What is it about reading that we love so much? Why do books make our lives so much richer?

By the Book is respected literary journalist Ramona Koval’s love letter to books and writing, about reading and living, and about the authors that have written themselves into her life: from Oliver Sacks to Oscar Wilde, Christina Stead to Grace Paley. It is about learning to read (and asking her mother to buy her a copy of the Kama Sutra), about love and science, about poetry and travel and falling in love.

By the Book is quintessentially Ramona: warm, bright, erudite—unmissable.

Born to Yiddish-speaking survivors of the Holocaust and brought up in Melbourne, Australia, Ramona Koval found that books were her lifeline from a young age. She is now of the country’s best-loved broadcasters, spending sixteen years presenting The Book Show on Radio National and interviewing writers on stage at festivals in Australia, Europe, and North America.