Stephen Romei

Stephen Romei writes on books and films. He was formerly literary editor at The Australian and The Weekend Australian.

Edna O’Brien’s protagonist Vlad Dragan is based on Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian-Serb ex-leader accused of war crimes.

Stephanie Bishop

This Point Break remake leaves the original for dead. Plus, the gang’s back for The Peanuts Movie.

The new material in a collection of Robert Hughes’s writings is raw, courageous and hard to read.

SEBASTIAN SMEE

Those who argue Christopher Hitchens abandoned the Left for the Right will find contradictory evidence in his writings.

Richard King

The slippage between a person and their image drives Beatlebone, a brilliant novel by Irish writer Kevin Barry.

James Bradley

Peter Craven celebrates a new translation of Sophocles’s Antigone.

Peter Craven

Indonesia’s history is a spectre in Eka Kurniawan’s amazing novel Beauty is a Wound.

Sam Twyford-Moore

ASIO has come a long way since the days it focused too hard on communists and was closely identified with the Coalition.

Peter Edwards

Welcome to our annual look ahead at some of the books due to be published over the next 12 months.

The anthology by Alex Miller, The Simplest Words, invites readers to take stock of the writer and his written works.

Gerard Windsor