There is something quietly audacious about a journalist who makes her living uncovering what institutions prefer to bury, then sits down to do the same thing in fiction. Louise Milligan has spent years at ABC Four Corners doing exactly that, breaking stories on child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, the treatment of women in parliament, and the grinding costs borne by those who seek justice. Now, with her second novel Shellybanks, published by Allen & Unwin in March 2026, she has found a way to do it again, this time under the cover of literary fiction.
The Sydney Morning Herald calls Shellybanks vivid and haunting, a verdict that fits neatly with what the book promises on the page. Journalist Kate Delaney, the protagonist Milligan introduced in her 2024 debut Pheasants Nest, is back. She is older, bruised, and still carrying the weight of the violent crime that upended her Melbourne life. When she travels to Dublin to comfort her beloved aunt Dolores, she arrives expecting grief and finds instead a decades-old secret: as a teenager, Dolores was drawn into a disturbing religious movement that took her youth, her freedom, and far more besides.
What makes Shellybanks more than a sequel is the territory Milligan has chosen to explore. The book centres on the long shadow cast by Ireland's institutional religious abuses, the silencing of women by structures of church and state that operated across generations. For a writer born in Dublin who moved to Australia as a child, the material is clearly personal. In an earlier interview, Milligan described the experience of being a migrant as being permanently caught between cultures, never quite an insider in either place. That tension, of belonging and exile, runs directly into this novel's emotional core.
The first novel, Pheasants Nest, published in March 2024, was shaped by Milligan's reporting on real cases of violence against women, including her coverage following the rape and murder of Jill Meagher in Melbourne in 2012. It was shortlisted for both the Indie Book Awards Best Debut Fiction and the Danger Awards Best Crime Fiction, and drew strong endorsements from writers including Annabel Crabb and David Marr. Early praise for Shellybanks follows in a similar register, with crime writer Chris Hammer calling it "a stunning dive into Ireland's dark past," and J.P. Pomare declaring Milligan "the real deal."
There is a question worth sitting with here, one that never quite disappears when journalists write fiction: does the form serve the investigation, or does the investigation hollow out the form? Milligan's critics have noted that Pheasants Nest, for all its momentum, occasionally felt more like reported reconstruction than lived-in narrative. Some readers found the omniscient detachment, the sweeping in and out of characters' minds, more journalistic than literary. These are fair observations, and they apply genuine pressure on how we read a second novel.
The strongest counter-argument is simply that fiction allows Milligan to go where journalism cannot. The women let down by Ireland's religious institutions are not named sources she can quote on the record. Their stories, when told in courtrooms or inquiries, often arrive stripped of the texture that makes suffering legible to strangers. A novel restores that texture. It gives Dolores an inner life. It asks the reader to feel the weight of shame imposed by institutions that traded on moral authority while betraying the people in their care. That is not nothing. In a country whose own Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse produced findings that are still being absorbed, the subject carries obvious resonance.
If there is a lesson here, it is one that resists simple telling. Shellybanks asks whether fiction and journalism are really so different when the goal, in both, is to make the hidden visible. Milligan's body of work suggests she has made her peace with that question. Readers will judge whether the novel earns it.