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
At the heart of The Dutch House by Ann Patchett is the effect on two children of their mother’s disappearance when they were young. In the story, Danny and his older sister Maeve grow up in a house previously owned by a Dutch family in the state of Pennsylvania in the USA. The furniture and
If, like me, you enjoy crime fiction, you will love Chris Hammer’s fourth novel, Treasure & Dirt. The story begins with the discovery of the crucified body of a miner at the base of his mine in the fictional opal town of Finnigans Gap located in western New South Wales. Lauded Sydney detective Ivan Lucic
Loop Tracks by New Zealand writer Sue Orr has just been released by Upswell Publishing. Previously published by Victoria University of Wellington, this captivating novel is now more widely available, as it deserves to be. Loop tracks refer to the way our lives spiral forwards and backwards in time over our lifespan, intersecting at different
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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
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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