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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 …
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 …
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 …
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.
Accidental Aid Worker is Liu's story of how wanting to help a community became life-changing. It is also an exploration of the complexities of aid, both moral and logistical.
My review of Michael Giacometti's bold collection of short stories, My Life and Other Fictions, is published in the Newtown Review of Books today. There is much to savour here. A thought-provoking gift for Christmas.
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 