Cassie McCullagh

Thank you both for being with us on the bookshelf today.

It's been an absolute delight.

Tamara Neal is a lector in classical Greek and Latin and her position is funded by the Aroni Foundation and the Kudos Foundation.

Maria Takalanda is a poet, a writer and an academic at Deakin University.

Her last book of poems was called The End of the World, which is kind of appropriate.

Thanks again.

Well, now to just another book to throw on the pile, Kate Evans, and it's a new one by an Australian journalist and commentator, Bridie Jabbour.

You might have read her work in The Guardian Australia.

Well, now she's written a novel as well.

The book is called The Way Things Should Be.

It's perhaps a comedy of manners, very bad manners if that's the case, Kate.

Which is somewhere, I think, in kind of the table lands of New South Wales, yeah.

Poppy is the younger sister.

She's made a career out of being irritating.

She really knows how to hang on to her resentment and she's got a sharp tongue.

And then there's Finn, the brother, who'll do almost anything to avoid a fight.

So he's apparently the sweetest of the lot, but we're not really quite sure.

In fact, Kate, I thought he was a psychopath.

Well, I think this is firmly in the 20-something chick lit territory.

It's sort of madcap and scatterbrained and a rollicking ride through a moment in the life of a highly dysfunctional family.