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Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s Listen Layla absolutely grabbed me with it’s combination of deep questioning and heart on its sleeve social conscience.
Yassmin Abdel-Magied is a Sudanese-Australian writer, broadcaster and social advocate. She trained as a mechanical engineer and worked on oil and gas rigs around Australia for years before becoming a writer and broadcaster. She has published a memoir, Yassmin's Story, as well as a book for younger readers, You Must Be Layla.
Layla Hussein is a precocious inventor. At just fourteen Layla has helped steer her school team to the international Grand Designs Tourismo being held in Germany.
With the holidays ahead and invention of her mind, LAyla is blindsided when her Grandmother falls ill and her whole family must quickly pack and travel to Sudan to be with their family.
Layla can’t support the team from halfway around the world, but can she really just give up her dreams to nurse her sick Grandma?
I think it’s a truism that adolescence is a time of questioning. I’m pretty sure I’m still working through some of the big questions that first occurred to me as a teenager. And that’s what makes LIsten Layla so engaging.
In Layla, Yassmin Abdel Magied, opens up the door to questions of personal and social identity, belonging and responsibility. These are questions that we don’t always do well discussing as a nation, with our beer soaked jingoism more often than not getting in the way of true openness and debate.
Through Layla we are exposed to the destabilising notion that identity is not some label you wear but an ongoing discourse between aspects of yourself.
At home in Brisbane Layla has her friends and her inventing which is opening up her world. Yet she also must deal with her difference; as she catches the bus, or just attends a school meeting she is reminded that others see her differently to the Australia they want to believe in.
Arriving in Sudan Layla finds she is not quite Sudanese enough for people either; her Arabic is accented and her passionate attitude is destined to see her get into trouble as she discovers Khartoum is not Brisbane.
Listen, Layla is set against the Sudanese uprising of 2018/19 that saw pro-democracy protesters overthrow the repressive military government through non-violent civil disobedience. Abdel-Magied uses this historical backdrop to great effect highlighting the intergenerational attitudes and underscoring the power of youth.
Within this space Layla is forced to confront her reality and consider the wider world she lives in. It’s powerful to consider the challenges to identity and questions of responsibility that Abdel-Magied sets out.
With almost half of Australian’s either born overseas or with a parent who was born overseas our national identity cannot simply be summed up by lamingtons and vegemite sandwiches. As Layla confronts her commitment to the Sudanese revolution she in turn questions what is her responsibility to first nations people when she returns to Brisbane.
These aren’t questions that are limited to adolescence and Listen Layla is a timely reminder that in the face of injustice there is always work to be done.
Listen, Layla is technically YA but as I always end up saying; this is a book for everyone, full of ideas and questions that we can all benefit from considering.

A B Endacott’s Mirror Mirror is a mini-book, an essay on the importance of narratives and a fabulous look at our world as storytellers.
First up Mirror Mirror gives us reason to celebrate because it is the first offering from a new publishing house Debut Books. Against all odds it seems the Australian publishing industry managed to grow during Covid which is a stunning testament to how powerful and important stories and reading have been in our lockdown experiences. Sucha healthy industry should be fostering independent publishers and that’s exactly what Debut Books is. The mission of Debut is to foster unique Australian stories and so I’m pretty excited to see what they’ve got coming.
Mirror Mirror is compact offering at under one hundred pages but it punches above its weight in big ideas.
The imagery of the title explores the role of stories in reflecting our society. There’s also an interesting sleight of hand in that it also takes in the ways we as storytellers inhabit those stories and often can come to inhabit our own reflections.
I don’t want to get too theoretical early in the morning but this is really where storytelling and narrative theory gets interesting.
Endacott looks at the story of Cinderella, exploring the various iterations of the fairy tale back to their folklore origins. In the ways the story has been told we can see cultural values reflected. From connections to nature, to the necessity or even desirability of violence in meeting out justice.
Cinderella takes us to Disney and their control of a huge market share of storytelling across the world. What does it mean for one company and presumably one company line to hold so much power over the stories that you grew up with and are perhaps now sharing with your kids.
AB Endacott asks these questions in a relatable way and her conversational style guides the reader through some tricky points of theory to help us see why stories matter.
And if you’ll indulge me for a sec I want to reinforce that point about stories and the way they are told being oh so important…
Cast your mind to some of the biggest news stories in Australia at the moment. So much of what we are discussing depends on who gets to tell the story and whose story will be listened to.
The right to tell stories and the right to be heard has never been equally shared in our society. Too often the most powerful have assumed their right to tell the dominant narrative and for it to be listened to unquestioned.
But we should be asking about which stories and why. What do the stories we follow tell us about who we are as a culture.
Check out Mirror Mirror on the podcast

