading Room Juliet Rieden, this very special series showcases some of Australia’s established literary heroes and shines a light on Australia’s rising stars.

Juliet invited leading Australian authors – Liane Moriarty, Thomas Keneally, Charlotte Wood, Trent Dalton and Nikki Gemmell – to share with her their very favourite (Australian) reads: the novels which have inspired their lives, shaped their writing – and the novels they read for pleasure!

We hope this exclusive series will inspire you to try new authors, explore new genres and lose yourself in exhilarating adventures…

Miles and his little brother Harry live in their ramshackle family home in Tasmania trying to dodge their abusive, drunken fisherman father. Their mother is long dead and with elder brother Joe leaving town, Miles now faces long bitterly cold days working on his father’s boat. Harry’s seasickness means he is spared the ordeal until one day in squally weather both brothers are forced to join their father.

Favel Parrett burst onto the Australian literary scene in 2011 with this heartbreaking, exquisite and award-winning novel about three brothers who live in the shadow of their father’s black moods. Part psychological family drama, part mystery, part painful rite of passage, all engulfed in the wild isolation and natural richness of the Tasmanian countryside. The author’s intimate understanding of this rugged heel of the world seeps through every pore of the evocative narrative.

In 1965 Joe’s school in a working-class suburb of Melbourne sees the nuns fill pupils’ heads with horrendous descriptions of Hell. No matter his intentions, Joe is always in trouble and fears those fiery pits must be waiting for him. When his Aunty Oona arrives on their doorstep distressed and needing shelter, the secrets in Joe’s family start to unravel, including the one about the dark shadow on his cheek.

Tony Birch’s writing is spare yet tender, intimate yet chilling. Told through the eyes of eleven-year-old Joe Cluny it’s a confronting story about love and courage involving insidious cultures of violence, especially against women. Joe is surrounded by women, raised by single mum Marion alongside his feisty sister Ruby and then joined one night by Aunty Oona, bleeding and in desperate need of help. He assumes Oona’s bruises are the sort of punishment the nuns at school and parish priest claim is meted out on those who sin. She must have done something terrible, he supposes. Joe is about to learn about the secrets women carry as the plot shifts gear to a deeply affecting denouement.

The 1959 Turner family murders rocked country town Tambilla. Mr Turner is away on business and his heavily pregnant sister Nora visiting their grand Georgian house when the tragedy is revealed. Nora is so shocked she goes into early labour. Jump to 2018 and Nora’s granddaughter Jess, a journalist who lives in London, flies to the Sydney bedside of her ailing grandmother and discovers some dark family mysteries.

Kate Morton wrote this epic whodunnit while holed up with her family in South Australia during the pandemic. There she reconnected with the Australia of her youth and this evocative thriller is the result. It opens in 1959 with the haunting scene of a mother and her children on a hot summer’s afternoon lying seemingly asleep under the canopy of a willow tree. The group looks so serene, surrounded by the remnants of a picnic… but something terrible has happened. A gripping page-turner.