What orients us historically if we don’t know our forebears during our childhood? Is our sense of family contained in houses or other environments? How tenuous are the links between parents and children? What haunts us from the past and why? Lisa Gorton’s new novel, The Life of Houses, provokes this kind of questioning and
I hate Easter egg chocolate so books are my Easter treat. Who needs dud chocolate when birds, love, war, art forgery and poems of great immediacy are on offer? H is for Hawk Helen MacDonald’s photographer father died suddenly and training her new goshawk, Mabel, helped her through it. MacDonald’s an academic who writes about
Each year I send a book list to friends and contacts with highlights from my previous year’s reading — and they love it. This week The Cove Observer is publishing my list. Here it is for people who haven’t seen it yet and who don’t live in Lane Cove, on the Lower North Shore of Sydney.
joanne burns taught me a lot about writing during my time at university and with her recent poetry collection, brush, my education continues. What I relish in her work, old and new, is its humour and playfulness, its gimlet-eyed perception and its voltaic surge. In burns’ spirit of inventiveness, I’ve chosen several definitions of the
Three great books sweetened the days between Christmas and January 1 for me — ending a fine literary year and paving the way for a happy 2015 of reading pleasure. I wonder which of these three sweet treats will please your palate over the summer break? 1. Revolutionary Road Richard Yates, with a rapier-deftness like
Robert Dessaix’s voice is as distinctive as a fingerprint and his dazzling flights through fiction and memoir distinguish his writing in Australian letters. What Days Are For: A Memoir, published in November, is classic Dessaix and does not disappoint. Despite its clinical backdrop, it’s an intimate fireside chat, blazing and crackling — and I was
Santa’s reindeers do heavy lifting at Christmas but they don’t get much glory (or cake). I raise a glass to my reindeers of 2014. These are the books I meant to garland with fairy lights well before now … but the year jingled away. Dasher … Combining classical music and travel: Was this memoir written
Speed date 1: Australian Love Stories First crush, slow burn or for better or worse? First crush? Easy. Bruce Pascoe’s ‘Dawn’. It’s a paean to a sleeping woman and the reader shares her lover’s gaze. Sensual. Silver-tongued. Seductive. Here’s an amuse bouche: ‘It is allowed that I may let a finger slide into the cup
Here’s the format: Three questions, three answers, move on. When it’s over, you decide which book of short stories you’re going to date. Your time starts now … Speed date 1: An Elegant Young Man What world are you from? I’m the kind of guy who walks around Liverpool in the south-western suburbs of Sydney
Cracking the Spine: Ten short Australian Stories and How They Were Written is a diamond that should feature on reading lists the nation over — to ensure its richness can be savoured by secondary English and tertiary Literary Studies students, thoughtful writers and all who enjoy reading and good books. It’s an insider’s view of
Recent Comments