The most recommended books about Sydney Australia

Any book that starts with an impulsive decision is bound to engage someone like me who doesn’t like to plan much before a journey. With his Australian visa shortly to expire and his relationship going the same way, Nathan, aged twenty-nine doesn’t do the sensible thing and fly back home to the UK. Instead, he buys a potentially unsuitable decommissioned postal delivery 105cc Honda "Postie" motorbike. He names it Dorothy and starts the homeward journey from Sydney to London. I found his story riveting as, like me, he finds delight in the simpleness of life on the road and in meeting local people and other travellers.

I bet he’s glad he didn’t get that flight home!

This is a really funny book. It is the second volume of Clive James’ Unreliable Memoirs, and it’s set in London in the sixties. James moves to London from Australia to find fame and fortune as a writer and playwright, but things do not go smoothly. I remember snorting with laughter as he describes having no money and nowhere to live, so he crashes at a friend’s place. His friend has bought just a new mattress and James has no blankets and is freezing, so he sleeps in the plastic packaging that the mattress arrives in. He said he rustled like a packet of chips all night long.

Voss is White’s best-known novel, a historical fiction based on the German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt’s failed expedition across Australia.

The novel conveys both the determination and uncertainty of the colonial project in the mid-nineteenth century. In places I was horrified by its grotesque depictions of suffering in the outback, but it is also a beautifully written text that captures the explorer’s yearning to understand the land and Australia’s failure to recognize Indigenous personhood – in both the nineteenth century and when White writes in the 1950s.

I return to the novel’s imagery whenever I think about the outback or frontier in literature and culture.

I found it a true delight to read such a clever, gentle tale full of humour and life observations.

Mrs. Winterbottom and her husband have both retired, but while she’s keen to set off around the globe, he’s happy in the garden.

I really loved the way Nell shows us Mrs. Winterbottom’s irritation with her husband, at the same time as making it clear they love each other. It’s relatable and realistic, and every line’s a gentle gag.

There are precious few books on Bhutan, which adds to its allure in my eyes. I loved reading about the author’s childhood in a village near India, where he didn’t see a car until he was eight.

Om Dhungel’s smarts took him further from home, including to nearby Bangladesh. He rose to become a senior member of the government's telecoms service — when phones were so scarce that phone numbers were only four digits long and even the king of Bhutan needed help making a call sometimes!

But in the 1980s, Bhutan began an ethnic-cleansing campaign against citizens of Nepali ancestry. Om fled to Australia and contributed enormously to helping thousands of other Bhutanese refugees. I love reading books about good people—and Om is certainly one of them: a true gentleman and sensitive soul.

Corris and his protagonist, the hard-scrabble private detective Cliff Hardy, are quintessentially Australian. The Dying Trade introduces Cliff (smoker, drinker, ex-boxer) and sets the standard for all the books that follow in this series. It’s dry and laconic, with a wonderful sense of place (a very gritty 1980s Sydney). There’s a definite nod to the greats— Chandler and Hammett in this series; you know Cliff Hardy probably shouldn’t take this job, it’s odds-on he’ll cop a beating along the way, possible he’ll find love and lose it again. I enjoy the author’s economy with words and the moral complexity of his characters. If you like hard-boiled crime, this series is worth a look!

*Note: Sydney is much nicer than it may seem when you walk in Corris’s shoes!

There was one night reading this, when the story affected my breathing, heart rate, and time left on this planet, for the worse, as I galloped through it even though I knew every paragraph could hold up to a few years worth of study, if I hadn’t been so impatient to learn more!

Very crudely, White seems to say that it doesn’t matter what people do, goodness matters and the imaginative and usually obtrusive ways in which he shows good is often quieter than evil, more basic and durable, but sometimes not as strong, seem to me the discipline he tried to train himself in, to get it all down and write the novel in the first place.

That story often feels more painted than written, and when written, written in Australian and not English; people seem to speak when its someone else’s turn… show more.

Yes, she is one of ‘the’ Moriartys, and this surprise shift away from her usual young adult fiction works is more than worthy of her famous surname. This book is sublime, whimsical, dreamy, chatty, fun, sad, joyous, and all with a sense of surreality that you strangely and completely enjoy. I found myself swept away as the lead character, Abigail, seeks to find answers to the tragedy that has haunted her since she was young and oh, how I walked that path with her. The strange retreat she is on will keep you guessing and the sweetness of her story will stay with you long after the final page.

I loved this book for its pacy story, fantastic characters, and gripping plot. The story is intense, and Holly Craig is a fantastic writer. Every single page is gripping and drives the story forward.

A woman becomes obsessed with the woman next door and befriends her. When her new friend is murdered, her husband insists that they flee. What happens next is a story of survival.

Brilliant. 

On to the suburbs of Sydney where three families gather for a backyard barbeque that culminates in epic disaster. Liane Moriarty’s books each have their own flavor but what always makes her writing for me, is the utterly relatable characters. In this story, I felt completely ‘known’ by mother of two, Clementine. Selfish when she knows she shouldn’t be, wracked with guilt over things that simultaneously are and aren’t her fault, letting herself embrace her sexuality only to come up against dire consequences. Liane Moriarty’s famed novel is Big Little Lies but if you’re looking for more of the same best pal characters and unthinkable moral dilemmas, put this one on your list.