According to the end matter in her debut novel, The Secrets We Kept, author Lara Prescott was named for the heroine of Boris Pasternak‘s Nobel Prize winning novel, Doctor Zhivago. It was not until the CIA declassified 99 documents pertaining to the real story behind the publication of the Russian classic, however, that her interest […]
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Akin is Emma Donoghue’s tenth novel for adults, but only her second set in the modern day. Known by most readers for her 2010 novel, Room, Donoghue has published countless novels which examine little known pockets of history, such as 2014’s Frog Music and 2016’s The Wonder. At first glance, Akin is something entirely different to Donoghue’s back catalogue, including […]
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Sisonke Msimang, the new curator for Perth Festival’s Literature and Ideas festival, delivered her full program for the late February event on Thursday night to an enthusiastic crowd at the Octagon Theatre. Her program, designed around the concepts of ‘Land, Money, Power, and Sex’ has been curated with a goal of inviting a new intake […]
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Kathy O’Shaughnessy‘s In Love with George Eliot is subtitled ‘A Novel’. Thank goodness for that, because if not, booksellers and librarians probably would not know where to shelve it. While readable and intensely interesting, the book reads more like a bibliomemoir, more akin to previous George Eliot studies like The Road to Middlemarch and last year’s […]
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In her new collection of essays, through the lens of reflecting on her reading and writing, Debra Adelaide reveals much of her own story. An avid reader from a young age, Adelaide recounts her early encounters with Tolkien at the local library, laments her own inability to reduce the number of books in her home (no matter […]
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Angela Savage may be best known for her Jayne Keeney PI novels, or for her role as the Director of Writer’s Victoria, but in Mother of Pearl, she’s serving something different. Celebrating Savage’s love of Thai culture and customs, Mother of Pearl is a sensitive exploration of the issue of overseas surrogacy, told from multiple points of view, […]
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You might be forgiven for thinking that there are echoes of the past in Meg Mundell’s newest novel, The Trespassers, as a boatload of British folk board a boat bound for Australia to escape overcrowing, unemployment and disease at home. Instead, it’s the not-too-distant future. Among the passengers are our three protagonists: Cleary, nine years old and […]
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Josephine Rowe‘s newest collection of short stories, Here Until August is a slim but beautiful looking collection. It’s striking blue and purple cover makes you want to pick it up. And you should, because what is inside is just as fascinating as out. It begins with the story “Glisk” (winner of the 2016 ABR/Elizabeth Jolley Prize) […]
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In 1806, after conquering Prussia with his armies, Napoleon Bonaparte led a procession into Berlin through the Brandenburg Gate. Watching in the crowd is an eighteen year old man named Johannes Meyer who will soon find himself swept up in the tide of history. Fortune is a novel which traces its way around the big […]
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The unnamed narrator in Ruby Porter‘s Michael Gifkins Prize winning debut novel Attraction can’t seem to get her mind to focus. She and her girlfriend, Ilana, and her best friend, Ashi, are on a road trip to the narrator’s family beach house in New Zealand’s North Island. The trip is one of escape for our protagonist, but […]
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Canberra-based author Kathryn Hind‘s debut novel Hitch was published in June this year. The inaugural winner of the Penguin Literary Prize, Hitch tells the story of Amelia, a young woman of indeterminate age, who is hitchhiking her way to Melbourne. Her journey is an emotional one as well as a physical one, and throughout the book, there […]
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Rohan Wilson’s latest novel, Daughter of Bad Times is a novel with an extremely global outlook, but this may just be its problem. The novel follows two protagonists, Rin Braden and Yamaan Ali Umair, two lovers from very different circumstances. Rin is the daughter of Alessandra Braden, the CEO of Cabey-Yasuda Corrections, a company which owns […]
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The town that makes up the main setting of Tony Birch’s new novel The White Girl is a fictional one, but it could have been anywhere in Australia. The novel tells the story of Odette Brown, an Indigenous woman who was raised on the mission in Deane separated from her family, and in particular her father. She lives on […]
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The longlist for the 2019 Booker Prize is out, but readers will have to wait a little while to pick up copies of a few of the contenders, with books such as The Testaments not due out until September 2019. This list, hotly anticipated by bibliophiles everywhere, is notoriously difficult to predict, and 2019 is […]
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Six Australian writers have been shortlisted for the 2019 Miles Franklin Award at a ceremony held this evening at the State Library of NSW. Among those shortlisted are debut authors, Michael Mohammed Ahmad (The Lebs) and Jennifer Mills (Dyschronia), and two-time Miles Franklin award winner, Rodney Hall (A Stolen Season). Gail Jones, whose book The Death of Noah […]
