Bernard Caleo
Bernard Caleo is a member of the Readings events team
Review — 3 Oct 2021
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…
Review — 1 Aug 2021
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…
Review — 6 Sep 2021
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-vision…
Review — 28 Jun 2021
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…
Review — 26 Apr 2021
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 themselves and have…
Review — 2 Aug 2020
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…
Review — 21 Oct 2019
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…
Review — 23 Sep 2018
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…
Review — 19 Aug 2019
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie
This book is one wild ride: a hectic riffling through the back catalogue of literature, a throwing ofbooks into the back seat of an unglamorous car, and a helter-skelter drive…
Review — 25 Jun 2019
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 intrigue, the…
