This one’s a romp! It starts from a dog’s eye view of the bustle of a New Delhi railway station then pans out to reveal a colourful cast of characters (human and animal), a fast-paced plot, and a tragi-comic take on the city and the Indian nation. It’s so filmic, so Bollywood and so much
Coral Vass works to get the words just right. And that’s whether she’s writing about the Australian dubbed by many as ‘the greatest batsman who ever lived and the greatest cricketer of the 20th century’ or about two birds fighting over a perch. Her most recent books for children, Meet … Don Bradman and Two
Here’s my project. I read a poem a day, imbibe its rhythms and use this as an inspiration for my own writing. Because it’s 2016, I’ll choose 16 quotes from 16 of these poems to feature on A Bigger Brighter World so you’ll get to enjoy a taste of them too. I may not manage
Author and teacher Pauline Deeves’ book for 8- to 12-year-olds, Midnight Burial, won the 2015 ACT Writing and Publishing Awards (children’s fiction category). She explains here why books aren’t broccoli, how her upcoming book about WW I is told through the eyes of a young girl on the home front, and how musk sticks kick-started
Canberra-based author Irma Gold is the new ambassador for the ACT Chief Minister’s Reading Challenge—and she’s passionate about finding ways to get kids hooked on books. Her compassion for the baby elephants that are put to work in the tourist industry in Thailand informed her upcoming book for children, Seree’s Story, that will be published
Too much partying and sleeping on the beach to finish a novel? Try one of these 15 fab short stories for size … 1. ‘Letter to George Clooney’’ by Debra Adelaide – this movingly clever story shows why refugees seek refuge in Australia and how disorienting and surreal it can be when they get here. 2. ‘Cake
In what was a strong year for literature in Australia and worldwide, it was hard to choose this year’s reading highlights. Read this list in conjunction with my ‘Bring on the elves’ blog post for an even more comprehensive list of great books I discovered in 2015. The Golden Age by Joan London Set in
Here are 15 book ‘elves’ that cheered and challenged me in 2015. Each review has just one quote and one comment from me—so they’re short and sweet just as elves should be. Find a stocking filler or two here perhaps … Six bedrooms ‘I was drinking Brandivino, a foul, sultana-flavoured brew.’ Yep. I was there. Bennett Daylight
The stark melancholy of its wintry cover, the complex city I revisited through its pages and the ‘speak-memory’ concept that guides the narrative were all signals that I should have loved Gail Jones’ latest novel, A Guide to Berlin. Other reviewers warmed to the book in ways I didn’t—so, I keep going back to it
The Mothers features four Australian women from three generations—each revealing how ‘having’ a child radically alters her life. Through their eyes, we see the less-than-pretty history of our nation, in which there was no support for women struggling on their own with children and where the forced adoption of the babies of unwed mothers was
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