A weekly show about the books we love and the stories behind them. Hear the best writers from Australia and around the world talk about their lives and their work.

Read This Podcast

Michael sits down with Andrew for a conversation about the Dickensian world he has created in his new novel and why he considers it his most optimistic book yet.

Andrew O’Hagan’s Big Dickensian Energy

Across half a dozen novels, Andrew O’Hagan has made a name for himself as an author of delicacy and grace, painting the community he comes from, in Scotland’s west, with tenderness and wry, affectionate humour. His latest, Caledonian Road, follows art historian Campbell Flynn. A man who is at a turning point and is about to come up against his own downfall. This week, Michael sits down with Andrew for a conversation about the Dickensian world he has created in his new novel and why he considers it his most optimistic book yet.

Reading list:

Our Fathers, Andrew O’Hagan, 1999

Be Near Me, Andrew O’Hagan, 2006

Mayflies, Andrew O’Hagan, 2020

Caledonian Road, Andrew O’Hagan, 2024

Lives of Girls and Women, Alice Munro, 1971

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Alice Munro, 2001

Dear Life, Alice Munro, 2012

You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store.

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Guest: Andrew O’Hagan

As if finding the time to read wasn’t hard enough, working out what book to pick up next can be a nightmare. In bookshops and libraries, browsing through book reviews and looking at that tower on the bedside table, choice paralysis grips us all.

That’s where Read This comes in. Hosted by editor of The Monthly and lifelong book tragic Michael Williams, this is a new weekly show about the books we love and the stories behind them. Each week Michael and an array of readers, writers and chatty book people will share their thoughts on the reading that’s worth your time: from that buzzy new release to the classic that you’ve never quite been persuaded by.

Surprising, insightful and passionately opinionated, Read This promises insightful conversations with the smartest, funniest readers and writers we know and in-depth interviews with the best Australian and international authors talking about their lives and their work. You’ll never be left wondering what to read next.