Cassie McCullagh

Her books include Strange Museums, Suck My Toes, Dirt and Indelible Ink.

I really like the way that fiction like this, when you live in the city that it's written about, makes you sort of retrace histories and geographies.

And so it took us into the slums and the underworld of Sydney in the 1930s.

Hannah, Kent, you read it as well.

And Tom and Cassie, this is also making me think about her research and the way in which any stories of an underworld and an underclass are also stories of cops and the legal system as well.

And in Iris, there was a lot about early women members of the police force.

And in this one, I mean, she's obviously moving ahead in time.

But is she also making a decision about moving into the men's story in this one?

I know.

I have my pencil and I'm pointing, which is probably a bit rude.

Look, the other thing about all of those places where people were going and dancing and meeting up with, you know, visiting sailors, it made me think of Come In Spinner by Dymphna Cusack and Florence James where they're, you know, which is a strongly class-based story of Australia, of Hotel Australia, of princes.

And it, of course, was written in the period.

But it almost feels like perhaps you could read these books from the period side by side with The Trap and see how what she's doing is taking the stories that we're familiar with and inverting them and playing with them in a sort of satisfying way, expanding the bookshelf.

And that book is The Trap by Fiona Kelly McGregor, published by Picador.

This is ABC Radio National's weekly book review program and podcast, The Bookshelf, with me, Kate Evans, with Cassie McCullough, and our guests this week, theatre writer Tom Wright and novelist Hannah Kent.

And next on our book pile, an elegant offering from Deborah Adelaide.

Now, where does this one fit?

This new book, When I Am 64, there's many different ways of reading it, and I think that's part of what Hannah and I will be talking about.

But she has this very useful note at the end of the book where she says, "'This is a work of autofiction, based on the real story of my friendship with Gabrielle Carey, but shaped with the tools of fiction and expressing truths that are uniquely mine.'"

So she's calling it a novel, she's calling it autofiction, but it is possible to read it as memoir as well, because this is a book that's based on her decades-long friendship with the writer Gabrielle Carey, who died by suicide in 2023.