Reviews

A Net for Small Fishes

Book Review: An infamous Jacobean murder gets a fictional treatment in Lucy Jago’s A Net for Small Fishes

‘Today is the fourteenth day of November, 1615. I have known Frankie for nearly seven years. She is twenty-five years old and eight months pregnant. I am thirty-nine years old and about to die or be pardoned.’ You’d be forgiven for not knowing about the murder known as The Overbury Scandal. I had certainly never…

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Literary Lion Tamers

Book Review: Delve into the fascinating history of Australian publishing with Craig Munro’s Literary Lion Tamers

Covering a century of Australian literature, author and editor Craig Munro has assembled a somewhat motley crew of characters, to celebrate a handful of key figures from the world of publishing and editing. From A.G. Stephens, the “three initialled terror” of the critic world, to Munro’s former colleague, the late Roseanne Fitzgibbon, Literary Lion Tamers…

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Change Your Thinking to Change Your Life

Book Review: Kate James’s Change Your Thinking to Change Your Life brims with life positivity lessons

These crazy Covid times have most likely left people feeling as though they were living the wrong life. For those of you questioning and soul-searching, never fear as life coach, Kate James is here to help. She is an author who has worked in the realms of positive psychology and meditation practices for some time….

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Eye Of A Rook

Book Review: Invisible illness spotlighted in Eye of a Rook, the insightful debut novel from Josephine Taylor

Josephine Taylor‘s debut novel is something a little bit different for Fremantle Press. Mixing historical fiction with contemporary, Eye of a Rook takes a look at women’s health throughout recent centuries, shining a light particularly on attitudes to chronic illnesses and women’s pain. Based on the author’s own experiences with vulvodynia, Taylor hopes that this book…

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The Moroccan Daughter

Book Review: Explore family secrets and Moroccan culture in Deborah Rodriguez’s The Moroccan Daughter

The Moroccan Daughter, the new novel from bestselling author Deborah Rodriguez, will take you on a journey through the streets of Morocco. Introducing you to the sights, smells and tastes of the culture, and the traditions and dynamics of family and country. Amina Bennis returns to Morocco and her childhood home for her sister’s wedding….

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Loud

Book Review: Tana Douglas’s Loud proves it’s a hard rock life

Rock and roll ain’t easy on the artists. It’s no picnic for the roadies either, as Tana Douglas’s memoir, Loud proves. Douglas was the world’s first female roadie. Her first book gives us a fly on the wall account of her life and career in music. She and her fellow crew members worked hard, played…

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The Shape of Darkness

Book Review: The Shape of Darkness reinforces Laura Purcell as a master of building suspense

Laura Purcell’s fourth novel with Raven Books once again sees the ‘queen of the sophisticated and spooky page turner’ serve us up a Gothic, historical treat. Whilst none of her subsequent books have been quite so spine-chilling as 2017’s The Silent Companions, this latest offering, The Shape of Darkness is a suitably spooky novel about violence, grief…

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Book Review: Randa Jarrar is provocative and unabashed in her memoir Love Is An Ex-Country

Love Is An Ex-Country is the compelling new memoir from Arab American writer and academic Randa Jarrar. The book (much like its author) is provocative, powerful and utterly unabashed. Presented as a travel memoir, Love is an Ex-Country begins with Jarrar heading on a cross-country road trip, emulating a similar trip taken by celebrated Egyptian…

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Born Into This

Book Review: Adam Thompson’s Born Into This spotlights Tasmania and its people

The Tasmanian landscape and a whole host of engaging, charming and well drawn characters populate the stories that make up Born Into This, the debut short story collection from Adam Thompson; an emerging Aboriginal (pakana) author from Tasmania.  The collection comprises sixteen stories, often brief, but always impactful. In spite of this brevity, Thompson is…

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The Sad Ghost Club

Book Review: Lize Meddings cordially invites you to join The Sad Ghost Club

Over half a million sad ghosts follow artist Lize Meddings‘ Sad Ghost Club on Instagram. With a focus on positive mental health and making sure even the saddest of ghosts never feels alone, Meddings’ art has transitioned from screen to page, in the first volume of The Sad Ghost Club. Aimed at younger readers, the…

