Stuck for what to read on your Summer break? Browse my top 15 Summer of 2020 reading suggestions to pin it down. This is Happiness by Niall Williams – What a novel! It plaits warmth and wisdom with depth and humour. “Father Coffey, the curate … pale and thin as a Communion wafer.” Laugh and
This was a year in which poetry really had to do its fine work – and it did. These are the poems that most soothed and stirred me most in the latter half of 2020. ‘Short talk on the Mona Lisa’ by Anne Carson Every day he poured his question into her, as / you
Adorable cows, shimmering deserts, and the deep currents that connect us. Found Found has some of the most adorable cow drawings you’ll ever see; their limpidly lashed eyes and big wet noses nuzzling you from the page. Blue Mountains artist, and descendant of the Bundjalung people, Charmaine Ledden-Lewis, has engaged beautifully with Bruce Pascoe’s story
In iso-limbo, these things helped me to drift rather than row against the tide. Life unplugged Covid-19 iso offered inklings of a slower, soulful existence but would any of us go as far as Mark Boyle? In winter 2017, he turned off his phone, laptop, internet and electricity and started life afresh with just a
Isla’s Family Tree is a delightfully conceived picture book that features a little girl who can’t see how the twins her heavily pregnant mother is carrying will fit into her family. When Isla’s mother shows her the family tree she has crafted to help illustrate how families are always growing and changing, Isla shouts, “There’s no
Here are five things I got up to in isolation during the Covid-19 lockdown (four of them book-related of course). Step away from the fridge With people’s focus on the refrigerator and what they can and can’t buy in the supermarket, it made sense to avert my eyes momentarily from the Covid-19 pandemic and fix
Poet-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield’s fourth collection, Toward Antarctica, (Red Hen Press), is an insider’s love letter to one of the world’s most iconic wild places, and I found it unique, moving and brilliantly informative. I doubt I will ever go to the Antarctic but this book makes me feel I’ve (almost) encountered it. Bradfield recommends listening to
In a summer of catastrophic bushfires, devastating loss of life, and relentless political slyness Vicki Hastrich’s Night Fishing: Stingrays, Goya and the Singular Life is a book of solace. Its 13 essays offer us the space to look more closely at nature and linger peacefully; the opportunity to celebrate the coast, water and creativity; the
These five books helped me weather a fiery summer … Salt steps Raynor Winn had not thought much about homelessness before it happened to her and her terminally ill husband in their 50s. With little alternative, Winn and her husband Moth decided to walk the South West Coast Path in the UK and wild-camp along the
Here are the highlights of my reading in 2019. These books hummed through the haze of the devastating bushfires Australia has experienced in the last few months of 2019 and into 2020. If you’re suffering from the smoke – grab one and head inside to read! Wolfe Island by Lucy Treloar – ‘Ideas came to
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