Trust no-one! This is a key message of The Betrayal — an intriguing novel about a couple born shortly after the Russian Revolution and who came to adulthood during the Great Terror of the 1930s. Anna and Andrei lived through the Siege of Leningrad and had high hopes afterwards that everything would settle and be
This novel’s an intriguing ride for those who want an intergenerational Australian family story set in a rural setting. It’s jaunty as a show pony and dappled with striking characters — some larrikins, some lovable — all adding flavour to this pre-WWII tale of show-jumping and falls from form and grace. At its heart Foal’s
If you’re not interested in negotiating the twin griefs of burying a daughter and growing old then forget it. Blue Nights charts them both in a scarifying and cool-eyed way. As soon as a child is born (or adopted, as was Didion’s daughter Quintana Roo) guilt about failure enters the picture. When the daughter, whom
The pieces I liked best in this unusual sibling tale were ponderings about memory. Forty-something introspective, Denise, says of her father: “Inside, beyond my recall of events and dates and talk, there was this hot-wired memory of his body … Your experiences, the hard felt ones, don’t fade. They are written forever in your flesh,
You may know that it was the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke who wrote the oft-quoted exhortation to “Live the questions now … [so that] you might live some day into the answer.” You may not know that, on his birth, Rainer Maria’s mother, Phia, consecrated him to “the gracious Madonna” and gave him a
Edith Campbell Berry is a fascinating protagonist and the Edith trilogy, of which Cold Light is the last, is a tour de force. The trilogy took 25 years to write and the sweep of history this last volume of the work encompasses (1950 to the Whitlam era) is staggering. Like the other Edith volumes —
This might be how … but I’m still wondering why? Patrick Oxtoby, the central character in M. J. Hyland’s much-lauded novel, makes a terrible mistake that alters the course of his young life. He seems to make the mistake because he can’t express himself and has been in a repressed rage due to his fiancé
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1975 and it’s no mystery why they keep re-issuing it. It’s fabulous! I’m just sorry it’s taken me so long to getting around to feasting on its delights. Dillard spends a year chronicling what she observes each day in the hills of Virginia.
“Where We Must Be” is the standout story of this impressive debut collection. The narrator, Jean, is a struggling actor who dresses up as Bigfoot — scaring paid visitors to a North Carolina nature park. Her boyfriend and neighbour, Jimmy, has given up being a postman after a fatal spot was found on his lungs.
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