The Bookshelf

What if the most talked‑about streaming show of the moment was a mirror reflecting your most private fears and failures? That unnerving question sits at the heart of John Lanchester’s Look What You Made Me Do, a sharp novel about resentment, revenge, money, class and generational unease. Plus: the art of the short story, as Hannah Kent reads and reflects on Lauren Groff’s new collection Brawler; and a woman’s inner life rendered with quiet and devastating precision in Mary Costello’s A Beautiful Loan.
BOOKS
John Lanchester, Look What You Made Me Do, Faber
Lauren Groff, Brawler, Hutchinson Heinemann
Mary Costello, A Beautiful Loan, Text
GUESTS
Hannah Kent, novelist behind the phenomenon Burial Rites + The Good People, Devotion and Always Home, Always Homesick
Tim Rogers, author of Detours; frontman of You Am I, The Hard-Ons and various musical escapades. His solo tour Le Charme Defensif kicks off this week
OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED
Andrew O'Hagan, Caledonian Road
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Michelle de Krester, Theory and Practice
Jacqueline Maley, Lonely Mouth
Erin Somers, The Ten Year Affair 
James Joyce, The Dubliners; The Dead 
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Colm Tóibín, The Magician
Steve Hanley, The Big Midweek: Life Inside the Fall
CREDITS
Presenter: Kate Evans, Cassie McCullagh
Producer: Kate Evans, Sarah Corbett
Sound: Craig Tilmouth, Antonia Gauci
Arts editor; Sarah L'Estrange

A Bookshelf festival special with Kate Evans onstage with writers Jock Serong and Emily Maguire on historical fiction, from the 2025 Sydney Writers Festival.

Statues come alive and London is re-imagined in Francis Spufford's Nonesuch, and surprising parallels in two Australian novels of secrets, shame, land and time in M L Stedman's A Far-Flung Life and Eva Hornung's The Minstrels. Kate Evans, Cassie McCullagh, Michael Robotham and Roanna Gonsalves - to help you decide what to read next.
BOOKS
Francis Spufford, Nonesuch, Faber
Eva Hornung, The Minstrels, Text
M L Stedman, A Far-Flung Life, Penguin
GUESTS
Michael Robotham, internationally acclaimed crime writer – whose books include the Joe O’Loughlin series, the Cyrus Haven/ Evie Cormac series, and his latest – featuring Philomena MCcCarthy, The White Crow. His first Australian-based novel is out later this year
Roanna Gonsalves, writer whose collection of short stories is The Permanent Resident, and whose first novel (The Servants) will be published later this year. She is also one of the hosts of a monthly book club at the State Library of NSW
Other books mentioned:
Phillippa McGuiness and Richard Neville (eds) The Library that Made Me (you can write your own stories about libraries that have shaped you right here)
Anita Heiss, Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray: River of Dreams 
Emily St John Mandel, Station Eleven
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Rashida Murphy’s Old Ghosts  and Karleah Olson’s Bloodwood (forthcoming)
Michelle de Kretser, The Hamilton Case
Natasha Brown, Assembly, Universality
Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore
Don Winslow, The Power of the Dog, The Death and Life of Bobby Z,  The Final Score [stories]
Presenters: Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh
Producer: Kate Evans
Sound engineers: Timothy Jenkins
Arts Editor: Rhiannon Brown

In this episode, we travel from the Swiss Alps to the quiet strangeness of Danish suburbia and the fierce edges of American literary drama. We begin with the visceral intensity of Gabriel Tallent’s latest novel, Crux, where characters cling to passion and survival with bloodied fingertips. Claire Thomas reflects on art, ambition, and the lure of towering peaks in On Not Climbing Mountains, and Helle Helle's They, a delicately surreal portrait of mothers, daughters, and the lives lived between silences. 
BOOKS 
Gabriel Tallent, Crux, Fig Tree 
Claire Thomas, On Not Climbing Mountains, Hachette 
Helle Helle, They, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken, Giramondo 
GUESTS
Hannah Kent, novelist, scriptwriter, and memoirist, whose books include Burial Rites, The Good People, Devotion, and Always Home Always Homesick 
Tom Wright, theatre writer and adaptor; Artistic Associate at Belvoir Theatre in Sydney 
OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED
Olga Tocarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Rachel Cusk, works
W.G. Sebald, works
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Henry James, works
Rainer Maria Rilke, works
James Baldwin, works
Katherine Mansfield, works
Leo Tolstoy, works
Teju Cole, works
Muriel Sparks, works
Johanna Spyri, Heidi
Blaise Cendrars, works
Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow
Harry Matthews, Sleuth
John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent 
Harry Mathews, Tlooth 
Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume
Catherine Lacey, The Möbius Book
CREDITS
Presenter, Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh
Producer, Kate Evans and Sarah Corbett
Sound engineer, Micky Grossman and Roi Huberman
Executive producer, Rhiannon Brown

Emerald Fennell's film adaptation of Wuthering Heights has been marketed as "the greatest love story ever told", which is not typically the description given to the original novel. What does this adaptation achieve, and what does it sacrifice in the process?
The Bookshelf's Kate Evans and Radio National's Arts Hour's Sky Kirkham discuss what they felt did and didn't work in this film and, in an expanded podcast extra edition, they also discussed the film adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet