Mike Shuttleworth

Mike Shuttleworth is a former Readings Hawthorn bookseller

Review — 3 Apr 2022

Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes

It’s clear that Julian Barnes’ latest novel, Elizabeth Finch, is informed by the author’s friendship with the late novelist and art historian Anita Brookner. Ever since Flaubert’s Parrot (shortlisted…

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Review — 1 Aug 2021

The Swallows’ Flight by Hilary McKay

The Swallows’ Flight picks up the threads of The Skylarks’ War, Hilary McKay’s Costa Award-winning novel of World War I. In this new novel, which can happily be read…

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Blog post — 11 May 2021

Reflecting on the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award winner

The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award is the richest award for children’s literature. It’s worth around $800,000 – courtesy of the Swedish government – and late last month was awarded to…

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Review — 25 Apr 2021

The Happy Lion by Louise Fatio & Roger Duvoisin

A happy lion is comfortable in his zoo, far from his home, in ‘a lovely French town with brown-tile roofs and grey shutters’.

He is an insouciant fellow with a…

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Review — 6 Sep 2020

The Wolves of Greycoat Hall by Lucinda Gifford

When the Scottish Conservation Society announces plans to reintroduce wolves into the wild, the Greycoat family of Morovia is soon boarding the Trans-Bohemia Express for the land of shortbread and…

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Review — 24 Jun 2019

Impossible Music by Sean Williams

Simon Rain is eighteen, a guitarist, songwriter and passionate metalhead. When, a month before Christmas, Simon suffers a minor stroke, his life will never be the same. He cannot hear…

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Review — 22 Apr 2019

Promise Me Happy by Robert Newton

Melbourne writer Robert Newton is well known to teenage readers. His colourful novel Runner, about a boy caught up in Squizzy Taylor’s 1920s underworld, is a staple of early…

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Blog post — 18 Feb 2019

Bibliomemoirs: Four recommended memoirs about books and reading

Defined by Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Times in 2014 as ‘a subspecies of literature combining criticism and biography with the intimate tone of an autobiography’, the bibliomemoir…

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Blog post — 12 Dec 2018

Meet the bookseller with Mike Shuttleworth

Mike Shuttleworth has worked as a bookseller at our Hawthorn shop for close to four years but he’s been an advocate for youth literature for far longer – organising events…

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Review — 24 Jun 2018

A Fortunate Life: Edition for Young Readers by A. B. Facey

They say the past is another country, and that was never more true than for this new young reader’s edition of the Australian classic A Fortunate Life. Albert Facey’s…

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