Reviews

Schoolmaster's Daughter

Book Review: A girl and a nation come of age in Jackie French’s The Schoolmaster’s Daughter

It’s hard to keep track of just how many books Jackie French has published. This year alone she will have published five books and according to her website, her total publications number around two hundred. French describes herself as an “Australian author, ecologist, historian, dyslexic and honourary wombat.” It’s not hard to see why generations…

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Book Review: Leave yourself rattled with The Hollow Ones the first in a new series from Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

Reading The Hollow Ones you will be drawn into a crime spree, and find yourself sharing time with a killer who can’t be seen and a killer who has defied the ages. The perfect read for Halloween; reading this will leave you rattled and looking at your friends and colleagues with an extra hint of…

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Miwako Sumida

Book Review: Clarissa Goenawan’s The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is a novel that examines a tragedy from three sides

Clarissa Goenawan‘s second novel The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida may tread familiar ground for her fans. While Goenawan is an Indonesian-born Singaporean writer, both this and her debut novel Rainbirds are set in Tokyo. Perhaps it is only fitting, then, that Sharlene Teo compares Goenawan’s writing to that of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, calling this novel…

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Rupert Everett

Book Review: Rupert Everett explores the fleeting nature of fame and filmmaking in To the End of the World

To the End of the World: Travels with Oscar Wilde is the latest memoir from actor, author, and now director Rupert Everett. In the book Everett, recounts the story of how he set out to make the film of Oscar Wilde’s last days, 2018’s The Happy Prince. The book, then, is part memoir, part travelogue,…

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Evening Morning

Book Review: Witness the birth of Kingsbridge, in Ken Follett’s prequel novel The Evening and the Morning

The year is 997 and the Vikings have come to Combe. After losing both his father and his lover in a devastating raid, Edgar sets out for Dreng’s Ferry, taking up an offer to rent a nearby farm and start over. Shipbuilders by trade, Edgar and his family attempt to begin a new life as…

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Dead Man In A Ditch

Book Review: Fetch Phillips returns in Luke Arnold’s Dead Man In A Ditch

Fetch Phillips, the noirish rouge for hire from Weatherly, is back. It’s been less than year since his last case. And, it’s aftermath is still rippling through Sunder City. People have got the idea that the magic might be coming back. They’ve also got into their heads that Fetch is working to figure it all…

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Hollowpox

Book Review: Morrigan Crow returns in Jessica Townsend’s Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow

Morrigan Crow has finally found a place to call home. Spending her days with her Wundrous Society classmates, and her evenings with the inhabitants of the magical Hotel Deucalion, Morrigan can now focus on her real task: mastering her growing Wundersmith powers. But something strange is happening in Nevermoor. Well, stranger than usual. Nevermoor’s peaceful…

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Only Happiness Here

Book Review: Gabrielle Carey searches for the secrets of happiness in the pages of a near-forgotten writer

Gabrielle Carey may have written more in the field of biography, but is best known as the co-author of Puberty Blues, written alongside Kathy Lette. Her latest offering, Only Happiness Here: In Search of Elizabeth von Arnim combines the straight accounting of the twentieth century writer’s life with a form of literary analysis and memoir that has…

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Song of the Crocodile

Book Review: Dive into Nardi Simpson’s mesmerising debut Song of the Crocodile

The Billymil family have lived in the small town of Darnmoor for three generations, and expectant parents Celie and Tom are preparing to welcome the newest addition. But tensions between Darnmoor’s Indigenous and settler families are rising. And the divide between the white run town and the Campgrounds, where the Billymils call home, is growing….

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Steve Wide

Book Reviews: Steve Wide’s Field Guides to Punk and Post-Punk & New Wave are short and sharp

Music fans will often find their favourite tracks are bigger than their genre. In fact, some music is so big it permeates into an entire subculture. Australian DJ, Steve Wide celebrates this with two sharp new books, A Field Guide to Punk and A Field Guide to Post-Punk and New Wave. Both of these are…

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Lionhearts

Book Review: Nathan Makaryk’s Robin Hood tale misses the target in sequel Lionhearts

Robin Hood is dead. A grief-stricken Will Scarlett takes on the mantle, struggling to balance the need to survive with the desire to end those who have taken everything from him. But he is not the only one calling himself Robin Hood; others have co-opted his friend’s myth, and their intentions are less than pure….

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Book Review: Laura Elvery’s second collection is anything but ordinary

The premise for Brisbane writer, Laura Elvery’s second collection of short fiction, Ordinary Matter, is enticing. Inspired by the twenty times a woman has won a Nobel Prize for scientific research, it is a collection about womanhood, feminism and motherhood. But, also about big issues which are very much prescient today, such as climate change and politics. From…

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The Wreck

Book Review: Adventure and rebellion on the high seas combine in Meg Keneally’s The Wreck

1819, Manchester. Sarah McCaffrey and her mother Emily attend a talk at St Peter’s Field by the renowned orator and reformist Harold Hartford (a fictional character based on Henry Hunt). The establishment, wary of the revolutionary sentiments growing among the poorer working classes in the shadow of the French Revolution some twenty years earlier, have…

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Caitlin Moran

Book Review: Caitlin Moran offers up another witty and wise memoir with More Than A Woman

Caitlin Moran is back with new memoir (and a new silver streak). Opening with modern day Moran travelling back in time to visit her thirty something self, who is fresh off saving the final draft of 2011’s How To Be A Woman. But the Moran of More Than A Woman has distressing news for her…

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The Mother Fault

Book Review: Kate Mildenhall’s The Mother Fault is deservedly one of this year’s most hyped Australian novels

