On the night I finished reading Marion Halligan’s Goodbye Sweetheart a quote from the TV series Broadchurch grabbed my attention. A mother whose child has been murdered says, ‘I used to assume that grief was something inside that you could fight and vanquish, but it’s not. It’s an external thing, like a shadow. You can’t
Laura van den Berg’s first short story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, wowed me with its melancholy misfits, elegant expressiveness and intriguing plot lines. This made me eager to read her debut novel Find Me—which traces a pandemic as seen through the eyes of a young woman
Strange graffiti is appearing on the walls of a Melbourne hospital and black foam drips from Jovan’s elbows as he washes it away. An undercurrent of suspicion creeps through the corridors, the culture and the couple who fled war-torn Sarajevo but have not truly escaped … What are we talking about? Black Rock White City
Heads up! You can use your brain to make you happy and use your body to decrease your risk of dementia by 32 per cent. This is not New Age nonsense. It’s the word on the street from award-winning university professor and world-renowned neuroscientist Dr Wendy Suzuki. I bookmarked so many bits of Suzuki’s new
Claire Varley’s debut novel The Bit In Between is a contemporary love story about Oliver and Alison, two young Australians who land in the Solomon Islands searching for purpose and belonging. Oliver is writing his second novel and Alison gets involved in supporting the local indigenous women. As Oliver’s novel takes shape, coincidences start to
When the winners of the Griffith Review’s Novella Project III were announced recently it dawned on me I’d forgotten to review The Novella Project II. Doh! I don’t know how it slipped off my list. Here’s a taster to entice you online to purchase Forgotten Stories: The Novella Project II. You should also mark your
This sonorous collection had me switched on from London to Singapore while all the other cattle-class travellers snoozed dopily into the wee hours. What a superb book of short stories—and one I found particularly delightful due to its absence of tricks. The tonal similarity of the stories appealed to me. Meaning: If there is such
Authors Gabrielle Lord and Walter Mason launched Carmel Bird’s My Hearts Are Your Hearts and The Michael McGirr Selects Series for Spineless Wonders on July 25 at Berkelouw Books, Leichhardt, Sydney. My story, ‘We’re All Travellers Here’, won the 2014 Carmel Bird Award, which was presented by Carmel Bird on the night. I was not
I first walked on the bare rocks of the Burren on the West Coast of Ireland before I knew I had Irish heritage and the tug of that landscape has been more intense than any other. Some of the most powerful scenes in The Green Road, by Irish author Anne Enright, are set in and
Station Eleven might well be the book for readers who gave up on The Road because the post-apocalyptic world Cormac McCarthy painted was so austere they couldn’t see past the misery to engage with the issues this fabulous novel raised. Emily St. John Mandel’s apocalypse is a flu pandemic that wipes out most of the
Recent Comments