Meg Bignell for Better Read Than Dead: The Good Losers

The heartfelt and hilarious new novel from the bestselling author of The Angry Women’s Choir.

Callie March is fascinated by human absurdity, including the habits of the upper class. So when she pushes her screen-addicted teenage son to join a local rowing club, she is thrilled to discover a whole new world of odd behaviours, irrational obsessions and riverside rooting.

Thrust into a support crew and a very silly uniform, Callie has inadvertently volunteered for a season of pre-dawn parenting, endless fundraising, and pandering to insufferable dickheads. But she also finds friendship, intrigue and lust, while her son might just find love.

Callie is torn between enchantment and repulsion, until a trail of corruption and scandal leads to deep suspicion. There’s something fishy in the rowing shed, and Callie is determined to find out what lurks behind the closed doors of this sports club. In doing so, she will rock the boat – or better still, capsize it altogether.

This novel is set in northern Tasmania. It contains profundity, profanity, heart-ache, bum chafe, terrible winners and very good losers.

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Meg Bignell was a nurse and a weather presenter on the telly before she surrendered to a persistent desire to write. She is the author of four novels and one non-fiction book. Her third novel, The Angry Women’s Choir, won the People’s Choice Award for fiction at the 2025 Tasmanian Literary Awards. She has written and performed in short films, cabaret shows and a musical. She lives on the east coast of Tasmania with her husband, three children, one dog and about a thousand cows.

Clare Fletcher is the author of romantic comedies Five Bush Weddings (in development for a feature film) and Love Match. Clarealso co-hosts That Rom Com Pod with fellow author and work wife, Karina May.