This one of the scariest books I’ve read this year and perhaps ever. It’s also one of the cleverest I’ve encountered in recent times at evoking how the American dream can easily turn sour. Paul Krovik is a property developer who subdivides some acreage, builds his family a model home and gets into debt due
The Son is a breathtaking epic equal in scope and intensity to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian but I think it’s a more consistently engaging read. The story spans 160-odd years of Texan history from the mid-1800s and details the violent land grabbing, slaughter and empire building that lie at its heart. This blood- and oil-soaked
Samos Island was bliss. I swam in the Aegean, danced Zumba in the town square and drank Ouzo. I also read some great books! So today’s post contains reviews of Tenth of December, Shooting the Fox and The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. The first two are for short story enthusiasts and the third
All the Birds, Singing gathers pace as it steams towards its well-executed denouement. Hints are dropped like scat through the first half of the novel about why Jake Whyte is such a cagey, jittery character and carries such horrific scars on her back. The last half takes us more fully into the early experiences that
Ben Fountain’s debut novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, has been described by author and Vietnam veteran Karl Marlantes as the Catch 22 of the Iraq War — and it won America’s National Critics Circle award for fiction in March this year. This prestigious award is judged — as the prize name suggests — solely
It is 1941, at the end of the Blitz in London during World War II, and the poet, T.S. Eliot, is fire-watching with a young woman called Iris. They are on the roof of the publishing house Faber and Faber in Bloomsbury when Jim, an Australian from Essendon, flies into their view a Wellington with a
Today’s post contains my taster reviews of Boy Lost: A Family Memoir, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, Alone in the Classroom and The Blue Book … all worth a look. Boy Lost: A Family Memoir As she boarded a train to escape her violent marriage, Kristina Olsson’s mother, Yvonne, had her
Hannah Kent is a rising star in Australia’s literary firmament and the release of Burial Rites last month in Australia, and in the next few months in Britain and the US, is the major reason for her ascent. Literary critic Stephen Romei said Kent’s book was “the most talked about Australian debut novel in years”.
Four years after finding a dead man and a baby washed up on Janus Island off Western Australia Tom Sherbourne sits brooding in prison. A memory flares from his time as the island’s lighthouse keeper and he recalls, “The woomph of the oil vapour igniting into brilliance at the touch of his match. The rainbows
In Questions of Travel, Michelle de Kretser’s globe-trotting protagonist, Laura Fraser, stuffs her backpack with literature, boards a flight and later muses over “the feeble wattage she encountered everywhere [that] was opposed to books”. Recently, I lugged de Kretser’s large, hardback version of this outstanding novel through Europe and the UK for five weeks and
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