Posted on 15 Mar 2016 in Non-Fiction |
Part polemic, part memoir, Stan Grant’s new book is a passionate account of the toll of a lifetime of negotiating between two cultures. The contradictions of being black in Australia, shown so vividly in this book, are there right from the...
Posted on 11 Mar 2016 in The Godfather: Peter Corris |
As I wrote in an earlier column, I read Wilkie Collins’s ‘sensational novels’ in my younger days and admired them as good yarns. More recently I read (when I could still read) Peter Ackroyd’s excellent 2012 biography of Collins. As I’ve also...
Posted on 10 Mar 2016 in Fiction |
Patrick Lenton’s playful collection of absurdist, pun-filled, mostly superhero-themed stories and flash fiction is crafted with technicolour vividness. Reading Lenton is like eating a box of chocolates with familiar flavours in unfamiliar...
Posted on 8 Mar 2016 in Non-Fiction |
The Unknown Unknown illuminates the serendipitous pleasures of book buying. Donald Rumsfeld, former US Secretary of Defense, is not one of my heroes. Yet as Mark Forsyth has argued in this exquisite little essay, Rumsfeld’s 2002 phrase ‘unknown...
Posted on 4 Mar 2016 in The Godfather: Peter Corris |
Recently I was anxious to hear a reading of Morris West’s 1965 novel The Ambassador. I’d been told it was better than Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1956), which I’d read many years ago and recently heard as an audiobook. I inquired at the...
Posted on 3 Mar 2016 in Non-Fiction |
Do Muslim women need saving by the West? How have attitudes in the West changed towards Muslim women since those planes flew into the Twin Towers? Shakira Hussein’s book opens with a description of a celebrity fundraiser in New York for Afghan...