Scott Pape's The Barefoot Investor was snapped up by thousands of Australians last year, making it the No.1 book.

"In all arts festivals you're bringing the world to the local audience, but you also want the local audience to come and see the world."

Visit Britain and you'll bump into the adjective proper everywhere. We have the word at home – it's in the dictionary after all – but not as Brits use it, or overuse it.

It's official: Australia is having its "Scandi moment".

"Throughout the book, your test points seem to be lost in a sea of self-aggrandisement and scattershot thinking."

Richard Beasley's lawyer protagonist "prefers not to get out of bed unless blood has been spilled", but here he's soon in his element.

It's 1808 and the titular daughter, Rose Winton, wants to follow in the footsteps of her naturalist father Charles, who has made a ground-breaking study of the platypus.

As the visceral and emotional realities play out in Surrogate, the story flicks back in time, when another mother from a different era is pressured to give her baby away.

Jarett Kobek has created a big, debauched, nostalgia-rush of a book that evokes the queer and bohemian demi-monde of New York in the '90s

When Alice Pung first read John Marsden in her early years at high school, his books resonated because he didn't patronise his readers.

The most famous controversy in the America's Cup centred on 1983 challenger Australia II, the challenge that broke a 132-year winning streak.

The life of James Jesus Angleton, former chief of CIA counter-intelligence, reads like the most convincing fiction.

The tactics of galleries such as the Tannhauser ensured that the value of work by artists such as Vincent van Gogh increased.

Holiday time is reading time. Here's Jason Steger's selection of great reads from the past year.

Everyone featured in Katherine Wilson's book identifies with the label of tinker in unique and surprising ways, but for almost all of them, tinkering is a way to claw back time.

Garry Disher has already given us two crime series and in Under the Cold Bright Lights he heads in a new direction.

It is difficult to imagine how much time Scott Bevan spent paddling, talking to people and digging through archives to assemble the material in The Harbour.

In A Sea-Chase the compact world of sailboats – erotic, stifling, romantic, lonely – serves as an allegory of self-discovery.

This warm and engaging biography is a welcome addition to the considerable list of material already written about Caroline Chisholm

Combining exercise and a love of reading, Keith Austin decided to read while he walked - everywhere.

Catching the right words to conjure up the nature and force of the sea is possibly more difficult than catching that perfect wave.

The characters in Plane Tree Drive remain largely mysterious to one another, each with his or her own story or crisis.

This unsettling novel takes the form of a monologue by a character who cannot stop thinking about her husband's first wife.

In her 25th novel, the ever-popular Di Morrissey offers a strong, well-crafted plot and a dramatic physical setting.