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On an ordinary summer’s day in 1969, in a small Australian town, a new mother finds her baby missing from her cot. In this gothic novel, Cassandra Austin draws out the isolation and claustrophobia of new motherhood — and the judgement heaped upon ‘bad mothers’. My review of Cassandra Austin's novel, Like Mother, is up …
My review of Jessica Francis Kane's funny and moving novel, Rules for Visiting, is up now at Newtown Review of Books. I loved its insights and it made me laugh out loud. In one particularly comic scene, May finds Hello Barbie, the new doll belonging to her friend’s daughter, tucked into her bed. When I …
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Travel, exploration, philosophy, religion and science in one luminous work—Peter Matthiesen’s 1978 classic The Snow Leopard is unlike anything I’ve read before. Matthiesen has joined an expedition to the Himalayas with a zoologist friend, G.S., to study the bharal, a sheep/goat which has proven elusive to classification—somewhat like this book. Meditation on old and new cultures …
Kim Kelly’s newest novel is a story of love, ambition and prejudice in the medical world. When Kim Kelly stumbled across the true story of how a brilliant German–Australian orthopaedic surgeon, Dr Max Herz, had been interned as an enemy alien during World War I, she was immediately drawn in.
This is one hell of a ride. If you’re looking for a book to keep you up and turning the pages, this is for you. Adrian McKinty, author of the Sean Duffy series set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, has shown his versatility in producing a tight, intricate thriller which unfolds with escalating horror. Read my review here, published in Newtown Review of Books.
I recently reviewed Sallie Muirden's gentle and thought-provoking book, Wedding Puzzle, for The Newtown Review of Books.
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.
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 …
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 …
Continue reading "The Museum of Modern Love, reviewed in Newtown Review of Books"
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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