The May Better Reading Book Club Live Panel… Caroline Overington and Michael Robotham

“Passions run high when you’re talking about Ferrante and her work, particularly her sensational, highly addictive Neapolitan novels, which paint a portrait of a consuming female friendship against the backdrop of social and political upheaval in Italy from the 1950s to the present day.”  See more of this Vanity Fair article here

For the next Better Reading Book Club Live  we’ve got two of Australia’s best loved novelists, Caroline Overington and Michael Robotham, joining Cheryl Akle on the sofa. We’ll be discussing the first of Elena Ferrante’s four ‘Neapolitan’ novels, My Brilliant Friend.

Caroline Overington is a Walkley Award winning journalist and the author of eleven books, including most recently our Book of the Week, The One Who Got Away. She also penned Last Woman Hanged, which won the Davitt Award for True Crime Writing in 2015 and I Came To Say Goodbye, shortlisted for both Book of the Year and Fiction Book of the Year at the 2012 Australian Book Industry Awards.  She has profiled some of the world’s most famous women including Hillary Clinton and Oprah Winfrey.

Michael Robotham is an award winning crime fiction writer who has been described by Stephen King as ‘an absolute master.’ His most recent novel, Close Your Eyes was a Better Reading Book of the Week last year. He has twice won Australia’s Ned Kelly Award for best crime novel, for Lost (2005) and Shatter (2008). He was shortlisted for the British Crime Writer’s Award (CWA) Steel Dagger in 2007 and 2008. Last year he joined the ranks of John le Carre, Ruth Rendell, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, when he won the CWA Gold Dagger for the best crime novel for Life or Death, only the second Australian to win. He beat both  Stephen King and J.K. Rowling (writing as Robert Galbraith) to the prize!

The next Better Reading Book Club will be on Wednesday 25th May at 8pm AEST on the Better Reading Facebook page. We had so much great feedback from our last book club and we’ve taken all this onboard. At your request, we’ll extend the segment to a full half hour and we’ll take more comments and questions from our online audience.

See more on Elena Ferrante’s brilliant ‘Neapolitan quartet’

For Book Club Frequently Asked Questions click here.

Download the READING NOTES for My Brilliant Friend here