Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader.

Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader

Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader

Making the right choice in life is never straightforward but is one of the main reasons we find ourselves and each other so fascinating. Three Dollars is the story of Eddie Harnovey, a honest, compassionate man with a brilliant wife, Tanya, and a beautiful, if possibly epileptic, daughter Abbey. Eddie's life revolves around work and the three women in his life; the third is Amanda, a childhood sweetheart who re-appears in his life with mathematical precision every nine-and-a-half years. Eddie has a lovely house in the suburbs, he has a strong moral conscience, he's intelligent and witty, and the world around him is falling apart. On the brink of bankruptcy with just $3 to his name, has he made the wrong choices?Perhaps a large part of the answer lies in the speed with which we live our lives. It is easy to feel sympathy for Eddie as he bemoans the pace of change: "Everything happens too quickly to be understood while it is happening. Analysis is impossible until the event is over."A more likely cause of Eddie's predicament may lie in the fact that his wife is about to lose her teaching position at the university and Eddie, an engineer working for the Department of Environment, has been asked by his wife's former lover to falsify a report to allow a smelting plant to be built by Amanda's father.The depth of these relationships is explored with insight and great wit, unpicking those worries that come to us at night while, like Eddie, we lie and notice (and usually ignore) the cracks and flaking of paint on the bedroom ceiling. For Eddie, it is a time to rank debts and what has become the persistence and tyranny of the day-to-day struggle to financially survive.Three Dollars was written in 1998, but set in the times of Australia's introduction to what the surely misnamed 'economic rationalism'. The obsession with material goods and the soulless never-ending pursuit of profit are both a target for Eddie's scorn as well as a source of hilarious black comedy. Written with great humour and prose which at times may seem just a little too deliberate, Three Dollars is as pertinent today as it was in the 1990s.There are times, however, when the characters' tendency to editorialise or sermonise is a touch overwhelming, even if the sentiments seem sound or relevant to Australian politics today. Take this monologue from Eddie's wife, Tanya:"People's fear of change and their despair at the lack of certainty in any area of their lives, particularly where the social and the personal meet, that is with respect to their jobs and income, if it lasts long enough, will lead them to abandon reason, to be suspicious of it and to look for scapegoats and simplistic solutions. The wisdom or correctness of a government's decision will scarcely be discussed but instead attention will be focused on the strength with which the decision was made, the apparent certainty, the conviction with which it was implemented."Admittedly, Tanya is a university politics lecturer, but the moral hectoring in the novel can easily distract from the plot and soon become tiring.Ignoring the occasional sermon, however, Three Dollars an entertaining read, beautifully written and extremely funny. It sat on my bookshelf for over a decade and was rescued only because the mixed reviews for Perlman's latest novel, The Street Sweeper, made me curious. No ambiguity about Three Dollars though: compelling, dramatic and a disconcertingly humorous reflection of the way so many of us live our lives. In 2005, Three Dollars was made into an Australian movie, starring David Wenham. A superb interpretation of the novel, both film and book are highly recommended.

Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader

Megan Abbott

Tim Baker

Katherine Howell

If you were looking for chills and thrills in your reading, you are better off looking elsewhere than in this fairly uneven collection of stories.

Marion von Adlerstein

Jesse Blackadder

Eva Hornung

Chloe Maxwell

Stephen Fry

Andy Griffiths

Gold Coast author Richard Davis says the time is ripe to re-evaluate the life of Australian opera singer, Marjorie Lawrence.

Sitxteen-year-old Silvermay is in love with a wizard called Tamlyn - who comes from a race that only care about themselves.

Majok Tulba

Patti Miller

COUNTRY GIRL A memoirby Edna O'Brien

Tim Winton ponders place, status and the mining boom, while discussing his new novel Eyrie.

Alison Wylie spent her childhood summers at archaeological excavation sites. Today, she's redefining the scientific field to include Indigenous perspectives.

Paralysed from the neck down after a football tackle 26 years ago, Brett Morris finishes the Gold Coast Marathon Fun Run in a wheelchair in under an hour, and he's "very happy it's done".

This year's NAIDOC Week theme is Voice. Treaty. Truth. But the truth is that many Indigenous people feel voiceless when it comes to expressing where Australia stands on treaty today.

Tony Mulvihill has only one secret for training a good working dog, a lesson he learned 30 years ago from an Oregon buckaroo.

Disability advocates renew their push for local councils nationwide to ensure that new housing is universally accessible to address what they describe as a critical shortage of accommodation.

An educator on the New South Wales south coast hopes to have all the region's school children fluently speaking their local Dharawal language in the next 10 years.

A former ABC journalist, who pressed assault charges after her elderly mother was allegedly hit by a carer, urges Australians with family members in aged-care to install personal surveillance equipment.

Beekeepers in New South Wales are hand-feeding their hives as the drought cripples the bees' ability to make honey, with a shortage expected to sting consumers at the checkout.

A braille teacher says technology is causing a decline in literacy among people who are vision-impaired, prompting her to bring the tactile language into the mainstream.

MORNING BRIEFING: NSW police hunt for Sunjay Dayal, who escaped while undertaking maintenance work in Mount Kiera, while three cars set alight in a garage triggers the fire alarms inside a Liverpool unit block.

A woman on trial accused of murdering her partner allegedly poisoned him with a "cocktail of dangerous medication" so she could benefit financially from his death, an Adelaide court is told.

A new memorial planned for the 14 victims of the Appin mine disaster will bring little comfort to the families still shattered by the explosion of 1979.

The family of a grandmother killed when a minibus clipped a fuel tanker offers generous sympathy to the bus driver at his sentencing in Wollongong District Court today.

The rugby league player is slapped with an extra charge which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison as he is committed to stand trial in August over the alleged aggravated sexual assault of a 19-year-old woman in Wollongong.

Jobs growth versus environmental concerns reignite with a coal company's proposed expansion under Sydney's water supply.

In March 1996, teenager Matthew De Gruchy bludgeoned his family to death in a "frenzied attack" in NSW. Twenty-three years later, he is set to be released from prison as a 41-year-old man.

Fire crews have spent more than two weeks extinguishing a coal wash fire burning underground on a property in NSW.

The renowned painter launches legal action against his stepdaughter, saying she influenced her dying mother who "suffered from cognitive impairment" to withdraw $2.2 million from a bank account in 2016.

The ARLC has suggested that Jack de Belin needs a "reality check" as it argues that the code's no fault stand-down policy is necessary because the sport has been "beset by a series of scandals."

St George Illawarra's season is all but over, but a sensational debut from young winger Jason Saab in the team's latest loss may be a sign of better things to come.

Music teacher and actress Kimmie Jonceski performed a lead role in a musical while undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer this year and wants her courageous story to inspire other young women facing a cancer diagnosis.

Lorelei and Peter Murko, and other members of their family, have taken an incredible journey together because of problems they have faced with their kidneys.