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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.
Someone with a pretty sizeable following tweeted recently that reading digitally wasn’t really reading. Go read a book, you animals, she said. I wonder. What is a book? The words. It’s the words, folks. Who is more deeply moved by the quality of the paper, than the words printed on it? Yes, I understand that …
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.
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 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 …
Continue reading "Pre-release review of The Rosie Result – the final in the Don Tillman trilogy"
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.
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 …
Over the last weeks, I’ve been reading Irish-Australian writer Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy series (you can read Karen Chisholm’s overview of the series here) and am entranced by the acuity of his observations; the blinking humanity revealed when the lights go up. The feeling was similar over ten years ago when I first read James Lee Burke. With more than 20 titles so far in his Robicheaux series, Burke’s lyrical prose continues to distil what it is to be human—the flaws and vanities, petty obsessions and manifestations of love. In these writers’ hands, crime lies where the fragile membrane between coping and not breaks; where a civilisation’s codes of behaviour constructed and defended to protect both the weak and the powerful are breached. Crime is in the cracks. But that’s how the light gets in, too.
Do you have a story? Today, I went to a full day workshop to hear from two insider heavyweights about the ins and outs of self-publishing. Sue Liu and Anna Maguire are experts in their fields. Sue is a successful self-published author of Accidental Aid Worker. Anna Maguire, Digireado, is a veteran of the book …
I spent a recent Saturday at the Symposium of the 2017 Rose Scott Women Writer’s Festival, its theme this year, Women Writing Women. An intimate festival, held in the beautiful rooms of The Women’s Club overlooking Hyde Park, its limited numbers allow for mingling between writers and readers. This year, it drew such well-known writers as Delia Falconer, Tegan Bennet Daylight and poet Kate Middleton, launching her most recent collection, Passage (Giramondo, 2017).
Your Second Draft 