Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus is a great example of a character-driven story. The main character, Elizabeth Zott, is a strong-minded woman who combines the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt with Olive Kitteridge of Elizabeth Strout’s novel of the same name and Beth Harmon in Walter Trevis’s The Queen’s Gambit. Faced with situations common for […]
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Jacqueline Maley is a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald whose first novel, The Truth About Her, was published last year with a reprint in 2022. The main character of the novel, Suzy Hamilton, is a journalist who has written an article exposing a woman who falsely claimed to have cancer which she cured through
Two novels I’ve read in the last month involve the relationship between people and animals. The first, Runt by Craig Silvey involves Annie and her dog. The second, Horse by Geraldine Brooks centres on a famous American racehorse, Lexington, and his groom, Jarrett. Both counterpose the unique relationship developed between people and animals with the
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Nimble Foot by Robert Drewe is a rollicking tale inspired by the true story of an Australian boy called Johnny Day. In the latter half of the 1800s, Day became the world champion of the then popular sport of pedestrianism when he was ten. At the age of fourteen, he rode a horse called Nimble
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Just to let you all know that the latest edition of Children, Families and Communities was published on 7 October by Oxford University Press. Along with Rebekah Grace and Christine Woodrow, I am an editor on the 6th edition using my professional name, Jennifer Bowes. The book is a collection of up-to-date research-based chapters about
They say that every book an author writes explores the same themes. Reading Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro got me thinking about how this very different novel raises similar issues to the other two Ishiguro books I have read, The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. In my view, Ishiguro
The Murder Rule by Dervla McTiernan begins with a series of emails in which Hannah Rokeby secures herself a place in the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia Law School. From the tone of the emails, it is clear she will use whatever means she has available to obtain entry. The Innocence Project is a
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Elizabeth Strout’s latest book, Oh William! is a slim one, more a novella than a novel. It extends the story of characters we have met before in Strout’s fiction, Lucy Barton the writer and William Gerhardt, her first husband, although Oh William! can be read as a stand-alone story. While I was eager to read
In An Officer and a Spy, bestselling author Richard Harris recreates the Dreyfus affair that fascinated Europe in the last years of the 19th century. The story is told from the viewpoint of Georges Picquart, an officer of the French army sent to observe the public humiliation of Alfred Dreyfus in 1895 following his trial
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Sarah Winman’s Still Life and Jan Wallace Dickenson’s The Sweet Hills of Florence both feature the city of Florence. The city itself is more than a backdrop in both novels. It acts almost as a character in the stories. Still Life begins at the end of the second world war and spans four decades. The