Cassie McCullagh

Well, people outside Sydney may not know that I also do a daily show on ABC Radio Sydney.

And so I interviewed a number of the guests in the course of that program during the week.

Jeff Goodell, who wrote a book called The Water Will Come, Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilised World, which was terrifying, but he was fantastic.

Also, Angela Saini, who's written a book called Inferior, The True Power of Women and the Science That Shows It, basically pointing out some very obvious mistakes that science has made over the last couple of hundred years.

But I think the one that I loved the most, one that I'd like to recommend to bookshelf listeners is...

is one called Janesville, an American story.

Now, this is by Amy Goldstein, who is a Washington Post reporter.

She's been one for 30 years, won Pulitzer Prizes, et cetera.

But she, at the end of the GFC, went to one small town.

and followed their story for 10 years, embedded herself in the community there.

They had a General Motors plant that closed down, 8,000, 9,000 jobs went.

And it's the most riveting, touching, beautiful portrayal of a community in crisis and what happens and these lives you would never expect to care about, but it's very touching.

Well, time now on the bookshelf to turn to one of the big novels of the year, Michael Ondaatje's Warlight.

It's just released this week.

Now, Stephen, it's because when we spoke to you earlier this year about some of the big books ahead of us that you were so looking forward to this novel and that we wanted to have you back.

And also because you said at the time that you thought of him as a writer's writer.

And I want to hear...

how you think of that now in the context of this book.

But let's set the book up a bit for people because they won't have read it.

It's called Warlight.