Our latest reviews
Me and Mr Booker by Cory Taylor
In some senses, Me and Mr Booker is your conventional coming-of-age story. Sixteen-year-old girl is bored; sixteen-year-old girl falls in love; sixteen-year-old girl learns many important lessons about life. But by the end of chapter one, you know this novel’s…
Snake by Kate Jennings
Snake is Kate Jennings’s firstnovel, first published in 1996and now reissued – because,quite frankly, it is a brilliantnovel written, with sparseeffective language. Jennings,firstly, is a poet and her moveto writing a novel easilydemonstrates her power of lucid imagination.It is the…
Those Who Come After by Elisabeth Holdsworth
Those Who Come After is abook that straddles the crumbling,aristocratic world ofpost-war Europe and the hot,dry landscape of Australia,today and in the 1960s.Juliana Stolburg was 12when her family of threestepped off a boat that travelled from Europeto Melbourne in 1959…
Virtuoso, Ray Chen
The young Australianviolinist has now won twoof the world’s biggestperformance prizes, makinghim hot property. Hisdebut for Sony, featuringmusic by Bach, Tartini, Franck and Wieniawski,struck me at first as being very muchabout showing off Chen’s versatility, so I wassurprised by how…
When Horse Became Saw by Anthony Macris
I first became aware ofAnthony Macris when I readhis heart-wrenching,beautifully wrought Meanjinessay,* When Horse BecameSaw*, about his young son’sdescent into autsim. Thismemoir, commissioned onthe strength of that essay, tells the widerstory – about how his son’s condition wasrecognised, the…
A Love Letter from a Stray Moon by Jay Griffiths
Griffiths has taken the life ofFrida Kahlo as inspiration,creating a fictional autobiographythat is a passionate odeto love and creation at theirmost pure and primal. Actsthat can inspire delirious joy,or knee-jerk reactionary fear– art that has consequences beyond successfound within the…
The Sparrows of Edward Street by Elizabeth Stead
Aria Sparrow is 17 andstruggling to help her mother,Hanora, and younger sister,Elizabeth Rose, cope with thegrim realities of living in adisused army camp that hasbecome the dreaded housingcommission settlement on thefringe of Sydney in 1948.
Row upon row of corrugated…
The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan
Mod-glam vampire rot hasfinally lost its reign at Top ofthe Pops. And in many ways,this is a story that pits thesepitiful snobs prone tocatatonia against the morecomely monsters of hunger,lust and depravity –werewolves. For a serious literary novelist onhis seventh…
Urban Cook by Mark Jensen
I already have too many cookbooks, so why do I feel compelled to collect more? Unfortunately I am not going to be able to resolve my dilemma in the limited space I have here but I will say that when…
Mangia Mangia by Teresa Oates and Angela Villella
On a drizzly Friday morning I made the trip out to Thornbury to bottle passata with Teresa and Angela, who established Mangia Mangia to introduce and reconnect people with traditional family methods of preparing and preserving food. The morning began…
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