Our latest reviews
Blood Moon: Garry Disher
A chaplain at an exclusive private school is attacked and left for dead during Schoolies Week on the Mornington Peninsula, at a time when police resources are stretched to the limit. Hal Challis and Ellen Destry dig into his life…
The Owl Service: Alan Garner
This is one of my all-time favourites, and don’t let the fact that it was first published in 1967 put you off! It’s still available in paperback with a very nice new glittery cover.
The Owl Service takes an old…
Solace of the Road: Siobhan Dowd
Holly is fifteen and has been in and out of care all her life. When she decides that her new foster parents in London are too well meaning and drippy for her tastes, she steals a blonde wig and hits…
Jarvis 24: David Metzenthen
Metzenthen’s fabulous new novel sees Marc ‘Jarvy’ Jarvis take on work experience at a car yard. A little unusual perhaps, but there is a method to his madness: the girl Electra, a talented sprinter from Broome who is in Melbourne…
The Lucky Ones: Tohby Riddle
How unfair that someone who can illustrate picture books so full of mystery and expectation also has the talent to write in the same luminous way. I was fascinated and discomfitted by this book about Tom at art school, and…
Alex and Me: Irene Pepperberg
Alex is an African Gray Parrott; Irene is a biological scientist who for 30 years worked with Alex the parrot to overturn our preconceptions about animal minds. Together, Irene and Alex proved that a parrot could understand language, mathematical concepts…
The Waiting Room: Gabrielle Carey
When is it ever the right time to die? And when is a long life long enough? Gabrielle Carey is faced with such dilemmas in this sensitively written memoir on the frailty of old age. When her mother suddenly starts…
Strangers: Anita Brookner
Retired banker Paul Sturgis ‘had always known it was his destiny to die among strangers’. He lives alone; his one surviving relative (and acquaintance) is a determinedly genteel, regally distant cousin-by-marriage. His solitude is broken by a chance encounter in…
The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life: William Nicholson
How happy can I expect to be? Is what I’ve got enough? Am I leading the life I was meant to live? In what could be the most aptly-named novel of the year, these questions are explored through the intertwined…
The Day I Killed My Father: Mario Sabino
‘The day I killed my father was a bright day, although the light was hazy, without shadows or contours.’ Knowing who the killer is from the very first page is an unlikely way to begin a novel, but in the…
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