We invite all Brennanites, faculty and staff, from the Dean down to incoming first-years, to read the same book.
Brennan Book Program
The idea comes from “campus books” at US universities (such as Stanford’s Three Books program). It gives everyone a chance to come to the Brennan Program with something in common. We hope it becomes a way to open up conversations between all years of the Program, and also between students and staff.
For 2024, we’ve chosen to streamline the options and stick one theme. By launching early over Summer Circle you are welcome to select one to read, reflect and claim ROJ, and be eligble for the bonus ROJ. Students can use the books for reflections, however there is a cap: two books per calendar year.
Are audiobooks or podcasts more your thing? Check if your titles are available Audible (PDF) or your preferred audiobook service.
Dual Narratives
This year's theme is “Dual Narratives”. In Australia, we have a diverse mix of people, stories, and experiences. When we get to university, we have an opportunity to learn who and what the world is really made of. This theme is about recognising the multiple and complex of experiences navigating Australian life and culture through non-fiction and fiction titles. We hope there’ll be something for everyone here. If you find a title in the wild, and think Brennan students would be keen to read, then go ahead and share it in the Brennan Collective on Facebook. We love seeing new names contribute to the program.
2024 Titles
The Shape of Dust by Lamisse Hamouda
In 2018, on his way to a family holiday in Cairo, Australian-Egyptian citizen Hazem Hamouda disappears without warning, going missing somewhere between landing and customs. His eldest daughter, Lamisse, has recently moved to Egypt from Australia to study at University of Cairo. With little Arabic and even less legal knowledge, she finds out her father has been arbitrarily arrested. Going up against the notorious Egyptian prison system, Lamisse discovers that the Australian embassy provides shockingly little support to dual citizens arrested abroad.
Shouldering the responsibility of her father’s welfare, Lamisse learns to navigate both deeply flawed systems, and freeing Hazem involves a reckoning with the two countries she’s called home – coming to terms with the prejudice and racism of the country she grew up in and the corruption in the country she was hoping to reconnect with. The Shape of Dust is a haunting appraisal of the way Australia treats its citizens, both at home and abroad.
Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran
Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2023, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is set in a nursing home nestled in the quiet suburb of Westgrove, Sydney – populated with residents with colourful histories.
But this ordinary neighbourhood is not without its prejudices. The serenity of Cinnamon Gardens is threatened by malignant forces more interested in what makes this refuge different rather than embracing the calm companionship that makes this place home to so many. As those who challenge the residents’ existence make their stand against the nursing home with devastating consequences, our characters are forced to reckon with a country divided.
Shankari Chandran is a lawyer working in the social justice field, she was raised in Canberra and has lived in London working in Law. She now resides in Australia, and is active in both writing and law.
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta
Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from an Indigenous perspective. He asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently?
Sand Talk provides a template for living. It’s about how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It’s about how we learn and how we remember. It’s about talking to everybody and listening carefully. It’s about finding different ways to look at things.
Most of all it’s about Indigenous thinking, and how it can save the world.
Tell Me Again by Amy Thunig
For years, Amy Thunig thought she knew all the details about the day she was born, often demanding that the story of her birth be retold. Years later, heavily pregnant with her own first child, she learns what really happened that day. It's a tale that exemplifies many of the events of her early life, where circumstances sometimes dictated that things be slightly different from how they might seem – including what is meant by her dad being away for ‘ work' and why her legal last name differs from her family's. In this remarkable memoir, Amy narrates her journey through childhood and adolescence, growing up with parents who struggled with addiction and incarceration. She reveals the importance of extended family and community networks when your immediate loved ones are dealing with endemic poverty and intergenerational trauma. In recounting her experiences, she shows how the stories we tell about ourselves can help to shape and sustain us. Tell Me Again will captivate, move and inspire readers with its candour and insight.
I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness
Austin Channing Brown's first encounter with a racialised America came at age 7, when she discovered her parents named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. Growing up in majority-white schools, organizations, and churches, Austin writes, "I had to learn what it means to love blackness," a journey that led to a lifetime spent navigating America's racial divide as a writer, speaker and expert who helps organizations practice genuine inclusion. In a time when nearly all institutions (schools, churches, universities, businesses) claim to value "diversity" in their mission statements, I'm Still Here is a powerful account of how and why our actions so often fall short of our words. I'm Still Here is an illuminating look at how white, middle-class, Evangelicalism has participated in an era of rising racial hostility, inviting the reader to confront apathy, recognize God's ongoing work in the world, and discover how blackness--if we let it--can save us all.
Songs for the Dead and the Living by Sara M Saleh
When the ground beneath your feet is always shifting, how can you ever know where you belong?
Jamilah has always believed she knows where her home is: in a house above a paint shop on the outskirts of Beirut, with her large, chaotic, loving family. But she soon learns that as Palestinian refugees, her family's life in Lebanon is precarious, and they must try to blend in even as they fight to retain their identity. When conflict comes to Beirut, Jamilah's world fractures, and the family is forced to flee to Cairo: another escape, and another slip further away from Palestine, the homeland to which they cannot return. In the end, Jamilah will have to choose between holding on to everything she knows and pursuing a life she can truly call her own.
