Our latest reviews
Bark by Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore fans rejoice. Her first new collection of stories in 15 years is here and reading it will remind you of why you fell in love with her corrosive wit in the first place. Darker and more overtly political…
Australian Art: A History by Sasha Grishin
This is an important and good-looking contribution to the understanding of Australian art. Covering ground from the earliest rock art to the twenty-first century, Sasha Grishin presents an engaging and comprehensive narrative that sheds light on our cultural history, attitudes…
Earth Hour by David Malouf
David Malouf creates cosmologies around what we typically regard as banal spaces – most famously suburban Brisbane in works such as Johnno. His novels, short stories, essays and poetry are each a virtuoso of memory, exploring the flesh of…
Morning Phase by Beck
Late one warm Wednesday in February, sitting in the gathering dark with a tart glass of wine, I listened to Beck’s Sea Change in anticipation of its new companion album, Morning Phase. I smiled after just a few bars…
The Lost Child by Suzanne McCourt
The protagonist of Suzanne McCourt’s debut novel, The Lost Child, is Sylvie, a sharp-witted but vulnerable young girl. Living in the small fishing town of Burley Point, her father is violent and angry, her mother brooding and distant. After…
Kinder Than Solitude by Yiyun Li
Kinder than Solitude is an intriguing book about three friends – teenagers during the 1990s and the era of the Tiananmen Square protests. Ruyu is an orphan who has been raised by her Catholic grand-aunts and at the age of…
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine
The original meaning of Aaliyah is ‘above it all’, and for Rabih Alameddine’s protagonist in An Unnecessary Woman, the name is becoming. Aaliyah’s existence is defined through multiple displacements – estranged from her family, divorced, retired and friendless, Aaliyah…
Stories We Tell by Sarah Polley
Canadian writer and director Sarah Polley has created a tender and unforgettable love letter to her parents with this documentary, a pastiche of dramatised retellings and ‘home videos’, genuine archive footage and intimate testimonies that explore the unreliability of memory…
The Yellow Papers by Dominique Wilson
Melbourne-based independent press Transit Lounge has a particular interest in works that explore the connections between East and West, and this latest release, with a narrative that moves between characters in Australia and China, certainly fits this brief. The Yellow…
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Set in the antebellum Deep South, Huckleberry Finn is a beguiling tale about a pair of runaways and the friendship that develops between them as they journey by raft down the Mississippi River. One of these runaways is, of course…
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