Our latest reviews
Max by Marc Martin
Max is the sweet story of a seagull, Max, who likes fish, but also likes chips. When his good friend Bob, who coincidentally owns a fish-and-chip shop, moves away, Max flies across the city to search for him.
Marc Martin…
The Firebird Mystery by Darrell Pitt
In his steam punk Sherlock Holmes mashup, Melbourne-based writer Darrell Pitt playfully manipulates reality and history to create a fast-paced mystery.
Teenage orphan Jack Mason keenly misses his circus performer parents, but his harsh and grounded life at Sunnyside Orphanage…
The Secret Maker of the World by Abbas El-Zein
The stories in The Secret Maker of the World span different time periods, transporting readers across the world, from Lebanon to Australia, to China. We meet a mayor facing down scandal, a priest welcoming his congregation, and a geographer in…
Geek Sublime by Vikram Chandra
For most of us, computers and the programs that run on them are tools, designed to make our lives and work easier. But for the developers who build this software, the lines of code that underpin what we see on…
The Ravens by Tomas Bannerhed
In deepest, darkest Sweden there is a telltale heart amid the panoply of crime fiction. Very rarely do we see the raw beauty of an infernal consciousness like The Ravens knock on our door and remind us that brutal poetics…
Beams Falling by P.M. Newton
If you’ve ever entertained the thought that years of reading crime fiction have given you enough insider knowledge to become a blisteringly incredible police officer, this is the book to make you say, ‘You know what, I am going to…
A Mad And Wonderful Thing by Mark Mulholland
It’s a strange irony that Bernard McGinn died of natural causes just a few months or so back; Mcginn was part of an IRA group of snipers based in South Armagh, Northern Ireland, on the Irish border. Between 1990 and…
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
Alternatively funny and heartbreaking, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves tells the story of a young woman, Rosemary, and her not-so-ordinary upbringing. This is the kind of book where the less you know about the story before reading, the better…
The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt
To put it plainly, The Blazing World lives up to its title and burns the page away. Siri Hustvedt’s new novel is an art-world satire with a genuine emotional resonance and sense of longing, eluding similar novels that strike off…
The Free by Willy Vlautin
At times in Willy Vlautin’s fourth novel, The Free, I found myself wondering if I was reading or had in fact drifted while watching a documentary. The stories in this realist fiction so well match America’s working underclass of…
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