Emily Maguire

Amazing program and an amazing experience.

I was researching my new novel, which is going to be out next year, and the primary novelist

sort of area of my research was around hoarding disorder and hoarding behaviour which isn't an immediately obvious match for an institute that's about health and medicine but there's a lot of intersections with the work going on there to do with you know how do you get people to change when they don't want to change with things around smoking and eating and in my case hoarding how do you

you know, if someone thinks they don't have a problem at all, is there really anything much that people who love them or the state or a doctor or anyone else can do to actually change things for them?

Well, it's really interesting when I was sort of doing some edits on it when the great –

toilet paper rampage was going on and suddenly all the headlines and everyone was talking about hoarding and it was nothing like anything to do with what I was writing and I sort of had a big panic that hoarding's just suddenly got this new meaning and this new resonance with everyone but it's just to do with running out of toilet paper but I think we've moved on from there a bit and definitely I think more people are spending so much time in their homes that a lot of people have been getting rid of a lot of stuff.

Oh, I've had a fabulous reading year.

I've been really escaping into reading.

But most recently, I've just absolutely loved a book that it's not out until October, but I was lucky enough to get an early copy.

It's called Song of the Crocodile.

It's the debut novel by Nardi Simpson.

Some listeners will know Nardi as half of this wonderful Indigenous folk duo, the Stiff Gins.

But Nadi's first novel, it's just a stunner.

It follows several generations of an Aboriginal family in a small town in country New South Wales.

So it's sort of this kind of classic intergenerational saga, but that is really selling it short to just describe it in that way.

It does huge things thematically, you know, especially in terms of ongoing consequences of colonisation and

The characters are just so real and written with just incredible warmth and insight and the story is just gripping and this gorgeous musical writing.

So it just feels like this kind of really effortless read.

It's so pleasurable and then I sort of finished it and I was like shaking.

It's an incredible book and I can't wait until I can actually physically push it into people's hands next month.