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 May 26th 2026 6pm OR 730pm.
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 March, at Matilda Bookshop Book Club we discussed the intense and surprising, The Minstrels, by Eva Hornung. In this novel, the Minstrels is a place of water and song in an otherwise arid zone, a site of transformation, and a storied yet contested locale in the fictional town of Bolton. The novel follows the life of strong-willed, word-loving, farmer and rewilder, Gem, as she undergoes a personal and artistic soaring after loss, in the place of the minstrels.
But don't be lulled into thinking this is a standard story arc. The novel takes unexpected turns, with one woman's resilience as the touchstone, while the world collapses around her. Hornung considers language reclamation as an act of resistance, environmental degradation, living country, music as life force, and the strange ways we make families, not necessarily with blood kin. The book is strange and wild, drawing some readers in with its punch-to-the-chest writing while alienating others with its fragmentary latter half. We loved Hornung's use of time in the novel and the land as a thrumming character throughout. We had a most deep and dynamic chat about what it might mean to live with creativity and connection after loss. MOLLY
Click HERE to read the March full wrap up
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2026
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 April 29th at 6pm OR 710pm.
SOLD OUT Please get in touch about joining our waitlist (08 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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There was a lot to say about Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline at our March Red Door book club sessions. Set in Sydney in May 2021 during Israel’s bombing of Gaza, each of the characters is contending with their personal and political response to the violence, and the censorship and lack of understanding they encounter in their professional lives. This novel, which might have flown under the radar, became a bestseller after the board of Adelaide Writers’ Week capitulated to political pressure to drop the author from the lineup and the majority of AWW authors pulled out in protest, leading to the collapse of the festival; a painful irony, given the censorship themes of the book, and a case of life imitating art.
We came close to having a rare moment of consensus during book club, in that most of us enjoyed the book and found it a valuable and underrepresented perspective on the Palestinian diaspora and Muslim experiences in Australia. While some found the language a little too workmanlike and the characters occasionally felt like puppets for ideas, one person posited a theory that rang true: perhaps it is the simplicity of the language and thus the accessibility of the text to a wide audience that makes the novel (and the author) seem so dangerous to those politically opposed to the ideas in the novel. If the novel reached for loftier artistic ideals, complexity of language, and a higher level of difficulty it would narrow the audience and perhaps make it easier for would-be censors to ignore. Instead, Abdel-Fattah makes accessible discussions of the Nakba and the ongoing violence towards Palestinians, and exposes the casual bias of western thinking and ideals in Australian media and academia. ROSE
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2026
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 May 7th, 2026 at 6pm OR 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.
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For our most recent Matilda Translated Book Club we read Monique Escapes by Édouard Louis and time flew as we tried to cover all the talking points In this memoir (essay?) Louis recounts helping his mother leave an abusive relationship, framing the story as both a personal intervention and a broader critique of the social structures that trap people in cycles of dependence and harm.
Whilst ultimately a joyous conclusion, many readers moved through the book with a quiet sense of dread, anticipating that something terrible might happen. The writing itself divided opinion: some felt its starkness lacked flourish, while others admired the deliberate sparseness and clarity of Louis’s style. We also discussed whether the title signals an escape or a rescue, and what that distinction reveals about agency. Some readers found Louis’s presence in the narrative slightly self-aggrandising, while others argued that placing himself so directly in the story is necessary for the political point he is making. Those in the know believe the book becomes richer when read alongside Louis’s other interconnected works, and the discussion happily recruited a few new members to my unofficial Édouard Louis appreciation society.
A really fun book club - for such a slim volume, Monique Escapes proved remarkably generative, sparking one of the most thoughtful and searching discussions we've had.
HEATHER
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2026
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn
Monique Escapes by Edouard Louis
Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali (Turkish)
2025
Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán (Chilean)
The Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung (Korean)
The Directorby Daniel Kehlmann, trans. Ross Benjamin (German)
On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle, trans. Barbara J. Haveland (Danish)