In an indeterminate future Australia where everything is run by The Department, Mim’s husband, Ben, goes missing. Unable to track him using the technology that all citizens are fitted with, members of The Department begin asking questions. They claim to be concerned for his welfare, but they take Mim’s passport and those of her two…

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In The Time of Foxes

Book Review: Take a trip around the world in Jo Lennan’s In the Time of Foxes

A film director in Hackney with a fox problem in her garden; an escapee from a cult in Japan; a Sydney cafe-owner rekindling an old flame; an English tutor who gets too close to an oligarch; a journalist on Mars, face-to-face with his fate. These are just some of the characters and situations which readers will…

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The Spill

Book Review: Imbi Neeme’s The Spill explores the ins and outs of family ties

Imbi Neeme‘s debut novel The Spill was released in June, in the midst of a pandemic. Rather than despairing at the changed world of publishing that her first novel was born into, Neeme embraced the challenges and opportunities that this brought. She has since launched a campaign to support those Victorian Writers who, like herself, were…

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Language of Butterflies

Book Review: Wendy Williams’ The Language of Butterflies is a profound love letter to a vanishing species

Wendy Williams’ new book The Language of Butterflies is an enchanting look at one of the world’s most beautiful and resilient animals and the role they play in our ecosystem. It’s a trove of facts and treasure and all things butterfly and moth. From evolution, survival, nature and existence, it’s all covered here in great…

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Riven

Book Review: Return to Bronwyn Eley’s stunning fantasy world with Riven

With Lord Rennard dead, Kaylan is on the run. Bound to a powerful Relic she has little control over, she’s headed for Stynos, the one place she might find an ally, and someone who can help her manage this dark and dangerous power. But with Edriast guards on her tail, restless rebels watching from the…

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Flyaway

Book Review: Gothic fairytale comes to small town Australia in Kathleen Jennings’ Flyaway

When Bettina Scott’s father and brothers disappeared, her mother took charge. The wild ways of her childhood were over, and Bettina was moulded into a proper young lady. But, when a mysterious letter arrives and a painted warning appears on their perfect picket fence, Bettina is forced to confront what really happened all those years…

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F*ck Happiness

Book Review: Ariel Gore’s latest offering F*ck Happiness makes us rethink happiness

There are some people who think happiness is as easy to achieve as typing out a smiley-faced emoji. Ariel Gore knows the reality is far more complex. Her latest book, F*ck Happiness: How the Science of Psychology Ignores Women is a deep and insightful look at the positive psychology movement and where it rests in…

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Anne Tyler

Book Review: Redhead by the Side of the Road, the latest novel from Anne Tyler is short and delightful

For those of you not familiar with Anne Tyler, Redhead by the Side of the Road is her 23rd novel. She is a former Pulitzer Prize winner, has been shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and  was a participant in the Hogarth Shakespeare project which also saw the likes…

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18 Tiny Deaths

Book Review: Meet Frances Glessner Lee, the mother of modern forensics, in Bruce Goldfarb’s 18 Tiny Deaths

Born into a wealthy Chicago family in the 1870s, Frances Glessner Lee was supposed to marry well and raise a family. A career was never on the cards. Let alone one that would see her recognised as the mother of modern forensics. Instead a chance encounter with an old family friend, George Magrath, changed her…

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The Vanishing Half

Book Review: Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half is every bit as good as promised

The release of Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half early last month was met with great excitement, with the book quickly becoming a bestseller. Bennett’s sophomore novel is the story of the Vignes twins, Stella and Desiree, who grow up in an American town called Mallard during the 1960s. There are two things to know about Mallard…

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The Safe Place

Book Review: With The Safe Place Anna Downes delivers a tense and compelling debut

The Safe Place, the debut novel from actor and author Anna Downes, takes lead protagonist Emily Proudman on a thrilling ride. She loses her apartment, her agent and her job; all in the space of one day. Before she has time to take it all in, her successful and handsome former boss comes to the…

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Necessary People

Book Review: Necessary People is an underwhelming portrait of ambition and jealousy in the world of TV news

Anna Pitoniak’s new novel Necessary People has a blurb quote from Stephen King on its front cover, and one from Lee Child on its back. In fact, the first couple of pages of the book are devoted to quotes from publications like Refinery29 and Marie Claire, exclaiming how much their reviewers loved this book. Yet Pitoniak’s second…

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Conjure Women

Book Review: Afia Atakora delivers a cautionary tale about the narratives of history in Conjure Women

Set in the years immediately preceding and immediately after the American Civil War, Afia Atakora‘s debut novel Conjure Women is an exploration of both what it meant to be a woman and what it meant to be a slave in the Antebellum South. Conjure Women is the story of Rue, a ‘conjure woman’ in a small community made up…

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Older But Better

Book Review: Older But Better, But Older is a handsome, devilish book about growing up

There is no actual school of life. So what does one do if they want to learn to be an adult? Luckily, the fine ladies who wrote the  bestselling book, How to Be Parisian have you covered. They’ve put together a playful, new volume that is chock-full of observations and advice about growing up. It…

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Melting Moments

Book Review: One woman’s life tracks gently alongside the pull of history in Anna Goldsworthy’s Melting Moments

It is hard to believe that Melting Moments is a debut novel. Not only is the name Anna Goldsworthy a familiar one in the Australian literary scene, but the writing inside this novel is so accomplished that it feels effortless to read. Melting Moments is the story of Ruby, following her from her days as a young woman,…

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Mammoth

Book Review: Chris Flynn’s Mammoth is a novel of great wit, imagination and science

Mammoth, the new novel from author Chris Flynn, is a witty and compelling mash-up of historical and science fiction, with gags and subtle ecological (and more) messaging nestled side by side.  On the face of it, Mammoth, sounds bold, audacious and something that shouldn’t really work. A sentient Mammoth fossil tells his life (and after…

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