Bernard Caleo
Bernard Caleo is a member of the Readings events team.
Reviews
Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang
The young female narrator of this debut novel set in China and America in the 1880s is kidnapped in its first sentence. Shocking as this act is, it proves to be merely another downwards step in a seq…
The Islands by Emily Brugman
The Houtman Al Campbell is a Abrolhos is an archipelago of more than a hundred islands and coral reefs flung into the Indian Ocean 80 kilometres out from Geraldton. This wild, forbidding place is the…
Men in My Situation by Per Petterson & Ingvild Burkey (trans.)
Men in My Situation paints a portrait of the effects of grief upon a fragile psyche, and as you are already guessing, the results ain’t pretty. Our first-person narrator, Arvid, lives in Oslo and his…
Permafrost by S.J. Norman
The seven short stories in S.J. Norman’s Permafrost present us with word-etchings of varied settings – apartments, hotel rooms and front yards – against which the emotional action shudders uneasily i…
Travelling Companions by Antoni Jach
My brother Luke says this thing: ‘It’s not the destination. It isn’t even the journey. It’s the company.’ Antoni Jach’s novel Travelling Companions, which presents a particularly untroubled dream-vis…
The Liquid Land by Raphaela Edelbauer & Jen Calleja
Austrian writer Raphaela Edelbauer studied Sprachkunst – Language Art – in Vienna. Her disturbing metafiction, Das flüssige Land, was shortlisted for the German Book Prize in 2019 and this English tr…
Hell of a Book by Jason Mott
Jason Mott’s first novel, The Returned, was a bestseller back in 2013: top of the charts, TV adaptation, the whole nine yards. In writing this new book, his fourth, Mott has drawn on memories of that…
Two-Week Wait: An I.V.F. Story by Luke C. Jackson, Kelly Jackson & Mara Wild
This graphic novel is a fictional story based on the real-life experience of Melbourne-based wife-and-husband writer team Kelly and Luke Jackson. The authors are in-vitro fertilisation veterans thems…
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
Fungi, eh? Flavour of the month. The newest mycological champignon, Merlin Sheldrake, is a ‘musician and keen fermenter’, a son of Rupert Sheldrake, holds a PhD in tropical ecology from Cambridge, an…
The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes
With this ‘narrative nonfiction’, Julian Barnes leads us through the literary and arty world of Paris of the 1880s and 1890s, the Belle Époque of glittering salons and vicious gossip and social snipi…
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie
This book is one wild ride: a hectic riffling through the back catalogue of literature, a throwing of books into the back seat of an unglamorous car, and a helter-skelter drive across an America heav…
Fortune by Lenny Bartulin
An extraordinary performance by Lenny Bartulin, this thrilling historical novel jumps, skitters and clatters across the page under your eyes. A vaudevillian juggling act of entertainment, history and…
Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know by Colm Tóibín
In his 2013 book New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families, Colm Tóibín exposed a roster of famous writers behaving badly. With Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats…
Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
Smoothly, calmly, Haruki Murakami leads us out to the latest outpost of his fictional universe. We survey the hillside and the lonely house in which the narrator has come to live. Once, it belonged t…
