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
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
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
‘What is it in us—what urge to lose ourselves in the otherness of things—that leads us so insistently to seek out encounters with paintings, plays, poems, novels, works of sculpture, dance, music?’ asks the Australian author David Malouf in his essay ‘Questions on the Way to the Exhibition’. This essay appears in Being There, the
‘You are what you read,’ writes Malcolm Knox in The Simple Act of Reading. ‘By digesting books I am creating myself.’ Knox is one of 21 writers in this anthology who explain how reading has shaped their identities and writing. And here’s my A to Z of why Debra Adelaide’s handpicked homage to reading should
A friend wants me to take a trip to Bunyah to visit the internationally lauded Australian poet Les Murray on his home turf. In the meantime, let’s hit the road with Murray’s latest poetry collection Waiting for the Past and see what vistas open up along the way … What sort of road trip are
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