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Skyglow

Book Review: Lose yourself in Leslie Thiele’s short story collection Skyglow

A woman adjusts to her new urban landscape. A slaughterman comes to terms with the death of his wife. A rodeo ringer blows into town, wreaking havoc. These are just a handful of the eclectic characters, locations, and stories that come gloriously together in Leslie Thiele‘s recent collection Skyglow. Bouncing from the past to the…

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The Forest of Moon and Sword

Book Review: Join Art on the quest to save her mother in Amy Raphael’s middle grade folk tale The Forest of Moon and Sword

In the dead of night, the Witchfinder General’s men came to Kelso and snatched away Art’s mother. Narrowly avoiding being taken herself, Art was left with nothing but a sword, her mother’s trusty book of remedies and salves, and her faithful horse Lady. It’s not much, but with the forest to guide her, she sets…

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Outlawed

Book Review: Anna North ventures into the feminist Wild West in Outlawed

  There are few things that will turn a woman to becoming an outlaw faster than the threat of being hanged as a witch. So it is for Ada, the protagonist of Anna North’s latest novel, Outlawed.  Described as a mash up of The Handmaid’s Tale with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Outlawed takes place in “the year of…

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Vida

Book Review: Jacqueline Kent’s Vida spotlights a determined woman’s campaigns for social justice

Vida Goldstein’s surname might have been used to denote a federal electorate, but she’s hardly a household name. This trailblazing woman was a steadfast women’s rights advocate who toiled away in Australia and abroad in the early 20th century. Jacqueline Kent‘s new biography chronicles this inspiring lady’s work in the social justice and political spheres. Kent…

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My Best Friend's Murder

Book Review: Polly Phillips’ debut My Best Friend’s Murder hooks you in from the first chapter

There have been a number of big commercial thrillers which explore the dangers that hide inside ordinary homes and behind seemingly innocent faces; but none have been quite so relatable to me as the debut novel by Perth-based writer, Polly Phillips. My Best Friend’s Murder follows aspiring journalist Bec, who finds herself in her thirties,…

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Beowulf

Book Review: Maria Dahvana Headley breathes new life into an old classic in Beowulf

Beowulf is one of those stories that a lot of people think they know. That’s because it’s an iconic work of early English literature. Not only that, there have been countless translations and adaptations in the intervening centuries since the heroic tale was first uttered by a bard. Amongst its translators and adaptors are some…

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The Awful Truth

Book Review: Adrian Tame’s The Awful Truth celebrates journalism, larrikinism and fanaticism

Adrian Tame certainly understands the adage, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” The English-Australian journalist has notched up over five decades in the business working in Australia, the US and the UK. In his fourth book, The Awful Truth: My Adventures with Australia’s Most Notorious Tabloid he gives us…

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When I Come Home Again

Book Review: Scattered viewpoints water down the heartbreak in Caroline Scott’s When I Come Home Again

Caroline Scott’s fiction debut, 2019’s The Poppy Wife was that rare kind of historical novel, which is at once comfortingly familiar and refreshingly original. She returns to writing about the aftermath of the First World War with When I Come Home Again. The novel follows a returned solider with amnesia who is sent to convalesce in an English…

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Lucky's

Book Review: Andrew Pippos toasts community and family in his debut Lucky’s

Debut author Andrew Pippos has used his own family history as a leaping off point for his first novel Lucky’s.  The multi-generational family saga details the rise and fall (and rise again?) of Lucky, a second-generation American-born Greek entrepreneur, restauranteur and erstwhile family man. Having found himself stationed in wartime Australia, impersonating clarinetist Benny Goodman…

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Broken Rules

Book Review: It’s all in the mind with Barry Lee Thompson’s debut collection, Broken Rules and Other Stories

There’s a lot of subtlety to Barry Lee Thompson‘s short story collection, Broken Rules and Other Stories. It’s clear from the first story that this collection is incredibly literary. Most of the stories have their action take place in a character’s mind and draw tension from a close examination of the social contracts that govern the…

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Shore Leave

Book Review: David Whish-Wilson’s Shore Leave is a well-paced edgy thriller full of local flare