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The body count is high in Amanda O’Callaghan’s debut short story collection, This Taste for Silence. From the very first story, death, murder and unexplained disappearances emerge as a dominant theme in this collection which has been described by Ryan O’Neill as ‘utterly haunting.’ Brisbane-based author O’Callaghan is an internationally acclaimed writer of short (and very […]
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Earlier this month saw the publication of Elizabeth Kuiper’s debut novel Little Stones. The novel, which draws upon Kuiper’s own childhood experiences, follows the story of Hannah, a young white Zimbabwean as she navigates everyday life in a country under the control of Robert Mugabe. Following the novel’s release we sat down with Elizabeth to […]
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Little Stones might be the debut novel from Australian writer Elizabeth Kuiper, but it won’t be her last. The novel, of which an early version was long listed for the Richell Prize, published in Award Winning Australian Writing and received the Express Media Prize for the best work of fiction, marks the arrival of a new voice in Australian writing. One […]
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Meg Keneally may have a literary giant for a father, but her career speaks for itself. Beginning her working life as Junior Public Affairs Officer at the Australian Consulate-General in New York, she has worked as a sub-editor and freelance features writer in Dublin, as a journalist at the Daily Telegraph in Australia, as a talkback […]
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The unnamed protagonist of Carrie Tiffany’s new novel, Exploded View, lets us into her life by increments. Immediately, as readers, we are welcomed into her interior world– a place where the only things that make sense are cars, and engines. It is the late 1970’s, and the girl and her brother watch things like Hogan’s Heroes on the TV, careful […]
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It’s the event that kicks off the writers’ festival circuit every year, and Perth Festival’s faithful will tell you it’s one of the best in Australia. Under the stewardship of new program curator, William Yeoman, the Perth Writers Festival has seen some changes in the last two years- most notably a change of name to […]
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Eccentric, heartbreaking and hilarious- this is how Debra Adelaide‘s latest book of short stories is described on the cover by her Picador stable-mate, Jennifer Mills. The book is Zebra and Other Stories, a collection comprised of fourteen stories, divided into three sections: First, Second and Third. These sections refer to the point of view taken in the stories. Adelaide covers a […]
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Changelings, or babies swapped with supernatural beings in their infancy, permeate the mythology of a number of cultures throughout Europe. Often, it was believed that fairies had taken the child and left one of their own behind- a sign of bad luck for the family. The idea of a changeling may have been used to […]
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The entire time that I was reading Markus Zusak’s new novel, Bridge of Clay, I had Josh Pyke’s song “Feet of Clay” going around and around in my head. Perhaps, this has only strengthened my belief that the entire novel is really some sort of extended metaphor, although for what exactly I couldn’t say. One […]
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In the summer of 1968, Evelyn Lynden and her husband Lenny move to Evergreen Valley, California so that Lenny can work as an orderly in an asylum- part of the agreement he has made as a conscientious objector, so that he does not have to go over and fight in the Vietnam War. Their arrival […]
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Standing in line for an exhibit on the life of novelist, Inga Karlsson, Caddie Walker meets a mysterious woman who appears to know more about Karlsson and her famous lost work than anyone could possibly know. Caddie, a Karlsson devotee, becomes obsessed with finding out who this woman is, and if it’s possible that she […]
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New York, 1997. Marina, an academic who has been working on a book about members of the Hasidic community meets Constance, a young Rwandan woman who has come to America after the genocide. Marina watches as Constance walks away from her young son as he has a tantrum in the street and is struck by […]
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I don’t normally read non-fiction or memoir, but something about the premise of Nell Stevens’ second book, Mrs Gaskell and Me (also known as The Victorian and the Romantic) appealed to me when I first started hearing about it on social media a few months back. On the surface, it has a simple premise; it is a literary memoir […]
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In Mira Robertson’s debut novel, her eponymous heroine, Emily Dean, is sent to stay with her grandmother and great uncle on their property while her mother recovers from what I can only presume is a nervous breakdown of sorts. It’s most definitely not a farm, as Emily is told by her family, though to the […]
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When Claudia Carter returns home to the small town of Winston for her wedding, she is expecting chaos. She is expecting that her estranged parents won’t get along, that her sister Poppy will be a brat, and that her Aunt Mary will be a pain in the arse. But she’s put all of that aside […]
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