I lost all my childhood books. I don’t remember how it happened. I wasn’t paying attention. We moved around in my growing-up years, between houses and between countries. Boxes were packed, shipped, unpacked seamlessly every few years as I moved through childhood, adolescence and then teens. We didn’t cleave to things, or to places. ‘Nah,’ I would have said, if my parents had asked whether I wanted to keep them.
The Hiding Place
This novel moves from the familiar and domestic to a place of unimaginable horror with an ending that will make you gasp. A group of old friends has pooled funds and bought a rural property as a retreat, a bush block they can escape to from the city. This weekend, they have come together for their first visit. First and last.
Ripeness, Sarah Moss
The first words of this novel are from a woman in bed with her lover, in a state of ecstasy, and it is not long before we realise that she is not a young woman. The woman is Edith, 73, seeking and finding pleasure with honesty and poignancy. It is a refreshing opening.
Rite of Spring, Kris Kneen
The characters in Kris Kneen’s latest novel free themselves from the constraints of gender, diving into a new world beneath the waves. Two people alone on a challenging frontier, surviving physically but also dealing with loneliness and each other’s...
Audition, Katie Kitamura
My review of Katie Kitamura's new novel, Audition, is up at Newtown Review of Books now. Challenging, rewarding. Unsettling. Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, Kitamura’s latest novel contains many things jostling for our attention. The two parts, or perhaps twin novellas, which make up this work are centred around the same set of characters: …
JENNETTE MCCURDY I’m Glad My Mom Died.
My latest review, I'm Glad My Mom Died, by Hollywood child star, Jennette McCurdy, is up now at Newtown Review of Books. This one took hold of me in strange ways. Memoir is not my favourite genre and I'd never heard of McCurdy but she writes powerfully and in the voice of the small child, betrayed by the one she loves and trusts the most. It is compelling from the start, where the title lets us know she frees herself, to the end, where we find out how and when and what came next. And laugh-out-loud funny too. Hats off.
LAURIE WOOLEVER Care and Feeding: A memoir
Laurie Woolever’s memoir opens with an introduction noting that none of us has very much control over anything in life, despite our delusions and hubris. Her peace with this is hard-earned. ‘This is my story of being a (relatively) high-functioning addict in a world of irresistible temptations …’ For many years, Woolever’s career was in …
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A year on the bike
Might get wet. I watch the sky through my window, low cloud massing, the few blue streaks wiped out with a fat grey Sharpie. The gum trees rock back and forth but no splash appears on the glass, yet. I am as attuned to the weather as a farmer, the app my constant companion. Yet …
SALLY ROONEY Intermezzo
In her first novel, Conversations with Friends, a young woman, Frances, enters into an obsessive affair with an older man, a jaded, not overly successful actor. Published in 2017 when Rooney was in her mid-twenties, the protagonist’s naivety is understandable, though this older reader found her difficult to empathise with. In Intermezzo, her commentary on permissible forms of love has matured
The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor
The characters in The Late Americans are in their mid-twenties – elite graduate students in the arts at a mid-western university town: Seamus the poet, dancers Noah and Fatima, Stafford the painter. This is a coming of age novel, a reckoning with adulthood which may have begun in adolescence but is still in progress. It is a fraught time.
Your Second Draft 