This enjoyably quirky and nourishing police procedural is typically Vargas. The Inspector Adamsberg series, of which A Climate of Fear is the eighth instalment, all contain a delicious quirkiness and sense of fun that springs from the pen of this...
Oliver of the Levant is a wise and nuanced coming-of-age story set in troubled times. Like many 15-year-old boys in the late 1960s, Oliver Lawrence has a poster of Jimi Hendrix on his bedroom wall, and he’d rather hang around Bondi Beach than go to...
Jean and I are now living in Earlwood. Over the years, when in Sydney, we have lived in the inner west – Glebe, Annandale, Petersham, Marrickville, Newtown. Earlwood is often referred to as being in the inner west but this is technically incorrect....
This account of fictional writers’ brilliant careers contains connections, plays, substitutions, witty epigraphs, much ado about plagiarism and jokes galore. I’m tempted to describe this book as a parody of Australian literary history — so I...
Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil engages many of today’s pressing political issues within a well-crafted crime fiction plot. Melina Marchetta’s seventh novel, a realist crime story aimed at adults, is a switch from her previous fantasy and...
I was a precocious reader. As I’ve written elsewhere, the family story is that I learned to read when I was four years old from having the roadside billboards spelled out to me on the long drive from Stawell, in the Wimmera district of Victoria, to...
