After the Flood available now.
After the Flood
My review of The Place on Dalhousie, MELINA MARCHETTA
Melina Marchetta has written a story about home in The Place on Dalhousie. Home is both a place — where you live, the geography, the cityscape, the country — and a state of mind, the comfort and familiarity of having people around you ¬who know you and care for you. Home is support in its different guises.
Dying in the first person, Nike Sulway
This is a powerful and extraordinarily beautiful story of family, love and sacrifice. Sulway has created a world we enter slowly, uncovering the past and its hurts in small steps. It draws the reader into a place of mystery and wonder as Samuel is brought face to face with an emissary, Ana, who brings news of his long-estranged twin brother.
Sunshine, Kim Kelly
The lives of three men and a women, returned from the front after World War I, intersect in a new offering from Kim Kelly – an historical novella set in the fictional hamlet of Sunshine in far north-western New South Wales, ‘out the back of Bourke’. Snow, Grace and Art are each looking for something …
Shell, Kristina Olsson
Find my review of Kristina Olsson's Shell at the Newtown Review of Books, published this week. Its piercing look at consequences of Australia's inability to understand itself, and reconcile, stood out for me Through Pearl and Axel, Olsson brings the reader to mid-1960s Sydney. The visionary awarding of the design to Utzon — the result …
The Museum of Modern Love, reviewed in Newtown Review of Books
I was late to this party. I’d heard about this novel, and when I finally found time for fiction this year, I lost myself in it immediately. Heather Rose has written a masterpiece of introspection. The reader pauses to look up from the page and reflect, to remember a passage over the course of the …
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Pre-release review of The Rosie Result – the final in the Don Tillman trilogy
The Rosie Result, Graeme Simsion, 2019, The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne. It’s been four years since The Rosie Effect(Text 2014) and it’s a joy meeting up again with Don Tillman in this third and final instalment. The Rosie Result is Graeme Simsion’s clever way of bringing us a young Don Tillman, in today’s world. After 12 …
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Lady Bird & The Fox
In Kim Kelly’s new novel, her seventh, a simple scaffold of romantic historical fiction allows for a more sophisticated commentary on race, privilege and the place of women. Read my review of Lady Bird & The Fox, published by the Newtown Review of Books today.
How do you read?
Reading a book seems a straightforward thing. Be it on a page, an e-reader, on your phone, even listening to an audio recording, we’re all in the author’s hands, following the same path on this journey. Interactive multi-media books might be coming, but they’ve not taken hold of us yet. But I’ve recently been struck …
Dymphna Cusack
Such a joy to discover a new/old writer! I am now reading everything by Dymphna Cusack (1902–1981) whose writing life was brilliantly recreated by Marilla North (Yarn Spinners, UQP 2001) at a recent Jessie Street National Women’s Library Lunch Hour Talk. Cusack infused her literature with her passion for social justice. Women’s rights to control …
Your Second Draft 