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 March 24th 2026 6pm OR 730pm.
SOLD OUT — please join the waitlist or contact us on 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 February, at Matilda Bookshop Book Club, we chatted about the elemental, chaotic, tour de force, that is Sarah Hall's Helm.
Narrated from the vantage point of Helm, Britain's only named wind, looking upon the actions of humans from the neolithic to the medieval to the present-day, this is a disorienting read. But in the best possible way. Hall manages to show the growing dislocation between humans and nature through a series of gently accumulating set pieces, each with the mercurial trickster helm as a force to worship, control, admire, study, understand, experience, curse, destroy, or commune with depending on which stage of human evolution is in focus.
As readers, we were blown away (literally) by the scope of this achievement. For some, Helm was too virtuoistic with not enough to hold onto; for others, this was a masterpiece in using fiction to unravel human history. In any case, the discussion was breathtaking, just like the book, as we considered our ever increasing disastrous relationship to weather/climate/landscape, while acknowledging our primal need of natural elemental beauty. MOLLY
Click HERE to read the February full wrap up
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2026
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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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 March 18th at 6pm OR 710pm. ***sold out - email us to join the waitlist books@matildabookshop.com.au***
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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We had an energetic discussion about the importance of love stories in our culture and the literary canon at our February Red Door Book Club meetings, where we discussed Heart the Lover by Lily King. A few of us loved the book or parts of it; some preferred the second half of grown-up love and grief while others preferred the college romance of the first half. Most of us admired the skill in King’s writing. Many, though, felt the book lacked heft, and particularly disliked the double-cancer plot turn, which felt contrived to some.
In the first group, we compared the book to The Great Gatsby, since there are multiple references to it, culminating in a particularly funny declaration that “Gatsby is a loser” for pining over an unattainable love for decades. In the second session, we broke apart and analysed what we felt could have made for a stronger book with a fascinating discussion of alternative plots: what if Lily King had simply followed through on the more low-key story of Yash returning to Jordan/Casey’s life with a closer analysis of the tension between an all-consuming first love versus a more stable, domestic later-life love with the father of her children, Silas? Finally, we talked about how the Aeneid (though none of us had read it) was referenced in the novel with the exploration of the randomness of tragedy versus the consequences of our own bad decisions, and how they direct and change the course of human lives. ROSE
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2026
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
Sign up here to join the Red Door Book Club newsletter
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For our first Matilda, Translated Book Club of 2026, we read Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali -- a debatably fictional story of young love in Berlin, that closely echoed Ali's private life while his public life was thrown into tumult by a collapsing empire. An unnamed narator gives us access to a dying man's journal, destined to be burned, but devoured with the same fervor of Raif and Maria's relationship.
The discussion of this novella was rather lively. Despite being widely enjoyed, many people expressed frustration at the characters -- life experience and perspective proving to be the antidote for many juvenile woes -- with the protagonist Raif lacking the ability to truly see Maria in the way a lover should, choosing to be enrapt by the woman he created in his head. Others had a more empathetic view of him: a man who is simply overwhelmed by how much life there is to live, subsequently never living any of it for himself. We likened Maria to the 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl', a stock character whose purpose is to help with the emotional growth of the male character. She was enigmatic, flighty, and equally dishonest with herself about how she felt. This resulted in a volatile cocktail of yearning, and sadness.
We all agreed that this classic felt modern, timeless -- with subtle nods to the fluidity of the Ottoman Empire; a universal story of being young and in love with an imagined life, rather than a real one.
It was a strong start to the year!
NADIA
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2026
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)
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 April 2nd, 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.
