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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The Survivors by Jane Harper is the pick of the novels I’ve read this summer. It’s a perfect holiday book – entertaining, gripping and easy to read. The story takes place in a small Tasmanian seaside town. The rocks off Evelyn Bay have caused many a shipwreck in the past, and the title of the
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Before I read American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, I was aware of the controversy surrounding the novel. Indeed, this was what made me keen to read it for myself. American Dirt tells a gripping story from page one. It is written in a cinematic style and its pace is that of a thriller. Oprah Winfrey
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In The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante takes her devoted readers back to the streets of Naples with a new protagonist, Giovanna, an adolescent who is starting to question herself and her family after a privileged childhood. The story follows Giovanna from age twelve to sixteen, as she finds an outcast aunt and a whole cast
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The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld contains three interleaved stories. The novel begins with Viv as a child discovering a suitcase on a beach. The suitcase has a body inside. Viv’s story continues when she returns to the house where her mother lived before she married. A later chapter tells the story of a young man fleeing his