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: Wednesday February 25th 2026 6pm OR 730pm.
*please note, Matilda Bookshop Book Club usually runs on a Tuesday evening, but this month will be held on a Wednesday as a once-off.
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 November, at Matilda Bookshop Book Club, we discussed the tender and brutal coming-of-age, coming-out story, of shy, queer, academic Martha Mullins, in Sofie Laguna's The Underworld. 1970s Sydney, and Martha attends a privileged boarding school in the Southern Highlands of NSW, where she discovers the allure of Roman and Greek mythology as a map or guide for her own emotional and spiritual transformations.
For Martha, the underworld is a place of escape, refuge, desire, depression, liberation, belonging, rapture and rupture. The novel follows both Martha's high school and university years, bringing to mind Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend series, where two devastating events to do with her sexuality and shame, begin her descent into the underworld.
We discussed Laguna's writing of shame, privilege, outsider-status, and the blocks women face in academia, especially in the 1970s, but still now. For some, the structure of the novel was baffling, for others, the treatment of the underworld didn't quite coalesce. And yet, the more we talked, the more we discovered the novel's deeply penetrating themes of love, violence, and transformation. A fitting place to end another year of book club reading and chat in 2025. MOLLY
Click HERE to read the November full wrap up
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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 February 18th at 6pm OR 710pm.
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 last book for 2025 was The Mobius Book by Catherine Lacey, a deliciously form-breaking half-novella, half-memoir dealing with the end of the author’s coercive relationship and interrogating her relationship with religion, her friends, and her father, and the nature of fiction.
This book saw a distinct divide between the first and second book club groups, with the first group mostly loving it and the second group heartily sick of works that engage in that level of introspection and self-analysis. (I enjoyed the contrast.) We enjoyed energetic, flowing discussions ranging from the concept of amor fati (loving one’s fate, whether good or bad, because everything leads you to here) to the ignored blood pooling under the neighbour’s door in the fiction half of the book, which seemed a metaphor for how it is sometimes easier it is to pretend we don’t see a friend or family member’s potential domestic abuse because we’re afraid of being wrong, and how conversely it’s easier to call for help when it’s a stranger on the street. ROSE
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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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In our final book club of the year we read Clean by Chilean writer Alia Trabucco Zerán - a psychologically intense novel told in the voice of Estela García, a domestic worker whose testimony circles the death of a child in the wealthy Santiago household where she worked. What unfolds is not a crime narrative but an examination of class, power, and invisibility.
Given how much the novel leaves unanswered, it was no surprise that our discussion was wide-ranging and robust. We debated whether Clean sat closer to literary fiction or crime, (resoundingly landing on the former), and had a lively exchange about where Estela’s testimony might be taking place and to whom she is really speaking. Whilst most were settled with the police station or a psychiatric setting, the late suggestion of the narration taking place after death would make for an intriguing re-read. Many found the novel bleak but undeniably clever and propulsive, with some disappointment around the ending. In discussing the translation we were fortunate to have insights from a couple of Spanish speakers in the group, including a Chilean expat, whose reflections on Chile’s class system brought real depth to what was a dynamic and searching conversation.
HEATHER
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2025
Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán
The Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung
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 February 5, 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.