Songs for the Dead and the Living is a coming-of-age tale played out across generations and continents, from Palestine to Australia. Sara M Saleh is an award-winning writer/poet, human rights lawyer, and the daughter of migrants from Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been widely published nationally in English and Arabic.
Anam by André Dao
A grandson tries to learn the family story. But what kind of story is it? Is it a prison memoir, about the grandfather imprisoned without charge or trial by a revolutionary government? Is it an oral history of the grandmother left behind to look after the children? Or is it a love story? A detective tale?
Moving from 1930s Hanoi through a series of never-ending wars and displacements to Saigon, Paris, Melbourne and Cambridge, Anam is a novel about memory and inheritance, colonialism and belonging, home and exile.
Anam blends fiction and essay, theory and everyday life to imagine that which has been repressed, left out, and forgotten. The grandson mines his family and personal stories to turn over ideas that resonate with all of us around place and home, legacy and expectation, ambition and sacrifice. As he sifts through letters, photographs, government documents and memories, he has his own family to think about- a partner and an infant daughter. Is there a way to remember the past that creates a future for them? Or does coming home always involve a certain amount of forgetting?
God Forgets About the Poor by Peter Polites
I will tell you why you should draft my story. Because migrant stories are broken. Some parts in a village where we washed our clothing with soot. Some parts in big cities working in factories. How we starved for food in Greece and starved for Greece in Australia. You don’t know the first thing about me. A son can never see his mother as a woman. You will only see me in relation to you. I have had a thousand lives before you were even a thought. Hospitalised as a child for an entire year. Living as an adult without family in Athens when the colonels took control. Start when I was born. Describe the village and how beautiful it was. On the side of a mountain but in the middle of a forest. If we walked to a certain point on the edge, we could look over the valley and see rain clouds coming. Sometimes we would see a cat on a roof, we read that as a warning of a storm. When we looked down, we saw the dirt, which was just as rich as the sky. My island, your island, our island. Sometimes I think God forgot about us because we were poor. A stunning new novel from the author of Down the Hume and The Pillars , God Forgets About the Poor is a love story to a migrant mother, whose story is as important as any ever told.
Storytellers: questions, answers and the craft of journalism
Leigh Sales is one of Australia’s most accomplished journalists, having anchored the ABC’s flagship 7.30 program for twelve years. She has been a foreign correspondent, hosted Lateline and anchored numerous elections for the ABC. In this book, she turns her interviewing skills onto her own profession, those usually asking the questions: the journalists.
In ten sections – from News Reporting to Editing, via Investigative, Commentary and of course Interviewing – Sales takes us on a tour of the profession, letting the leaders in their field talk direct to us about how they get their leads, survive in war zones, write a profile, tell a story with pictures, and keep the show on the road. A who’s-who of Australian journalism – including Lisa Millar, Kate McClymont, Hedley Thomas, Trent Dalton, Benjamin Law, Tracy Grimshaw, Richard Fidler, David Speers, Stan Grant, Niki Savva, Waleed Aly, Annabel Crabb, Karl Stefanovic and Mia Freedman – talk candidly about their greatest lessons and their trade secrets.
A fascinating insight into a vital and much-misunderstood profession, Storytellers is a book for anyone who’s ever wanted to be a journalist, or even just wondered how the news and stories are made.
Borderland by Graham Akhurst
Jono, a city-born Indigenous teenager is trying to figure out who he really is. After graduating, Jono scores a gig at the Aboriginal Performing Arts Centre and an incredible opportunity comes knocking -- interning with a documentary crew. Their mission? To promote a big government mining project in the wild western Queensland desert. The details are sketchy, and the land is rumoured to be sacred. But who cares? Jono is stoked just to be part of something meaningful. Plus, he gets to be the lead presenter!
Life takes a turn when they land in Gambari, a tiny rural town far from the hustle and bustle of the city. Suddenly, Jono's intuition becomes his best guide. He's haunted by an eerie omen of death, battling suffocating panic attacks, and even experiencing visions of Wudun -- a malevolent spirit from the Dreaming. Borderland is a heart-pounding horror gothic that follows Jono on an epic quest to find himself in the face of unbelievable challenges. Graham Akhurst is a UTS creative writing lecturer in the School of Communication, and works in the Centre for the Advancement of Indigenous Knowledge (CAIK).
