Non-Fiction reviews
Accidental Feminists by Jane Caro
Accidental Feminists is a celebration of the women who came after the Australian women who won the right to vote. These secondwave feminists grew up earning money most of their lives, a fact that is …
Beyond Words: A Year with Kenneth Cook by Jacqueline Kent
In 1985, Jacqueline Kent was living in Sydney and working as a freelance book editor. At a dinner party, she met Kenneth Cook, author of classic Australian novel Wake in Fright. The two quickly fell …
The Dinosaur Artist by Paige Williams
Adapted and greatly expanded from her 2013 New Yorker article ‘Bones of Contention’, Paige Williams delves again, more deeply, into the heady and complex world of ‘commercial palaeontology’ and its i…
Through the Night by Ed Moreno & Caio Fernando Abreu
In 1990 Ed Moreno was given a death sentence: at just 25 years of age he tested HIV positive and doctors gave him five years to live, at best. Almost thirty years later, with the help of antiretrovir…
Heartland by Sarah Smarsh
The product of multiple generations of teenage mothers, Sarah Smarsh was just a child and living below the poverty line in rural Kansas when she first heard a voice from within. This voice grew into …
Close to Home by Alice Pung
Alice Pung arrived on the Australian literary scene with the 2006 publication of her memoir, Unpolished Gem. She has since gone on to write a second memoir, a series of children’s books, a young adul…
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…
The Arsonist by Chloe Hooper
In February 2009, the state of Victoria experienced extreme weather events that provided the perfect conditions for the bushfire catastrophe that has come to be known as Black Saturday. One hundred a…
Boys Will Be Boys by Clementine Ford
Just as she did with the title of her first book, Clementine Ford has taken another well-known expression and repurposed it for the title of her second. Ford reclaimed Fight Like A Girl and framed th…
The World Was Whole by Fiona Wright
This is the second non-fiction book from acclaimed Australian writer Fiona Wright. In 13 essays, she delves into the spaces we inhabit – our bodies and our homes – and explores what it means when the…
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