Hannah Kent’s latest novel, Devotion, left me breathless. What a superb piece of writing. Its lyrical prose, its lightness of touch with the central love story, and its fascinating historical detail all added to the pleasure of reading this book. I kept telling myself to slow down and savour this writing but once I hit […]
Historical fiction at its best Read More »
We’re close to Christmas and the prospect of summer holidays. What better way to banish the fears and challenges of the pandemic than to lose ourselves in reading? In this post, I’ll share with you the books I’ve put aside for summer reading. I was lucky enough to have attended a live writers festival at
In The Sweetest Fruits, Monique Truong has rescued from obscurity the life of an author famous in his time for his travel and food writing, and recreated through her imagination and artistry the many-sided lives of the women closest to him. Each woman’s story reveals new detail about the life of Patricio Lafcadio Hearn who
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A dominant theme in both The Labyrinth and The Mother Fault is the strong urge mothers feel to shield and support their children, often at great personal expense. The Labyrinth by Amanda Lohrey is a work of literary fiction. At its heart is the relationship between Erica and her adult son, Daniel. Early in the
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Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest novel, Whereabouts was like sitting in an Italian café on a piazza, sipping coffee, watching people pass, and wondering about their lives. It was such an enjoyable experience, I read the novel twice to savour the details of its deceptively simple story and language. An exquisite piece of writing, Whereabouts charts
Two very different books I have enjoyed reading during Sydney’s lockdown have been Belinda Probert’s Imaginative Possession and Kitty Flanagan’s 488 Rules for Life: The Thankless Art of Being Correct. Deprived of the usual variety of human company, I’ve found some books really come into their own at such a time. They can offer us
Amnesty, a novel by Aravind Adiga, made me see my hometown of Sydney in a completely new light. Adiga’s previous novels, including White Tiger which won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 2008, were all set in India. He used Sydney as a backdrop to his latest novel after spending time here as an international
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Fury, a memoir by Kathryn Heyman, seized my attention from the start. In the initial scene, Heyman presents her younger self standing on the boom of a fishing trawler, lashed by waves in a life-threatening storm in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her use of sensory language was so effective, I felt sea-sick with every rise
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Sofie Laguna is one of my favourite Australian authors. Her prose is so startling in its poetry and originality. Just through their language, her novels give me intense pleasure. I also really admire Laguna’s ability to tackle big subjects through the perspective of children as she has done so well in Infinite Splendours as well
When I read about Susan Johnson’s From Where I Fell in the program for the 2021 Sydney Writers Festival, I was intrigued. How could someone write a novel using only emails? From Where I Fell, published this year (2021), begins with an emotional private email from an Australian woman to her ex-husband, Chris Woods. The problem is