Previous book suggestions
Feel free to write a reflection on our past books including:
Evicted: Poverty And Profit In The American City' by Matthew Desmond, ‘The End of Policing’ by Alex S. Vitale, ‘Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison, See what you made me do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse’ by Jess Hill, ‘Eggshell Skull’ by Bri Lee, ‘What the Colonists Never Knew: A History of Aboriginal Sydney’ by Dennis Foley and Peter Read, ‘Truganini’ by Cassandra Pybus, ‘Treaty’ by George Williams and Harry Hobbs, ‘The Truth Hurts’ by Andrew Boe, ‘Forgotten War’ by Henry Reynolds, ‘Upturn: A better normal after COVID-19’ by Tanya Plibersek, ‘Woman and Leadership: Real Lives, Real Lessons’ by Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, A Stranger Truth: Lessons in Love, Leadership and Courage from India's Sex Workers by Ashok Alexander, ‘The Tyranny of Merit: What's become of the Common Good?’ by Michael Sandel, ‘Greed is Dead: Politics after Individualism’ by Paul Collier and John Kay, ‘Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present’ by Yanis Varoufakis, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr, ‘The Yield’ by Tara June Winch, ‘The Nickel Boys’ by Colsen Whitehead, ‘My Dark Vanessa’ by Kate Elizabeth Russell, ‘How Much of These Hills Is Gold’ by C Pam Zhang, ‘Saltwater’ by Cathy McLennan, ‘Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland’ by Patrick Radden Keefe, ‘There Are No Children Here’ by Alex Kotlowitz., ‘Too much lip’ by Melissa Lugashenko, ‘Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice’ by Bill Browder, ‘The Testaments’ by Margaret Atwood, ‘Australia Day’ by Melanie Cheng, ‘The Color Purple’ by Alice Walker, ‘East West Street” by Philippe Sands, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ by Margaret Atwood, 'The Tall Man' by Chloe Hooper, 'This Changes Everything' by Naomi Klein, 'Talking To My Country', by Stan Grant, ‘Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?’ by Bruce Pascoe, The Children Act’ by Ian McEwan, ‘We are All Completely Beside Ourselves’ by Karen Joy Fowler, ‘This House of Grief’ by Helen Garner (here’s a few thought starters), ‘Exit West’ by Mohsin Hamid or ‘Never Let Me Go’ by Kazuo Ishiguro (here’s a few points for discussion).
2022
Black and Blue: A Memoir of Racism and Resistance (Scribe 2021) - Veronica Gorrie, The Mother Wound by Amani Haydar (2021 UTS Law Alumni Award winner), Reasonable Doubt by Xanthé Mallett, Reasonable Doubt by Xanthé Mallett, Dead in the Water: A Very Angry Book about our greatest environmental catastrophe…the death of the Murray Darling Basin by Richard Beasley, Coming of Age in the War on Terror by Randa Abdel-Fattah, Why Weren't We Told? By Henry Reynolds, The Kabul Peace House by Mark Isaacs, How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division - Elif shafak, Transgender History (Second Edition) : The Roots of Today's Revolution, Queer: A Graphic History by Meg John Barker, Breeder by Honni van Rijswijk, After Story by Larissa Behrendt (available on audible), The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris (available on audible), Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen (available on audible), Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (available on audible), Steam Pigs by Melissa Lucashenko, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division by Elif Shafak (available on audible), Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (available on audible), Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (available on audible), Apeirogon by Colum McCann (available on audible), China Room by Sunjeev Sahota (available on audible), A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam (available on audible), The Promise by Damon Galgut (available on audible), The Fortune Men by Nadia Mohamed (available on audible).
2023
Still Alive, Safdar Ahmed (2021), The White Girl, T. Birch (2020) (available on audible), The Prophets, R. Jones Jr. (2022) (available on audible), The Keepers, A. Campbell (2022), Son of Sin, O. Sakr (2022) (available on audible), Red, F. McLean (2022) (available on audible), Pemulwuy, E. Willmot (2021), One Hundred Days, A. Pung (2021) (available on audible), Love & Virtue, D. Reid (2022) (available on audible), Jesustown, P. Daley (2022), In The Dream House: A Memoir, C. M. Machado (2020) (available on audible), Horse, G. Brooks (2022) (available on audible), Enclave, C. G. Coleman (2022), Cut, S. White (2022), Common People, T. Birch (2022), Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray, A. Heiss (2022) (available on audible), All That’s Left Unsaid, T. Lien (2022) (available on audible), The Woman President: Leadership, law and legacy for Women Based on Experiences from South and Southeast Asia, R. Vijeyarasa (2022), The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, R. Skloot (2017) (available on audible), The Hard Road Out: One Woman’s Escape from North Korea, J. Park, S. Chai and S. Baldwin-Beneich (2022) (available on audible), Sister Girl: Reflections on Tiddaism, Identity and Reconciliation, J. Huggins (2022), Net Privacy: How We Can Be Free in an Age of Surveillance, S. Molitorisz (2020), Know My Name: The Survivor of the Stanford Sexual Assault Case Tells Her Story, C. Miller (2020) (available on audible), Justice and Love: A Philosophical Dialogue, M. Zournazi & R. Williams (2020), His Name is George Floyd: One man’s life and the struggle for racial justice, R. Samuels and T. Olorunnipa (2022) (available on audible), Don’t Look Away: A memoir of identity and acceptance, D. Laidley (2022) (available on audible), Dropbear, E. Aruluen (2021), Butterfly, Y. Mardini (2022) (available on audible), Australia Day, S. Grant (2021) (available on audible), Another Day in the Colony, C. Watego (2021) (available on audible).