Two popular Australian authors and journalists are on a road trip! Please join us at your Port Macquarie Library on Wednesday 17th September at 6.30pm.
Michael Brissenden is an author and journalist. His first book of fiction, The List, was published in 2017. A second thriller, Dead Letters, also features the Federal investigator Sidney Allen and was published by Hachette Australia Books in March 2021. Smoke was published by Affirm Press in 2024, and his latest book, Dust, will be released in August 2025.
Michael was a journalist and foreign correspondent with the ABC for 35 years. He was posted to Moscow, Brussels and Washington, and worked in Canberra for many years in various roles, including as the political editor for ABC-TV’s 7.30 and as a reporter with the ABC’s investigative television documentary program Four Corners. Michael has published four previous books including his highly successful 2024 release, Smoke.
Following the acclaimed success of Smoke, one of Australia’s most talked-about crime writers and celebrated journalist Michael returns with Dust – a haunting and propulsive new thriller that shines a light on the desolate edges of society.
Written with the sharp eye and investigative prowess that have defined his decades-long career in journalism, Michael brings the same depth and urgency to Dust as he did to Smoke. As with his previous novel, inspiration for the book was drawn from both international and Australian news, including disinformation and rise of conspiracy groups, organised crime, corruption, and the discovery of bodies in a lake.
Michael reflects on the ideas behind the book: ‘I really wanted to write a gritty book set in Australia that examined disadvantage, poverty, extremism and the pressures placed on small communities at a time of rapid and often unnerving change. One of the big themes in Dust is the different ways the energy transition is affecting different communities, the disinformation that has taken hold around that issue and the often disproportionate cost and the different expectations experienced by people in the cities and those in the regions. Many of the main characters in this book exist on the fringe, they live in caravan parks and scrape by as best they can. Life is tough out there but not completely without humour, love or tenderness.’
With richly drawn characters, haunting landscapes inspired by regional New South Wales and a plot that grips from the first page to the last, Dust cements Brissenden’s place as one of best voices in crime fiction today. At once a compelling mystery and a searing social commentary, it explores the fragility of political identity, the legacy of trauma, and the unyielding forces of corruption in a world where lives are lived on the fringe, and nothing is as it seems.
Paul Daley is a celebrated Australian author, journalist and essayist.
His books have been finalists in major Australian literary awards including the Prime Minister’s History Prize, the Nib, the Manning Clark House Cultural Awards and the Indie Awards.
Paul Daley stands outside an empty tunnel walkway covered in graffiti. Dressed in black with his arms oh his hips, he smiles at the camera.
His non-fiction books include the bestselling Beersheba (MUP), a book that blends history, travelogue and memoir into a fast-paced, compelling narrative about the 1917 charge of the Australian Light Horse in World War One, and Canberra – a literary take on Australia’s most controversial city, part of NewSouth’s celebrated “City Series’’.
He is the author of three novels, including the critically-praised Jesustown (Allen & Unwin, 2022) about cultural theft, Australian Black-white frontier violence, anthropology and the making of history. Australian Book Review praised the novel as “akin to an Antipodean version of Heart of Darkness’’.
He has contributed essays to a wide range of publications and collections, including Meanjin, Griffith Review and Best Australian Science Writing.
Paul has worked continuously as a journalist since 1987. He was a founding staff-member of The Sunday Age, Melbourne, in 1989, where he wrote investigative stories about crime and news features before being appointed the paper’s Canberra-based national affairs correspondent. He later worked at The Age as the paper’s federal political correspondent and then as its roving foreign affairs and defence correspondent, covering conflict and unrest in the Asia-Pacific, including coups and insurrections in Fiji and the Solomon Islands, and the transition to independence of Timor Leste. From 2001 to 2004, he worked as a Fairfax correspondent in London, covering a wide range of stories across the United Kingdom and Europe. For four years, Paul wrote long-form journalism about politics as national affairs editor for The Bulletin, Australia’s oldest news magazine at the time of its closure in 2008.
Since 2013, Paul has worked for The Guardian, writing features and regular columns, often about Australian history and national identity. He has won numerous journalism awards, including two Walkley Awards – for Investigative Journalism and also for Indigenous Journalism for his coverage of Australian cultural amnesia on frontier violence and the historic theft of Aboriginal ancestral remains. He has also won Kennedy Awards for Indigenous Journalism and Best Columnist, and is the collaborative winner of the NSW Premier’s History Award for The Guardian’s ‘The Killing Times’ series on frontier massacres.
Paul has also contributed to collections of short Australian fiction. He co-wrote two popular plays, The Hansard Monologues (2013 and 2016), using excerpts from Hansard – the official transcript of Federal Parliament. Paul grew up in and went to school in Melbourne. He attained his humanities degree from the University of Melbourne in 1987. Despite having lived away from Melbourne for 30 years, he remains a dedicated Collingwood supporter (his storied grandfather, who he has written loads about, was himself a player for Richmond and Collingwood – so Paul reckons he didn’t really have a choice!). He now lives in Sydney with his family, including two much-loved and very needy dogs – Olive (a Collie-blue cattle dog cross) and Ronda, a pure breed black Labrador. He reads widely and appears regularly at bookshop events and writers’ festivals. His latest gripping novel, The Leap, (Simon & Schuster’s Summit Books, 2025), will be published on the 29th of July.
THE LEAP – Daley
A white-knuckle ride into a nightmarish outback setting, where a man searching for mercy encounters a town baying for violent vengeance. A pulse-pounding literary thriller with a stunning final twist.
Welcome to The Leap, an outback town fuelled by fear, churning with corruption, prejudice and misogyny – and blighted by its inescapable history of frontier violence. Into this nightmarish morass falters traumatised British diplomat, Benedict Fotheringham-Gaskill. He’s on his first Australian mission, one seemingly straightforward enough – until he arrives in The Leap to battle a town conspiring against him. The Leap is baying for violent vengeance over the alleged murder of the celebrated daughter of a powerful local grazier. But Benedict is on an impossible quest for the opposite: mercy for the young woman’s two alleged female killers. The townspeople will challenge and threaten Benedict at every turn as he fights for justice, his future, his sanity – and ultimately his life. From the acclaimed author of Jesustown comes a pulse-pounding throat-punch of a literary thriller, filled with humour, horror, blistering historical truths, indelible characters and a final twist that will take your breath away.
DUST – Brissenden
Lake Herrod, a once-thriving community, now lies in the shadow of a nearly dry lake. The town, like the water, is evaporating and its residents are left clinging to what little remains.
When Aaron Love discovers a fresh corpse near the cracked lakebed – along with evidence his missing father is alive and linked to a web of organised crime – he is thrust into a world of deception, injustice and betrayal. With the town on the brink of collapse, Aaron and a haunted detective, Martyn Kravets, uncover a web of conspiracy that reaches far beyond the small community.
