Our latest reviews
Confessions of a People-Smuggler by Dawood Amiri
I felt humbled to read Dawood Amiri’s Confessions of a People-Smuggler. He puts a human face to the people who end up in the messy middle to bottom end of the people-smuggling chain. It was less like I was…
Blood and Guts: Dispatches from the Whale Wars by Sam Vincent
With print journalism on the decline it’s heartening to discover there’s still very much a place for investigative journalism in book form. Australian writers in particular are producing some fantastic works of gonzo journalism: Anna Krien, Jeff Sparrow and Helen…
Trilobites and Other Stories by Breece D’J Pancake
It’s inevitable that when reading Trilobites, the collected short stories of Breece D’J Pancake, that we come to consider the backstory of the author. This slim volume was pulled together after Pancake took his own life, at the age…
The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis
The prophecy in Macbeth is fulfilled when, after so much murderous blood has been spilt, he sees no sense in stopping, which according to Martin Amis is the precise nature of the Holocaust. Opening with a witch’s cauldron and climaxing…
The Family Men by Catherine Harris
AFL player Harry Furey should be on top of the world – his team has won the premiership and his place in his family’s footballing dynasty looks assured. But Harry is tormented by the sordid events of Sportsman’s Night –…
The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs by Greil Marcus
When Greil Marcus’s editor suggested he write a history of rock ’n’ roll, he not surprisingly felt it was ‘a terrible idea, that it had been done to death’. Thankfully, Marcus did not shy from the task; instead, he reinterpreted…
The Few by Nadia Dalbuono
Detective Leone Scamarcio is a straight cop with a bent history: his father was a leading member of the Mob, and while he might not have inherited his father’s criminal inclinations, his father’s reputation hovers behind him like a shadow…
Rachael’s Gift by Alexandra Cameron
We’ve all heard of the pushy ‘stage mum’ but in her portrait of a family slowly imploding in the midst of a scandal, debut novelist Alexandra Cameron imagines the ruthless ‘art mum’. Forty-something couple, Camille and Wolfe, are struggling to…
Vogliamo Tutto (we want everything) by Nanni Balestrini
The student and worker movements of the late sixties in France and Italy are often not well understood these days. More often than not, they are depicted in contemporary film and literature as the backdrop to a romance or coming-of-age…
The Special by David Stavanger
David Stavanger’s The Special, winner of the 2013 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, has been described by the English poet Jacob Polley as a ‘collection of curious wisdoms’, and by Australian writer Anna Krien as the ‘dark mad place at…
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