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
Brit Bennett has published two compelling coming-of-age novels in the last five years. These engaging novels will take you deep into the lives of young black women trying to find a place for themselves in contemporary America. They focus on a crucial time in all women’s lives when we make big decisions that shape our
After our mothers have died, how many of us have tried to reconstruct their lives and wondered about how they felt about us? And how difficult would it be to work all this out if your mother was famous and an actress? In her latest novel Actress, Anne Enright explores the relationship between a fictional ‘Irish’ actress
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Classic story-telling John Boyne’s latest novel, A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom, is story-telling at its best with classic characters and story lines, dramatic action and cliff-hangers at the end of each chapter. How can you not read on with a first line like this: ‘On the night that I was born,
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