OUR BOOK CLUBS
Hello book lovers! Welcome to your local book club.
Matilda Bookshop now hosts three book clubs for adult readers.
(We also have three book clubs for kids - find out more here.)
All book clubbers receive a 20% discount on the book of the month.
To be involved, please join one of the book clubs mailing lists and you’ll be emailed when our upcoming dates are announced. Hope to see you soon!
WHEN: Tuesday evening, monthly at 6pm or 730pm
VENUE: Stirling Hotel Library Room
COST: $10
CONVENOR: Molly
OUR NEXT BOOK CLUB DATE: Tuesday October 28th, 2025 (SOLD OUT - contact us about the waitlist 08 8339 3931)
Our Matilda Bookshop Book Club is now 10 years old and is a lively, informal and informative meeting where we chat over the best in Australian fiction, new-release fiction, classics and international fiction. The sessions are convened by Molly (who is an author and manager of the bookshop), who has experience teaching literature and creative writing at a tertiary level. But most importantly, the evenings are fun and engaging.
If you are interested in receiving regular information about the book club, please sign up to the newsletter below.
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In September at Matilda Bookshop Book Club, we discussed the unsettling and profound Desolation by Hossein Asgari. With a framing device that sees an Iranian Australian writer, making notes in an Adelaide cafe, approached by an elderly down-on-his-luck Iranian with a 'story for you', so begins a story within a story.
The central thread sees a young and naive adolescent, Amin, falling in love with his glamorous neighbour (whose family has just moved from Tehran), discovering literature, questioning faith, all while living under the oppressive regime of 1980s Iran. When his beloved brother, a promising mathematician is killed when civilian Iran Air Flight 655 is shot down by US missiles in the Persian Gulf, his world is literally shattered by grief and loss.
This book elicited one of our most strident discussions yet, as we unpacked the framing device, the slipperiness of the unreliable narrator, how violence always begets violence, and what we learned about the grass roots of a nascent, revolutionary Al-Qaeda. This is an incredible account of how young men can be exploited in their grief or rage by powerful forces. It is a story of war from a Persian vantage point. It is a story of adolescence and falling in calf-love. It is a book about the healing imperative or destructive nature of stories. A dynamic and impressive discussion. MOLLY
Click HERE to read the September full wrap up
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2025
Desolation by Hossein Asgari
Cure by Katherine Brabon
Honour’s Mimic by Charmian Clift
We Do Not Part by Han Kang
Flesh by David Szalay
Elegy, Southwest Madeleine Watts
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich
Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser
2024
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin
Clear by Carys Davies
The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry
Take What You Need by Idra Novey
Until August Gabriel García Márquez
We All Lived in Bondi Then by Georgia Blain
The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt
Days of Innocence and Wonder by Lucy Treloar
2023
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright
Chai Time at the Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
Small Things Like These & Foster by Claire Keegan
August Blue by Deborah Levy
The Bookbinder of Jericho by Pip Williams
Out of Africa by Karen Blixen
Euphoria by Elin Cullhed
The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane
2022
Limberlost by Robbie Arnott
This Devastating Fever by Sophie Cunningham
Faithless by Alice Nelson
Horse by Geraldine Brooks
Bedtime Story by Chloe Hooper
Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes
Loveland by Robert Lukins
The Colony by Audrey Magee
Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
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2021
Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
Real Estate by Deborah Levy
Still Life by Sarah Winman
Stranger Care by Sarah Sentilles
From Where I Fell by Susan Johnson
The Performance by Claire Thomas
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stewart
Song of the Crocodile by Nardi Simpson
2020
Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Greenwood by Michael Christie
The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott
The Things She Owned by Katherine Tamiko Arguile
A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry
The Scent of Eucalyptus by Barbara Hanrahan
Betty by Tiffany McDaniel
The Labyrinth by Amanda Lohrey
In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World by Danielle Clode
2019
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Walking on the Ceiling by Aysegul Savas
Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi
The White Girl by Tony Birch
Lanny by Max Porter
The Erratics by Vicki Laveau-Harvie
Islands by Peggy Frew
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
Heart of the Grass Tree by Molly Murn
2018The Children’s House by Alice Nelson
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton
Flames by Robbie Arnott
Monkey Grip by Helen Garner
Warlight by Michael Ondaatje
In the Garden of the Fugitives by Ceridwen Dovey
The Only Story by Julian Barnes
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
The Choke by Sofie Laguna
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2017
The Passage of Love by Alex Miller
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry
Tin Man by Sarah Winman
The Last Garden by Eva Hornung
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
House of Names by Colm Tóibín
Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose
Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
Barking Dogs by Rebekah Clarkson
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
2016
The Good People by Hannah Kent
Commonwealth by Ann Patchett
LaRose by Louise Erdrich
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes
Between a Wolf and a Dog by Georgia Blain
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar
2015The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
Nora Webster by Colm Toibin
The Golden Age by Joan London
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood
Sweet Caress by William Boyd
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Sign up here to the Matilda Book Club newsletter
WHEN: Wednesday evening, monthly, either 6.00pm OR 7.10pm
VENUE: Matilda Bookshop
COST: $12 (includes a glass of red or white wine or sparkling water on arrival)
CONVENOR: Rose
OUR NEXT BOOK CLUB DATE: Wednesday November 5, 2025
The sessions are convened by Rose, an avid reader, published author and bookseller at Matilda Bookshop.
