The month of October has become synonymous with a distinct holiday — Halloween.  

Scary stories have been shared for generations and are an important part of our oral and written history. Though it might not be for everyone, we could not let the season pass without sharing 10 must-read novels for Halloween that explore the grim and gruesome, and the spooky or otherworldly.  

Shehan Karunatilaka has won the Booker Prize 2022 for his novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. The announcement was made by Neil MacGregor, Chair of the 2022 judges, in a ceremony at the Roundhouse, London, on October 17. 

This month we have 2 x 2 reading selections to give away. 

And in a not-too-distant future, a woman with a life-altering decision to make travels through a climate-ravaged landscape to visit her estranged father. This is a portrait of three generations, each grappling with their own mortality. Spanning the wild idealism of the 70s through to the fragile hope of the future, it is a novel about the struggle for transcendence and the reverberating effects of family bonds.  

Thanks to Scribe   

Then Alice got ill. Their symptoms mirrored their mother’s and appeared to have no physical cause; they received the same diagnosis a few years later. Ill Feelings blends memoir, medical history, biography, and literary nonfiction to uncover both of their case histories, and branches out into the records of ill health that women have written about in diaries and letters. Their cast of characters includes Virginia Woolf and Alice James, the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, John Ruskin’s lost love Rose la Touche, the artist Louise Bourgeois, and Florence Nightingale. 

Thanks to Scribe   

Chie, Miwako’s best friend, was the only person to know her true identity – but is now the time to reveal it? Meanwhile, Fumi, Ryusei’s sister, is harbouring her own haunting secret. 

Together, they realise that the young woman they thought they knew had more going on behind her seemingly perfect façade than they could ever have dreamed. 

Thanks to Scribe   

But as she and the eccentric crew travel further from shore and safety, the dark secrets of Franny’s life begin to unspool. A daughter’s yearning search for her mother. An impulsive, passionate marriage. A shocking crime. Haunted by love and violence, Franny must confront what she is really running towards – and from. From the west coast of Ireland to Australia and remote Greenland, through crashing Atlantic swells to the bottom of the world, this is an ode to the wild places and creatures now threatened, and an epic story of the possibility of hope against all odds. 

Thanks to Penguin 

Anyone is welcome to enter. To go in the draw, simply email us at competition@cae.edu.au and let us know your favourite books about desperate remedies. Include your name and postal address. Entries close on Friday November 4th. We will notify the winners and we may use their answers on social media.