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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Alerted by my sister last Sunday afternoon, I caught the announcement on ABC Radio National of the top ten books of the 21st century as voted by readers around Australia. The countdown of the top hundred books had been underway since Saturday morning. Many listeners followed the broadcast for the whole weekend. You may be
Inconvenient Women is a non-fiction book about Australian women writers in the 20th century. It covers the years 1900-1970 and sets out in accessible prose the lives of these writers in the context of the historical and political events which influenced their lives and their writing. The book’s cover features Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin,
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This is the Story of a Happy Marriage is a 2013 collection of non-fiction magazine articles by American novelist Ann Patchett written to pay the rent while she worked on her first novels. The success of Bel Canto in 2001 meant that she could largely give up her freelance work to focus on fiction. In
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Over recent years, John Boyne has published a series of four novellas named after the ancient elements of Water, Earth, Air and Fire. I have just finished reading the first two, Water and Earth, both published in 2023. In each, Boyne takes on a part of human nature which is dark and difficult and examines
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