J.P. Pomare is a regular guest on my show Final Draft in part because he is so damn prolific but more importantly he writes compelling, pacy thrillers that have the effect of glueing you to your chair turning pages till the last gripping moment. Last year Josh and I spoke about his incredible thriller of life in a cult In The Clearing. It delved into the psychology of belonging and how people are indoctrinated by a set of ideas. And that’s the other incredible thing about J.P. Pomare’s books; they leverage fascinating stories to explore ideas that are all too relevant to our world.
J.P. Pomare’s latest novel is called Tell Me Lies, and you might be able to guess from the name that this has a lot to say about the ways we live in a world that constantly confounds our ideas of truth.
Margot is a successful psychologist; thriving practice, beautiful family and an academic interest in antisocial personality disorder. On an otherwise uneventful night Margot is woken by the sound of broken glass. The family escapes through their open front door to see flames blooming from Margot’s office window. Someone has firebombed their house!
All these events quickly pile on Margot in the book's opening. Margot’s worsening personal situation is interspersed with transcripts from a mysterious trial playing out in our periphery; someone is lying and has betrayed trust leading to a death…
Throughout all this Margot continues to see her patients; one, a student whose academic career is under threat for writing papers for profit, another the moderator of horrifically graphic content for a social media platform and finally a young woman so chronically addicted to picking the wrong guy she cannot see the danger she is in.
When her clinic is also firebombed Margot must confront the possibility that one of her patients might be behind the violence.

Tell Me Lies confronts the difficult reality of how we respond when we know someone is lying. It’s a fascinating conceit and one that is ultimately flipped on the reader as we are drawn ever more tightly into MArgot’s first person narration.
Compelling stories told well have a way of convincing us they are real. How far into a tale must you get before you find yourself invested in its outcome?
Every day on social media we are encouraged by politicians, media outlets and friends to play amateur psychologist on the myriad personalities that filter through our feeds. When stories contradict we believe we can tell the truth from the lies but how do we know?
Tell Me Lies is a gripping story, drip feeding information and challenging us to solve the mystery ahead of Margot. As we dive deeper we find we it harder to separate the stories we are hearing from what we want to believe and even as we find ourselves shouting at Margot that she’s got it all wrong there’s more twists to come.
I read Tell Me Lies in just a few sittings. It’s popcorn reading with caviar ideas (I absolutely should not do metaphors!)
This one’s a must for lovers of psychological crime
If you want to discover more J.P. Pomare joined me on Final Draft and you can check that conversation out on the podcast

Pip Drysdale’s The Paris Affair
Pip Drysdale is an actor, Musician and writer. She’s the author of The Sunday Girl, and The Strangers We Know which is currently in production for a TV adaptation. Her latest is The Paris Affair.
Harper Brown is in Paris to fulfil her dreams. She’s landed a job as an arts writer for an online publisher covering all the hippest corners of the city of lights.
Sure her colleagues refuse to take her seriously, her ex keeps sliding into her DMs to remind her he’s doing great and now the hottest new artist in Paris is hot for her, but Harper has sworn off love.
Harper is jaded and she’s got reason. Her ex is a grade 1 gaslighter who won’t let go even after taking her time and money and dumping her just as his band hits the big time (he was fucking the bass player). Harper segues her anger into her writing garnering an online following for her blog ‘How to not get murdered’.
And that’s what makes The Paris Affair so compelling. Harper is savvy not just to the typical bastardry of men behaving badly, she tacitly acknowledges the ways seemingly innocuous male behaviour can become dangerous.
The Paris Affair does lots of things you’ve seen before in thrillers. There’s a dead woman and an indifferent police force. Another body turns up and this time Harper knows the victim. Yes there is likely an unknown killer stalking the streets of the city of love preying on young women.
As mystery/thriller tropes these are not original but here’s where The Paris Affair says ‘hold my bookmark’ and takes the reader down a different cobbled street.
Through Harper, Drysdale explores the dangers and benefits of our perpetually online and broadcast world. Harper’s column ‘How to not get murdered’ is a hyper reality version of the sort of situational awareness that women must live with to survive in a world where victims are more likely to be asked what they were wearing than if they are alright.
The Paris Affair shows us how in the hands of good guys and bad social media can be weaponized and will definitely have you checking whether your location services are active or not.
Pip Drysdale seems to asking the reader to look at their own desire to be seen through a multitude of social platforms and then start to question who is doing the watching.
The Paris Affair is an eminently readable novel. I didn’t hate being able to fly through the streets of Montmartre (even if vicariously) while we all site ourselves never too far from home. The writing is pacy and Harper is cynically endearing.
You could absolutely take yourself away for a few hours and read The Paris Affair for the escape of it all, but I’d suggest there’s a lot more going on here - dudebros and would-be nice guys need not apply.

