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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 […]

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

Jung Chang’s latest non-fiction book, Big Sister Little Sister Red Sister provides a fascinating insight into the history of China in the first half of the 20th century. Jung Chang, an author of Chinese origin now living in London, has written four books about Chinese history.  The first, Wild Swans, published in 1991, tells the story of her own

In the novel which won the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Tara Jane Winch immerses her readers in layers of time. The Yield is a contemporary story wrapped in thousands of years of history. It centres on August Goondiwindi, a troubled young Indigenous woman who returns to Australia from England to attend her grandfather’s funeral. Winch achieves the sensation of

Shortlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin Award for Australian Literature and Winner of the 2020 NSW Premier’s Prize for Indigenous Writing The White Girl follows the fortunes of two Aboriginal women, Odette Brown and her granddaughter Sissy, as they flee their country town for the city to find Sissy’s mother and escape the threat of

Hamnet, is Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel. The title refers to the name Shakespeare and his wife gave their only son. In the late 1500s in England, Hamlet was an equivalent spelling This work of historical fiction re-creates the life of Shakespeare’s family. With William Shakespeare away in London so often for his theatre work, Anne

Julia Baird’s latest book, Phosphorescence, contains a set of essays that focus on the joy of living and how to live well. Little sparkles of hard-won wisdom sprinkle the book. To create it, Julia Baird has taken some of her previous published articles, mined her own life and sought the secrets of joy and fulfilment in

As the weeks of home isolation continue, have you noticed more about your home and its surrounds than you did before? I don’t mean just the cobwebs in the corners and the dust on the window sills. Have you noticed the freshness of the air outside, the way birds are flying straight and low, the

In 2017, Korean-American author Min Jin Lee published Pachinko and Free Food for Millionaires, two fine family sagas. Both novels are ideal to read in our current circumstances of social isolation during a pandemic when we have more time to read  and are longing for escape into a different world and a different era. I was lucky enough

A friend and I have established a tradition for the Sydney Writers Festival. We agree on a day we will attend then I select the sessions and my friend brings  lunch. In 2017, I called her with my three session selections. ‘Just buy one ticket for the Helen Garner one,’ she said. ‘I’ve read nothing