Joanna Di Mattia
Joanna Di Mattia is from Readings Carlton
Review — 26 Feb 2024
Practice by Rosalind Brown
Scholarly success demands a certain ascetic discipline and Annabel, the protagonist of Rosalind Brown’s exceptional debut novel, thinks she’s adopted all the right habits. She’s spending a cold Sunday at…
Blog post — 8 Dec 2023
Bookseller spotlight: Joanna Di Mattia’s favourite books of 2023
Joanna Di Mattia is a bookseller at Readings Carlton.
I made an early declaration this year that Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos would be the best novel I’d read in 2023, and…
Review — 31 Jul 2023
Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin
When I was an undergraduate in the early 1990s, I took a course in women’s art history that ran over multiple semesters and offered a historical survey. I encountered art…
Review — 31 Jul 2023
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck & Michael Hofmann (trans.)
The title of Jenny Erpenbeck’s fourth novel refers to a tenet of ancient Greek philosophy – the idea of the right or critical moment to act. Just how kairos impacts…
Review — 3 Jul 2023
George: A Magpie Memoir by Frieda Hughes
I’ll confess I wanted to review this memoir, in part, because of a prying curiosity. What might the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes reveal to me about her…
Review — 3 Jul 2023
Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Love and Making a Life by Amy Key
What if being single isn’t a transient state? Is a life without romantic love necessarily intolerable? These are just two of the tough, weighty questions from which Amy Key’s introspective…
Review — 20 Apr 2023
August Blue by Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy’s new novel unfolds like a dream – surreal, beguiling, enigmatic. As with most of Levy’s work, it creates a singular world, influenced by Duras and de Beauvoir and…
Review — 27 Mar 2023
Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas
Madelaine Lucas’s gorgeous debut opens with her unnamed narrator’s discovery of a photo of a man with a little girl: his daughter. She recognises him – Jude, older now than…
Review — 28 Jun 2021
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
‘It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.’ A great opening line: nervous, brittle, crackling…
Review — 30 Aug 2022
This Devastating Fever by Sophie Cunningham
Leonard Woolf – writer, publisher, colonialist, gardener, animal lover, and husband of Virginia – called his personal battle between desire and repression ‘this devastating fever’. Leonard is a major protagonist…
