Robert Lukens

She's almost like a professional whiner.

And there's one sentence that I kept on coming back to, and it said, Dora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it.

Yeah.

But this is also a book that can creep up on you.

If you resist it at first in the way that many first-time readers do, it can suddenly change what you think is going on.

So this is what one listener told us.

He's one of our regular correspondents.

So let's meet him.

And Neville did tell us that he ended up reading this book until 3am.

He was sort of transfixed in spite of himself.

Thank you, Neville.

Reading Shirley Hazard's The Transit of Venus, along with novelist Robert Lukens and literary biographer Bernadette Brennan.

And since we had that discussion, a new collection of the collected short stories of the late Shirley Hazard has been published by Hachette, and it's one of the books on my own summer reading pile.

And now on the bookshelf, we'll stay with those same guests, Robert and Bernadette, and turn to another piece of Australian fiction, Joan London's The Golden Age, set in Perth in the early 1950s during a polio epidemic, in a children's home where children with the disease were separated from their families.

And that's where we meet our hero, a 12-year-old boy named Frank.

Here's the author herself, Joan London, describing him.

Joan London speaking to me in 2015, just after the book was published.

Robert, we meet this boy, Frank Gold, and he starts out in another institution where he meets what he thinks might be his future, his calling.

So what is it and what happens?

And there is such a delicate echoing of other things and other histories in these characters.