Posted on 31 Jan 2023 in Crime Scene, Fiction |
The fourteenth instalment of Barry Maitland’s groundbreaking Brock and Kolla crime series is also the last. Scottish-born, English-raised and, since 1984, Australian-based, Barry Maitland published the first Brock and Kolla novel, The Marx Sisters,...
Posted on 26 Jan 2023 in Fiction |
Fiona McFarlane’s story of a lost child reveals a cross-section of colonial Australia. ‘The boy met a god by the hollow tree.’ So begins Fiona McFarlane’s second novel, The Sun Walks Down, and so begins a kaleidoscopic tour through the social...
Posted on 24 Jan 2023 in Fiction |
In unearthing the story of a 19th-century thoroughbred, Pulitzer Prize-winner Geraldine Brooks examines racism then and now. Geraldine Brooks takes on a mighty task in her latest novel, Horse, covering events leading up to the American Civil War...
Posted on 20 Jan 2023 in Flashback Friday, Non-Fiction |
In this month’s Flashback Friday, Anna Verney assesses Deborah Levy’s 2018 memoir The Cost of Living. As readers of South African-born British writer Deborah Levy’s literary fiction will know, it always has an unsettlingly allusive...
Posted on 19 Jan 2023 in Fiction |
What did happen to Lily? Jodi Picoult’s collaboration with Jennifer Finney Boylan is much more than a murder mystery. Mad Honey is the latest novel from Jodi Picoult, a collaboration with fellow writer Jennifer Finney Boylan. The term ‘mad...
Posted on 17 Jan 2023 in Non-Fiction |
This sumptuous book is richly illustrated and almost as carefully crafted as the Byzantine silk of its title. Editor Sarah Braddock Clarke describes Byzantine Silk on the Silk Roads as an ‘academic book’, yet there is much to interest and delight a...