If you are interested in receiving book club updates, please sign up to the newsletter below.
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Audition by Katie Kitamura is possibly the most meta book we’ve discussed at Red Door so far. Structurally, the book is made up of two halves, with a “black box” in the middle, a scene we never see that is the invisible hinge of the story.
In the first half, the narrator has no children but a young man finds her and claims to be the son she gave up for adoption - to which she replies she’s never given birth. In the second half, the young man is her son. There were multiple interpretations in our discussion: is the narrator delusional in either half? Is the second half a performance of the play the narrator is acting in every night? Is it a Sliding Doors novel that explores the “what ifs” of our life decisions?
We decided it didn’t really matter. The point of the novel was to explore the unfixed nature of identity, how we are different people depending on who we are with, and how the people closest to us can suddenly seem like strangers in the work of a moment. The narrator is intensely unreliable, fickle, changeable, and the power dynamics within the family are constantly shifting. One gets the impression that Kitamura wrote this novel in deliberate opposition to narratives that use backstory as a way to “explain” why characters are the way they are; Kitamura is positing that there is no concrete, definitive self that can be “explained”. There is nothing immutable about our identities, they always shift depending on who is looking at us and what role we are performing.
Not everyone enjoyed this novel, but we all had plenty to say about it. ROSE
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2025
Audition by Katie Kitamura
Ghost Cities by Siang Lu
Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno
You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrigue
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher
The Antidote by Karen Russell
The Leopard by Guiseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
The Most by Jessica Anthony
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anna de Marcken
2024
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
All Fours by Miranda July
Breakdownby Cathy Sweeney
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
Vladivostok Circus by Elisa Shua Dusapin
The Variations by Patrick Langley
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Held by Anne Michaels
2023
The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto
North Woods by Daniel Mason
Strangers at the Portby Lauren Aimee Curtis
Cousins by Aurora Venturini
Ghost Music by An Yu
Shy by Max Porter
When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
A Sunday in Ville d’Avray by Dominique Barberis
Delphi by Clare Pollard
2022
Limberlost by Robbie Arnott
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
The Lovers by Paolo Cognetti
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
Sign up here to join the Red Door Book Club newsletter
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In October, we turned our attention to The Director by Daniel Kehlmann — a darkly humorous yet deeply unsettling novel that reimagines the real-life filmmaker G. W. Pabst as he’s compelled to work within the Nazi film industry. What begins as a study of artistic and moral integrity under pressure becomes a meditation on complicity, self-preservation, and the slippery line between survival and collaboration.
While some felt the novel had a slow start, most were soon drawn in by its cinematic precision — each chapter unfolding like a perfectly composed scene. The structure gave Kehlmann enormous creative licence: shifting perspectives, tonal pivots, and passages that moved between unease and wit, dread and absurdity. We found it a page-turning, immersive read. We had a great discussion about Pabst’s gradual moral drift and how Kehlmann uses fiction to fill the gaps history leaves, with a few “fun facts” shared along the way (where the real history proved far darker than his inventions!) Ross Benjamin's translation also drew admiration for its clarity and wit, capturing the rhythm of Kehlmann’s German prose. Overall, the group found The Director fresh, intelligent, and unexpectedly entertaining – a filmic, thought-provoking read that gave us plenty to discuss.
HEATHER
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2025
On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle
WHEN: Thursday evening, monthly, either 6.00pm OR 7.15pm
VENUE: Matilda Bookshop
COST: $12 (includes a glass of red or white wine or sparkling water provided)
CONVENORS: Heather & Nadia
OUR NEXT BOOK CLUB DATE: Thursday November 6, 2025 - 6pm and 7.15pm
Matilda, Translated is our newest club! The sessions are convened by Heather and Nadia, both booksellers at Matilda Bookshop.
If you are interested in receiving book club updates, please sign up to the newsletter below.
