Some of my favourite novels start with the childhood of their characters and follow them into adulthood. Kin by Tayari Jones is one of those novels. Kin tells the story of two motherless girls, Vernice and Annie, raised by kin in poor black families in Louisiana. In harsh family conditions, the girls sustain each other […]
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The debut novel Good People by Patmeena Sabit centres on the Sharaf family, an Afgam family living in the USA. The parents, Rhamat and Maryam, grew up in Afganistan but their children were born in America. The action revolves around the two older children, son Omer and daughter Zorah. The Sharafs are seen as good
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The intriguing idea that the name we give a baby influences the sort of person they will become is the premise of Florence Knapp’s celebrated debut novel, The Names. In the opening scene set in an English town, Cora, takes her 9-year-old daughter and a newborn son to register the boy’s name. On the way,
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Last year (2025) saw two remarkable memoirs published by the renowned authors, Arundhati Roy and Margaret Atwood. Both books relate the author’s development as a writer and situate them within their family, their country of origin and their times. Each is quite a different reading experience. Mother Mary Comes to Me is a memoir
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Jonathon Freedland is a London-based writer who visited Australia recently for the Adelaide Writers Festival. When the festival was cancelled, the Sydney Writers Festival invited him to speak about The Traitors Circle at the State Library of NSW, an event I was fortunate enough to attend. The Traitors Circle is a non-fiction book which reads
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The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is Kiran Desai’s third novel, published nearly twenty years after The Inheritance of Loss which won the 2006 Booker Prize. It is a monumental book of great scope and ambition. In many ways, it reminded me of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In telling the story of Sonia and
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Sydney writer Madeleine Gray’s debut novel, Green Dot, has been read widely since its publication in 2023, largely due to word-of-mouth recommendation. Gray has since published a second novel, Chosen Family, a book I have yet to read. Hera Stephen is the first-person narrator of Green Dot. She is in her mid-twenties, holds three arts
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You’ll need to set aside a few days to read I Have Some Questions For You by American author Rebecca Makkai, but it’s worth it. This is a whodunnit with extras. The novel is set in rural America at a secluded private boarding school for high school students. In the 1970s one of the students
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In the run-up to Christmas, I’m going no further than my local bookshop. Books make the perfect gift. They promise days of enjoyment and a complete break from our hectic lives. I think I have it sorted for family members. Now the pleasurable task of putting some suggestions forward for books I’d like to receive
At the recent History Unbound Festival at Parramatta, I discovered a feast of historical fiction by Australian authors. By chance, two of the novels I’ve read since feature orphaned female protagonists who end up living in a religious order. In the 9th and 10th centuries, this arrangement offered opportunities for women which would not otherwise
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