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: $12
CONVENOR: Molly
OUR NEXT BOOK CLUB DATE: Tuesday August 18th 2026 6pm OR 730pm.
*SOLD OUT - please contact us about the waitlist (8339 3931)
Sign up below to join our book club mailing list.
Our Matilda Bookshop Book Club has been running for eleven years 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 July at Matilda Bookshop Book Club, we discussed the sprawling and mystical family saga, Land, by Maggie O'Farrell. Taking a spit of peninsula on the West coast of Ireland as landing place, O'Farrell unravels the history of a country in myriad detail. This is a story of the cultural theft of Ireland by the British, via the erasure of language, place names and traditions via the map-making process.
The story moves forward and backwards in time, as well as deep into the layers of the earth (reaching down to the Bronze Age) as a sacred well becomes a hinge point to tell of Ireland's colonial history. The story begins with Tomas, an Irish surveyor working for the 'Redcoats', the British, to redraw the maps of Ireland after the ravages of the Great Famine on the land and people. Tomas’ ecstatic encounter at a sacred well, has reverberations that extend to his immediate family, and sets off a chain of events that sees each of his children scattered around the globe.
What a stunning premise! And what a beautiful writer! But our book club had a fascinating and dynamic discussion trying to work out why all these elements didn't quite 'land'. Perhaps too much plot for the story? Too much attribution of motivation after the action? Too much lengthy explanation rather than breathing space? We wanted more from this stellar writer (or perhaps less -- the writing is florid). We wanted her to lean deeper into the pagan elements and remove the melodramatic plot points. In any case, this was a wild ride of a book, and made for a simply stunning excavation of craft and the reading experience. MOLLY
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2026
Land by Maggie O’Farrell
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
Sororicidalby Elizabeth Preston
On Not Climbing Mountains by Claire Thomas
2025
The Underworld by Sofie Laguna
Seascraper by Benjamin Wood
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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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 August 12 at 6pm OR 710pm.
*SOLD OUT - please contact us about the waitlist (8339 3931)
Sign up below to join our book club mailing list
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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Our July pick was, in short, a banger. Young Mexican author and activist Dahlia de la Cerda reimagines the maligned mother Medea as a modern-day punk archangel of birth, love and abortion in interlinked short stories set in a violent, semi-fictionalised version of Mexico in which mothers look for their missing children, women escape (or cannot escape) bad relationships, wish for children despite the heartbreak, or seek backyard abortions. Book clubbers loved the strong voice, the contemporary language, the humour, and the reframing of a classic narrative. Although only one person had read Euripides’ Medea (not me!) our understanding of the basic story helped inform our interpretation and added depth to our reading of Medea Sang Me A Corrido.
Some people had beautiful insights to offer, in particular when we were discussing how Medea’s fate was played with by the gods, who had Eros shoot her with an arrow so she’d fall in love with Jason and betray her own family. One book clubber suggested that being born into poverty in a cartel-controlled society is the arrow the characters had been shot with. And while we had mixed feelings about the final chapter, the only one from Medea’s perspective, in which she sings her own corrido and perhaps over-explains the point of the book, once we framed it within the context of Euripides’ Medea, which contains monologues and a certain style of back-and-forth banter (stichomythia), we at least understood the intention behind de la Cerda’s stylistic choice. ROSE
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2026
Medea Sang Me A Corrido by Dahlia de la Cerda
The Dispossessedby Ursula K Le Guin
Brawler by Lauren Groff
Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah
Heart the Lover by Lily King
2025
The Mobius Book by Catherine Lacey
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
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 August 6, 2026 at 6pm OR 7.15pm.
*SOLD OUT: please contact us to join the waitlist
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.
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For our most recent Matilda, Translated Book Club, we read On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, translated from the Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan; a stark, slim novel set in a penal colony in rural Brazil, where a warden's new full-moon hunt turns the prison's final days into something closer to horror.
Almost everyone agreed that, although brief, the book was exactly the right length, "not a word was wasted." Several admitted they wouldn't have coped with the same intensity stretched any longer. Others talked about how cinematic it felt, each scene landing with a visceral, almost visual clarity, like something you were watching rather than reading.
Most hadn't clocked the epigraph, drawn from within the novel's own pages, on a first read, but loved its boldness once it was pointed out, and it fed into a bigger discussion of imprisonment as something that extends well beyond the walls of the prison itself. The morality of the characters also sparked real debate. The line between sympathetic and monstrous never quite settled, and the group appreciated that this felt like a deliberate choice on Maia's part rather than an oversight. One group was lucky to have insight from an ex-pat, who added valuable cultural context to some of the book's themes. That worked well with a broader, slightly self-aware moment - the reflex English readers have, reading translated fiction, to reach for Western equivalents, Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men came up more than once.
We also spent time on style and tone. The prose is stark and unadorned, or as Viswanathan put it, "blocky, roughhewn language," with dialogue doing a lot of the heavy lifting. That all changes in the final hunt scene, which is something else entirely, short, intense and propulsive. There was some discussion, too, of Maia's choice to build a world so exclusively male, brutal and bleak, and what that does or doesn't allow the novel to say.
A book thoroughly 'enjoyed' (appreciated?) by all, and one that's sent a fair few of us looking for more of the books in Maia's loose trilogy; Of Cattle and Men is already being picked up, and Bury Your Dead (due November) is on our radar.
HEATHER
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2026
On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paul Mai, trans. by Padma Viswanathan
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa, trans. by Stephen Snyder
Small Comfort by Ia Genberg, trans. Kira Josefsson (Swedish)
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, trans. Martin Aitken (Danish)
Monique Escapes by Edouard Louis, trans. John Lambert (French)
Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali, trans. Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe (Turkish)
2025
Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán, trans. Sophie Hughes (Chilean)
The Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung, trans. Anton Hur (Korean)
The Directorby Daniel Kehlmann, trans. Ross Benjamin (German)
On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle, trans. Barbara J. Haveland (Danish)