Our latest reviews
Labour Day: Joyce Maynard
Labour Day is a warm-hearted novel by the writer best known for At Home in the World, the memoir of her life and affair with reclusive author J.D. Salinger.
Labour Day is set in 1987 and narrated by 13-year-old…
Generation A: Douglas Coupland
Five bees sting five people: Harj in Sri Lanka, Zack in North America, Diana in Canada, Samantha in New Zealand and Julien in Paris. In their worlds, bee stings are no longer commonplace; bees are nearly extinct and are treated…
The Confessions of Edward Day: Valerie Martin
Valerie Martin is the Orange Prize-winning author of Property, and the author of three collections of short fiction and nine novels. The Confessions of Edward Day is written as the fictional memoir of actor Edward Day. Set in 1970s New…
Legend of a Suicide: David Vann
Legend of a Suicide, which seems to be loosely based on the author’s own father’s death, wasn’t going to be a joyous read – but David Vann has crafted this tragic event into a beautifully melancholic collection of five…
Father's Day: Tony Birch
Tony Birch won wide acclaim for his first story collection, Shadowboxing, set in 1960s Fitzroy. Father’s Day is another very Melbourne book, with recognisable settings such as Sydney Road, Brunswick and the St Alban’s train line. And again, his…
Barley Patch: Gerald Murnane
Words are not important. Or rather, they are only important in as much as a reader can find their way ‘across pages of text’ and into landscapes which they move through by virtue of their own imagining. Murnane assumes the…
Smoke In The Room: Emily Maguire
Here is a smokescreen in a sunlit city, a place where cheap beer and primal sex preclude sleep and grief. American Adam dreams of his dead wife, Katie screws to ward off madness, and Graeme isolates himself in the past…
The Essence Of The Thing: Madeleine St John
Madeleine St John, author of the wonderfully engaging The Women in Black, set in 1950s Sydney, turns her sharp eye and social observations to contemporary London.
Nicola, a young and happy publicist for an arts organisation, returns home to…
Rocky and Gawenda: The Story Of A Man And His Mutt: Michael Gawenda
Michael Gawenda is probably best known for being the editor of The Age, but has since found fame and freedom in semi-retirement writing a blog about his daily walks around St Kilda with Rocky, his young shaggy dog of…
Liar: Justine Larbalestier
Micah is a compulsive liar but she has agreed to tell us the truth. So begins this psychological thriller with an unforgettable but unreliable narrator who is trying to be honest.
The book is divided into three parts, or the…
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