Books Set in Australia: The Essential Reading Guide
June 28, 2026
Australia has a literature that doesn’t quite look like any other country’s. The landscape is genuinely alien to readers from elsewhere — not wild in a European way, not frontier in an American way, but strange and ancient and indifferent to human ambition. The best Australian fiction puts this landscape to work. Here’s a guide to the books and series that do it best.
Crime fiction set in Australia
Australian crime fiction is some of the best in the world, and it’s anchored to specific places in ways that matter to the story.
Rural Australia — drought, heat, isolation
Jane Harper has defined this space. The Dry is set in a small Victorian town during the worst drought in living memory — a community protecting itself from examination, a death that might be murder, and a federal agent named Aaron Falk who grew up there and has not returned since. The heat is almost physical on the page.
Force of Nature takes five women into the Giralang Ranges; not all of them come out. The Survivors moves to the Tasmanian coast — colder, wilder, but just as tightly wound. Harper’s Australia is rural, claustrophobic, and quietly devastating.
Melbourne — city as character
No writer has written Melbourne like Peter Temple. The Jack Irish series follows a Melbourne lawyer-turned-debt-collector through the city’s underworld, its racing world, and its pubs. The books are compressed, brilliant, funny, and shot through with a specific Melbourne bitterness about gentrification and lost working-class communities.
1920s Melbourne — Phryne Fisher
Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher is set in 1920s Melbourne — a city still close to its colonial past, already the most sophisticated in the country, and full of contradictions. Phryne is a wealthy, brilliant, and definitively liberated woman who solves crimes with style. The period detail is genuine; the setting is rendered with real love.
Full Phryne Fisher reading order →
Queensland and New South Wales
Candice Fox sets her darkest solo work in Far North Queensland — the tropics, the heat, communities that are as much jungle as suburb. Crimson Lake takes a disgraced police officer to a town that becomes both refuge and trap.
Michael Robotham’s Joe O’Loughlin series ranges across New South Wales and beyond — a clinical psychologist who is himself unravelling, consulting on cases that tend to be as much about the perpetrators’ psychology as the investigation.
Literary fiction set in Australia
Suburban Sydney — Liane Moriarty
Liane Moriarty writes about Australian suburban life with precision and wit. Big Little Lies (set on the northern beaches of Sydney) is the most famous, but Nine Perfect Strangers (inland retreat), Truly Madly Guilty (Saturday afternoon barbecue that goes wrong), and Here One Moment all capture the specific texture of middle-class Australian life — the way friendship groups have histories, the gap between what people say and what they mean.
Liane Moriarty reading order →
Action and adventure set in Australia and beyond
Matthew Reilly is Australia’s most commercially successful action thriller writer. His Jack West Jr series starts with an Australian protagonist leading an international team on globe-spanning quests — the Australianness of the main character is a deliberate choice in a genre usually dominated by American heroes.
Matthew Reilly reading order →
What to read first
| If you want… | Start with |
|---|---|
| Contemporary rural noir | The Dry — Jane Harper |
| Melbourne literary crime | Bad Debts — Peter Temple |
| Historical cozy mystery | Cocaine Blues — Kerry Greenwood |
| Dark Queensland thriller | Crimson Lake — Candice Fox |
| Sydney suburban drama | Big Little Lies — Liane Moriarty |
| Australian action | Seven Ancient Wonders — Matthew Reilly |
Australia’s best crime fiction exports better than almost any other country’s — the landscape, the particular quality of isolation, and the very Australian scepticism about authority travel well. Any of the above will show you why.
