When your husband is dying from a high-grade brain cancer that is stealing his language as well as the living he derives from it, and your toddler is grasping words in greedy mouthfuls and starting to build meaning from them, what happens? You don’t lose your own powers of expression—well, that’s if Marion Coutts’ memoir,
I got stalked by a red-eyed sheep in the Faroe Islands a few months ago and it was disturbing. While Sofie Laguna’s The Eye of the Sheep is also unsettling, I think this year’s Miles Franklin Award winning novel is worth a date. This is speed dating, okay? So, three questions …. three minutes …
Have you ever flinched or cast a furtive look behind you at a person who is unhealthily thin? Fiona Wright’s been on the receiving end: ‘People visibly recoiled when I passed, or looked back over their shoulders in a double take that I could never help but notice,’ she writes in Small Acts of Disappearance:
A friend is setting up a theme-based book club in Beverly Hills. Beverly Hills in the St George area of Sydney — not that one in California. Theme-based. (Not genre-based. Or fiction or non-fiction. Or classics or prize-winners.) Is that unusual? Can anything be unusual in book clubs? The under-one-hour-reading-club, based on something that takes
On the night I finished reading Marion Halligan’s Goodbye Sweetheart a quote from the TV series Broadchurch grabbed my attention. A mother whose child has been murdered says, ‘I used to assume that grief was something inside that you could fight and vanquish, but it’s not. It’s an external thing, like a shadow. You can’t
Laura van den Berg’s first short story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, wowed me with its melancholy misfits, elegant expressiveness and intriguing plot lines. This made me eager to read her debut novel Find Me—which traces a pandemic as seen through the eyes of a young woman
Strange graffiti is appearing on the walls of a Melbourne hospital and black foam drips from Jovan’s elbows as he washes it away. An undercurrent of suspicion creeps through the corridors, the culture and the couple who fled war-torn Sarajevo but have not truly escaped … What are we talking about? Black Rock White City
Heads up! You can use your brain to make you happy and use your body to decrease your risk of dementia by 32 per cent. This is not New Age nonsense. It’s the word on the street from award-winning university professor and world-renowned neuroscientist Dr Wendy Suzuki. I bookmarked so many bits of Suzuki’s new
Claire Varley’s debut novel The Bit In Between is a contemporary love story about Oliver and Alison, two young Australians who land in the Solomon Islands searching for purpose and belonging. Oliver is writing his second novel and Alison gets involved in supporting the local indigenous women. As Oliver’s novel takes shape, coincidences start to
When the winners of the Griffith Review’s Novella Project III were announced recently it dawned on me I’d forgotten to review The Novella Project II. Doh! I don’t know how it slipped off my list. Here’s a taster to entice you online to purchase Forgotten Stories: The Novella Project II. You should also mark your
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