28 books like The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding

This novel is elegantly written and emotionally authentic, and while it is a light and zippy read, the more you think about it, the more it seems to say. 

It is about a week in the life of Melbourne man Simon Larsen. Things are not going very well for Simon. He was a successful architect but during lockdown his business failed and his beautiful home had to be sold. Now Simon has moved his family to a tiny flat, and he is unemployed, broke, and can hardly get off the sofa. 

While Simon seems hopeless, the family he has married into are formidable, from his beautiful wife Tansy to his terrifying mother-in-law Gloria. I loved the Schnabels but still, I’m not sure I would want to be related.

Bittersweet, funny, and wise, this is an entirely perfect novel about life and love in a small town.

Jane moves to Boyne City, Michigan to work as a schoolteacher. There she falls in love with the amiable and handsome Duncan. Unfortunately, he has slept with pretty much every available woman in town and remains closely bound to his ex-wife. 

When a single event shatters Jane’s life, she discovers how friends can become your family, and how sometimes they need you as much as you need them. 

I loved every single word of this quirky and wonderful story.

This is the most devastatingly beautiful book.

It is deeply, deeply sad and yet also uplifting and life-affirming, perhaps surprisingly so for a novel that is largely about the end of a life. Edi and Ash have been best friends since childhood. For 40 years they have been through every milestone together and share many memories. Now their friendship is in its final days.

Edi is suffering from incurable ovarian cancer and doesn’t very have long left. And Ash’s world is reshaping itself around the hospice where she is slowly dying. It all sounds too sad to bear but even as it was breaking my heart this novel was making me smile.

This novel totally swept me away.

Often while I was reading, it felt like I was right there, in the Australian town of Ballarat, a part of a small community as everyone’s lives are being reshaped by a war raging across the world.

Connie Starr is a watchful misfit of a child who lives in a dream world. But this is as much a story about the people who surround Connie – parents and siblings, neighbours and friends – and the way their lives intertwine. We rarely witness any violent acts of war in this novel.

Instead, it is focused mostly on the people left behind at home, on their heartbreak and loneliness, the friendships that sustain them, and the determination that gets them through the toughest times.

This book dissects Tasmania, an island state of Australia, to reveal hybrid geology, diverse scenery, and exotic inherited origins. Its parental rocks once abutted North America and Antarctica in the Precambrian Super Continents Nuna and Rodinia. They split away and collided with the Paleozoic Super Continent, Gondwana. There they shared mountain building and mineralizing events with Australia. When Gondwana began to split, vast sheets of molten dolerite rock invaded across South Africa and Antarctica to enter Tasmania and buttress its highlands.

A remnant of Gondwana, carved by rivers, seas, and ice and host basaltic lavas, it is called a geological paradise. The author’s masterly explanations of its geology, superb photography of wilderness, highlands, coasts, rocks, and minerals, and clear diagrams, all combine in a mind-opening publication.  

I have been intrigued by the story of Truganini since living in Tasmania. There are many myths about Truganini, including that she was the last Aboriginal Tasmanian. This is her full story, based on eyewitness accounts researched by a writer whose ancestors had a connection to her subject. It depicts a devastating time for Aboriginal Tasmanians, including the Nuenonne clan of Bruny Island which Truganini was from. Truganini was a survivor who experienced profound upheavals and many personal tragedies. She was part of the team of guides for missionary George Augustus Robinson’s trip around Tasmania and with other Aboriginal survivors was exiled to a Christian settlement on Flinders Island for a time. This was part of a broken agreement with surviving Tasmanian Aboriginal people removed from their homelands. Returning to Oyster Cove and dying in 1876, Truganini was not put to rest until 1976 when her ashes were scattered in… show more.

This genre-busting debut novel by Tasmanian writer Robbie Arnott defies all attempts to describe or classify it. The writing is vibrant and beautiful. It’s a book that fills your lungs with a blast of fresh air, the scents of the cool southern rainforests and dazzles you with clouds and sun and rain and fire. It seamlessly blends realism with a spirit world, binding the human to the animal in an evocatively magical and disturbing story that brings Australian nature and animals into focus in an entirely new literary landscape. I defy anyone to read this book and not fall in love with the Rakali and weep a little the next time it rains. Quite the most remarkable book I’ve read.

My husband and I met in the newsroom at the Houston Post newspaper. On paper, I guess you could say we had the same job: writing for the newspaper.

But like Lawson Gale and Jack Brighton in this book, both of whom work to preserve the environment, our jobs weren’t the same at all. He was a political reporter while I was an arts reviewer. We have completely different passions.

When lepidopterist Lawson travels to Tasmania to find and protect an endangered butterfly, he’s escorted by Parks and Wildlife officer Jack and his Border collie. I’ll admit I wasn’t very excited to read this book, but did because a friend said it was “good”.

Since I have almost no interest in endangered butterflies and environmental problems, I was hoping for “goodish mediocre”. What I got was brilliance. The book is funny, suspenseful, playful, and romantic.

The bottom line is even… show more.

Van Diemen’s Land is the former name for the island at the bottom of Australia now called Tasmania. The British who invaded the island changed the colony’s name after the place became infamous. Not only was it home to the British Empire’s most feared convict stations, but it also had a fearsome reputation as the location of one of the most brutal genocides in the Empire’s history. Nick Brodie draws on extensive, yet previously ignored, archival documents to refute the long-standing myth that the Vandemonian War was fought between hapless convict shepherds at the far reaches of the island colony and the island’s Aboriginal inhabitants. He demonstrates instead how this significant conflict was an orchestrated campaign in which the Lieutenant-Governor of the colony used military and para-military forces to prosecute his war against Aboriginal people. Ultimately, the British won the Vandemonian War and then purposefully covered up the military nature… show more.

Many Irish history books mention the fate of prisoners, often involving transportation to Australia. This book picks up the narrative where they left off. The authors have meticulously pieced together the story of those on board the convict ship Tasmania, which left Ireland for Van Dieman’s Land in 1845, carrying 138 female convicts. The book tells the stories of voiceless people at the bottom of the social scale (being both convicted and female). The process of transportation is explored in detail and the women’s new lives in Tasmania are examined. Two women, Eliza Davis (infanticide) and Margaret Butler (stealing potatoes) form the centre-piece of the study. Both later married and had families and descendants, leaving a legacy in their new home. A sad, informative but ultimately hopeful read.