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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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Is the independent bookshop viable? Recently, I listened to Jemma Birrell’s interview with Sylvie Whitman, owner of Shakespeare & Company, that famous bookshop on the banks of the Seine in Paris, and it prompted some thoughts.
We’re now into the final month of this year, 2020, year of the plague; the year when the days ran into each other without bearings or markers, and ruled by fear. Check in. Wash your hands. Sanitise. Remember your mask. Wipe it down. Use an anti-bacterial, use a detergent. Don’t get too close. Don’t breathe. …
"The author–editor relationship is little understood outside the publishing industry and often mischaracterised by those within it. Commentators agree that this relationship is difficult to define and complicated, with the distribution of power ebbing and flowing in response to a variety of pressures.... Adding to the mystique, the editor’s role in book production is opaque. Editors have …
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The elements of flow, of indeed happiness, are ‘clarity of goals, feedback, feeling of control, concentration on the task at hand, intrinsic motivation, and challenge’ (89). Understanding this changed my life.
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.
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 …
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.
Your Second Draft 