Rebecca Lim is the author of more than twenty books. Her works including The Astrologer's Daughter and the Mercy series and she’s been listed for the PM’s literary awards, the Indies and Aurealis awards. An important aspect of her writing career that I want to highlight; Rebecca is a co-founder of Voices from the Intersection.
Voices from the Intersection is an initiative working to support emerging YA and children’s authors and illustrators who are First Nations, People of Colour, LGBTIQA+ or living with disability.
Maybe you’ve heard of Own Voices writing? It’s where authors from communities write about their experiences (rather than say dominant culture authors writing those experiences). It’s a really important part of our literary landscape because it means we are getting reflections of our whole community, including those people whose voices are often marginalised or not heard.
In that sense Tiger Daughter is an own voices narrative as Rebecca explores the experience of being a child of migrants and trying to balance culture and expectations from two worlds...
Wen and Henry are friends; they are drawn together as the children of migrants as well as by shared dreams of escaping their suburban school and the multiple daily acts of casual racism they face.
Wen loves to read and draw but her father sees these are frivolous pursuits. In his world Wen must be her best, she must achieve even as he undercuts her confidence that she will ever be good enough.
Henry excels in all his subjects except English. And so Wen is his confidant and his tutor. Together they dream of sitting the selective schools exam and escaping to a high school that will nurture their talents and offer them something beyond a world that constantly tells them what they are not.
Tiger Daughter is a vignette - only a small chapter in the lives of Wen and Henry (and in fact I was left wanting more as these characters very quickly become so compellingly real) But it’s a chapter of enormous significance. We see the reverberations, over a week, of a cataclysmic personal tragedy and the ways Wen and Henry must challenge the status quo of their worlds.
The novel has expansive scope; taking in culture and cultural divides within migrant homes, as well as exploring mental health and the ways personal pressures reverberate out into the world.
Even as the themes of the novel seem to encompass some of the larger debates we are concerned with as Australians the story itself is restrained in time and space.
Wen walks to and from her school, the shops and home; a tight circle that seemingly can barely expand enough for Henry’s house or a local party. Wen’s dreams are juxtaposed with the disappointment of her father, who has failed his medical specialist exam. As his world contracts, Wen is casting her eyes out on the wider world she seeks to occupy.
The world is shown as simultaneously threatening and promising. As the titular Tiger Daughter Wen must uncover, or perhaps nurture the strength she will require if she wants the life she dreams of.

Laura Jean McKay is the winner of the 2020 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
The Animals in That Country takes us north. Jean is a guide in a wildlife preserve. Irascibly anti-social, Jean drinks too much, smokes too much and picks fights online. Except for Thursdays when she cleans herself up and looks after her granddaughter. Jeans son Lee may have done a runner, but he did leave behind Kimberly and Jean is fiercely protective of Kim, even if Kim’s mum Ange has little time for Jean.
Jean and Kimberly love to plan for the day when they will have their own wildlife preserve. They carefully scrapbook their ideas, even as the news warns them of an illness spreading in the south.
Zooflu has hit the southern states hard, bringing flu-like symptoms, pink eyes and the ability to talk to animals!
Soon the park must close their gates and quarantine themselves against the pandemic, because who knows what the rescued animals will have to say about their captivity?
The Animals in That Country is part domestic drama, part road trip and part post apocalyptic dystopia.
Zooflu is greeted by many as an awakening of consciousness (who doesn’t want to hear how much their pets love them) but soon turns sour as humans find they cannot tolerate what they are being told.
McKay very quickly helps us understand that we are not the center of the universe anymore. That is if we ever were. The narrative shows us that whether we like it or not we are super-apex predators and all our illusions of benevolence fall away in the face of terrified creatures who only recognises humans as the gatekeeper of their freedom.
As the narrative progresses we see the gradual unravelling of society as people are faced with the wholesale changes Zooflu forces onto the world. There’s no way McKay could have foreseen what 2020 would confront us with and yet she’s given us a dramatic depiction of a society in flux.
The Animals in That Country poses a particularly sticky linguistic dilemma that seemed to me to resonate with all the shouty internet goings on that plague our lives. Because sure humans with Zooflu can decode what the animals around them are saying but often hearing does not equal understanding. And so we get some really strange and surrealistic communiques...
I mean why would you assume that a wallaby or a croc is going to talk to you like your best friend? Communication is about sharing something and taking the time to listen, even try to empathise with the other person.
And so it is Kimberly who teaches Jean; it’s not enough to just listen, she has to face up to the animals. Look at their bodies, their actions, their scents. Jean learns that she has to consider the animals perspectives to make sense of what they want to say.
Maybe I’m wrong, but how often do we do that day to day - actually try to take another’s perspective into consideration before we just keep talking??
The Animals in That Country represents a dystopia for some, a utopia for others. It’s a book of ideas wrapped in a page turning, breakneck narrative.
Check out my interview with Laura on the Final Draft Great Conversations podcast