Celebrities raved about her debut novel. Now Madeleine Gray is back

Celebrities raved about her debut novel. Now Madeleine Gray is back

After winning over Nigella and Gillian Anderson, what’s left – apart from writing another great book?

Melanie Kembrey

NOVEMBER 27, 2025

Rewind two years, when Green Dot was practically part of the summer scenery – wedged into beach bags, sunning itself on shelves and earning a reputation as the Australian debut of the season. Madeleine Gray’s first novel, a whip-smart, melancholy-funny story about a young comment moderator who has an affair with an older newsroom colleague, arrived with rare momentum. Word of mouth spread, booksellers championed it, and the celebrity praise rolled in: Nigella Lawson called Gray “a major talent”, while Gillian Anderson deemed her “a dazzling writer”.

 

FICTION

Review

Green Dot by Madeleine Gray review – witty tale of obsessive love

This article is more than 1 year old

A young millennial begins an affair with her fortysomething boss, in a debut that’s nicely ironic while avoiding nihilism

Madeleine Feeny

Thu 1 Feb 2024

Why do smart women expect their lovers to leave their wives, despite overwhelming evidence that the contrary is more likely? Australian critic Madeleine Gray is the latest writer to explore this question, in an acutely witty debut that charts, in painful detail, the inexorable arc of an affair between a disaffected millennial and her older, married boss.

 

BOOK OF THE DAY

Review

Chosen Family by Madeleine Gray review – friends, lovers or something in between?

From classmates to co-parents, the changing dynamics of a female friendship are astutely observed in a novel that explores the boundaries between love, lust and companionship

Joanna Quinn
16 January 2026

Australian author Madeleine Gray’s award-winning debut novel Green Dotwas a smart, funny tale of a doomed office affair. Her new novel, Chosen Family, is a smart, funny tale of a complicated, life-changing relationship between two women.

 

BOOK OK THE DAY

Review

On Censorship by Ai Weiwei review – are we losing the battle for free speech? 

China isn’t the only country imposing limits on creative expression, argues the provocative artist

Sukhdev Sandhu

Thu 22 Jan 2026 

Chinese culture is the opposite of provocation,” Ai Weiwei once told an interviewer. “It tries to seek harmony in human nature and society.” Harmony has never been his bag. Provocation though? In spades. As a student at the Beijing Film Academy in the late 1970s, he joined an artist group called Stars that had a slogan: “We Demand Political Democracy and Artistic Freedom”. In the 1990s, returning to Beijing after a decade in downtown New York, he and a couple of friends published and distributed samizdat-style books devoted to off-piste, often-political art of the kind that government censors tend to fear.

 

BOOK OF THE DAY

Review

Vigil by George Saunders review – will a world-wrecking oil tycoon repent?

The ghosts of Lincoln in the Bardo return to confront a dying oil man’s destructive legacy – but this time they feel like a gimmick

George Saunders is back in the Bardo – perhaps stuck there. Vigil, his first novel since 2017’s Booker prize‑winning Lincoln in the Bardo, returns to that indeterminate space between life and death, comedy and grief, moral inquiry and narrative hijinks. Once again, the living are largely absent, and the dead are meddlesome and chatty. They have bones to pick.

 

Julian Barnes

Book of the day

Review

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes review – this final novel is a slippery affair

Memoir merges with fiction as the author reflects on failed love, ageing and the end of life in this last instalment to his writing career

Alex Clark
Monday 19 January 2026

Julian Barnes tells us that this is his final book, so that’s one departure accounted for – the last instalment of a writing career spanning 45 years, encompassing novels and short stories, memoirs and essays, biography, travel writing, translation and even a little pseudonymous detective fiction. Many of these works turn up here, whether obliquely or overtly, referred to through subject matter, style, tone or connotation; in the contemporary cultural argot, which Barnes is fond of examining, these writerly winks might be known as Easter eggs.

Julian Barnes Looks at Art

 

Julian Barnes, pictured here in 1995, has published “Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art,” a collection of writings that previously appeared in a variety of publications over the last few decades.Photograph by Ulf Andersen / Getty

Julian Barnes Looks at Art

By Cody Delistraty

October 14, 2015

Julian Barnes says that, while he “has taught himself a fair amount about painting over fifty years,” he “only really has one shot in his locker about each painter.” He told me this on a recent afternoon, at his home in London. We were talking about his new book, “Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art,” a selection of articles that previously appeared in a variety of publications over the last few decades. “When I get asked to, say, review a biography of Braque or go and see a show of Manet, I think, I’ve only got one go at this, because I don’t have more than that amount of thoughts about the person,” he said.

Sex, death and parrots: Julian Barnes’s best fiction – ranked!

 

Julian Barnes by David Levine

Sex, death and parrots: Julian Barnes’s best fiction – ranked!

As the Booker prize-winning author prepares to publish his final novel at 80, we assess his finest work

John Self

Monday 19 January 2026

10 Duffy (1980)

Duffy is the first in a series of crime novels about a bisexual private eye that Barnes published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. It came out the same year as Barnes’s debut novel proper, Metroland, but where that took seven years to write, this took 10 days. Not that it shows: this “refreshingly nasty” (as Barnes’s friend Martin Amis put it) crime caper is beguilingly well written, with passages that display all of Barnes’s perception and wit. The plot of reverse blackmail and the shocking climax only add to the fun.
Sample line “Two in the morning is when sounds travel for ever, when a sticky window makes a soft squeak and three Panda cars hear it from miles away.”

Anthony Hopkins remains an enigma

 

Anthony Hopkins remains an enigma

We Did OK, Kid is both a tell-all and tell-nothing memoir

By Kate Mossman
3 November 2025

Therapy plays havoc with the modern celebrity memoir – all the mess of life and fame, so neatly processed. The books you really want to read, big of print and gaudy of title, are those in which motivations remain half glimpsed, major life events are left hanging in a sentence or two, and culpability is met with a shrug of the shoulders. Like Burt Bacharach’s Anyone Who Had a Heart(2013), where, unable or unwilling to look inwards, the American songwriter handed over a chapter to all his ex-wives and printed their testimonies in a different font.