Our latest reviews
The Visitors by Rebecca Mascull
The ghost story has been rattling the chains of literary history for centuries, with the likes of Shakespeare, Dickens, Poe, and Henry James (among many others) all experimenting with the subject – Rebecca Mascull’s debut novel adds another imaginative tale…
The Last Word by Hanif Kureishi
Hanif Kureishi is probably best known for his early work: his screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette (made into a film by Stephen Frears and starring Daniel Day-Lewis), won a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Screenplay in 1986 and…
The Poet’s Wife by Mandy Sayer
Mandy Sayer’s vivid new memoir, set predominantly in New Orleans, Indiana, and later in Sydney’s Kings Cross, details her volatile ten-year marriage to the Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, Yusef Komunyakaa. Two memoirs precede this work: Dreamtime Alice, which detailed the…
My Promised Land by Ari Shavit
My Promised Land is a profoundly inspiring and challenging book. It is an intensely personal impression of a country, for which the writer has intense admiration and affection but also grave misgivings. Israel was founded on a paradox. The ideals…
The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot by Rebecca Mead
I’ve read Middlemarch twice, once as a teenager and once as an adult. Although I loved it the first time, it was the second reading that convinced me this was to be my favourite novel. Rebecca Mead reads Middlemarch every…
Deserving Death by Katherine Howell
On a springtime morning in Sydney, two paramedics get a call: to attend to a collapsed woman in Sydenham. The paramedics recognise the address, and when they arrive their worst fears are confirmed: their co-worker and friend, Alicia Bayliss, is…
Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris by Edmund White
Writers writing in Paris – Genet, Proust and Rimbaud – are who attracted me to Inside a Pearl and while touched upon they appear infrequently within the pages of the latest memoir by Edmund White. An American writer, White arrived…
Destino Mexicano by La Compañia
In 2012, the Melbourne-based Baroque group La Compañia released their album, Ay Portugal. An homage to fifteenth-century Portuguese music, it was a triumph – and I still enjoy listening to it. So it was with great excitement that I…
The Undertaking by Audrey Magee
On the Eastern Front in 1941, Peter Faber, a German soldier, is fighting for his country. In a not yet divided Berlin, Katharina Spinell is waiting for a conflict she doesn’t understand to end. Fed up with rations and the…
The Days of Anna Madrigal by Armistead Maupin
Armistead Maupin began writing Tales of the City as instalments for a San Francisco newspaper in the seventies. Nearly four decades later, The Days of Anna Madrigal, which is his ninth book in the series, is said to be…
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