Shore Leave centres around an American Naval vessel that docks in Fremantle in 1989. The drama that surrounds that vessel and the sailors onboard will be etched in the minds of many locals for years to come.  Readers are introduced to a range of characters, a criminal with six months left on their prison sentence;…

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Life After Truth

Book Review: Ceridwen Dovey’s Life After Truth might just be the book we need to round out 2020

Ceridwen Dovey‘s latest novel is a bit of a departure from her previous offerings. Set at Harvard University, during the week of a fifteen year reunion, Life After Truth follows five friends as they navigate the many parties and events of the week, all the while wondering if they’ve taken the right path in life. The…

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Death Leaves The Station

Book Review: Alexander Thorpe brings intrigue and crime to the Goldfields in Death Leaves The Station

Alexander Thorpe’s debut novel, Death Leaves The Station introduces a standard Australian farmhouse in Western Australia’s wheatbelt to a world of crime, homophobia and racism.  Set on Halfwell Station, Mullewa, in 1927 Death Leaves The Station is also a coming-of-age novel. Ana, a young woman, starts encountering the world outside the seclusion of the family…

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Biting The Clouds

Book Review: Fiona Foley critically (re-)examines Queensland’s colonial past in Biting The Clouds

Biting The Clouds is the latest book from visual artist, writer and academic Fiona Foley. Adapted from her doctoral thesis, Biting The Clouds, is a compelling critical examination and exhumation of Australia’s, specifically Queensland’s, colonial history from an Indigenous perspective.  Foley is from the Wondunna clan of the Badtjala nation, and is a renowned visual…

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Islands of Mercy

Book Review: Rose Tremain’s Islands of Mercy looks promising but under-delivers

Well-known English writer, Rose Tremain‘s latest novel, Islands of Mercy explores the concept of places of safety, and contrasts two very different storylines – tenuously connected – in an attempt to explore what it means to have a meaningful life. Unfortunately, while the settings are richly drawn, both plotlines are ponderous and the book fails to excite….

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The Freedom Circus

Book Review: Survival, love, and circus clowns abound in Sue Smethurst’s The Freedom Circus

The first time Sue Smethurst sat down with her husband’s grandmother and asked about her experiences during the Holocaust, she was shooed away. Surrounded by fellow survivors in the Montefiroe Jewish nursing home in Melbourne, Mindla (pronounced Marnya) Horowitz felt no need to share her story. Everyone around her had one much the same, after…

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Clanlands

Book Review: Sam Heughan and Graham McTavish’s Highlands travelogue Clanlands is for the Outlander faithful

Last year, Outlander stars Sam Heughan and Graham McTavish set off for the Scottish Highlands in a questionable campervan, keen to explore more of the country they grew up in. From Glencoe to Culloden and countless lochs and castles in between, Clanlands is a record of their adventure filming what would eventually become Starz doco…

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A Wind from the Rift

Book Review: Bonnie Wynne ups the ante in The Price of Magic sequel, A Wind From the Rift

Gwyn just wants to go home. After months of imprisonment, first in the Clockwork City’s Bird Tower prison, then its horrific Charnel Vaults, her control over her magic is weakening, and the sooner she’s safe amongst friends, the better. But the Mancers of the Syndicate have come to a decision. Too dangerous to be freed,…

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Reprehensible

Book Review: Reprehensible by Mikey Robins is a hilarious look at historical bad behaviours

Reprehensible, from comedian and broadcaster Mikey Robins, is an informative and rollicking guide through the shameful behaviour of humanity’s most celebrated figures.  As Robin notes, “We are under bombardment from all of our screens, all of the time, reminding us with just one click what a dreadful time we are living through. But, here is…

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Our Shadows

Book Review: The great wave of family history hangs over the characters in Gail Jones’s Our Shadows

Gail Jones‘s latest book, Our Shadows, looks at the history of a Kalgoorlie family through three generations. The story is told from several points of view; from those of Frances and Nell, two sisters who were raised by their grandparents in the fictional Midas Street, Kalgoorlie (located in the ‘shadow’ of the super pit) after the…

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