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
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:
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
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