Our latest reviews

A Country Too Far by Thomas Keneally & Rosie Scott

Reviewed by Andrew Carter

‘If the truth is silenced, lies can fill the space,’ says Geraldine Brooks in A Country Too Far, a stunning anthology and searing moral work that beautifully gives voice to the voiceless without preaching at any point. This work…

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Moving Among Strangers by Gabrielle Carey

Reviewed by Belle Place

In Moving Among Strangers, Gabrielle Carey intertwines the histories of the reclusive Australian writer Randolph Stow, and that of her acutely reserved mother, Joan, who both grew up in Geraldton, Western Australia. Carey has lived most of her life…

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Down in the City by Elizabeth Harrower

Reviewed by Tara Kaye Judah

Far from the Newcastle shores of her youth, in 1950s London, Elizabeth Harrower penned her first novel, Down in the City. Staged in an ordinary apartment block in Sydney’s Kings Cross, the lives of two young couples and a…

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The Two Hotel Francforts by David Leavitt

Reviewed by Charlotte Colwill

The Two Hotel Francforts is set in Lisbon in June of 1940, and revolves around the rapidly entwining lives of two American couples, the Frelengs and the Winters. Having left America in order to live la belle vie in Paris…

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The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles by Katherine Pancol

Reviewed by Sally Keighery

Frumpy but loveable twelfth-century history boffin Josephine dispatches her adulterous husband and must confront life on the outskirts of Paris as a single, middle-aged mother of two daughters. When her beautiful but scheming Chanel-wearing sister Iris tempts her with a…

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Cartwheel by Jennifer DuBois

Reviewed by Nina Kenwood

Twenty-one year old Lily Hayes is an American college student studying in Argentina. Five weeks into her exchange program, she is arrested for the murder of her roommate, fellow American student Katy Kellers. The case becomes a media sensation and…

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Subtle Bodies by Norman Rush

Reviewed by Alan Vaarwerk

Ned, a California anti-war activist, and his wife Nina are trying to conceive – he is 48, she is 37, and the clock is ticking. When Ned, without warning, travels to upstate New York for the funeral of his eccentric…

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Gentlemen Formerly Dressed by Sulari Gentill

Reviewed by Fiona Hardy

It’s 1933 and the well-bred but occasionally low-brow Rowland Sinclair has just escaped torture in Germany, fled Paris, and is waiting in England for passage home to Australia. However, he and his fabulously bohemian group of live-in friends cannot leave…

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The Best 100 Poems of Dorothy Porter

Reviewed by Lucy Van

A wild combination of experimental, popular and prolific, Dorothy Porter was the kind of poet writers want to be and readers – even non-poetry readers – want to read. Black Inc.’s The Best 100 Poems of Dorothy Porter concisely represents…

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The Embassy of Cambodia by Zadie Smith

Reviewed by Emily Laidlaw

What to make of Zadie Smith’s The Embassy of Cambodia, a short story, originally published in The New Yorker, now packaged into a slight, hardcover book? Is that all? you may very well ask. Printing a short story…

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