Image of cover of book Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh reviewed by Braham Dabscheck in the Newtown Review of Books.

AMITAV GHOSH Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s hidden histories. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck

Award-winning novelist Amitav Ghosh turns to non-fiction to chart the greed and racism at the heart of British and American opium sales to China. In researching his Ibis Trilogy novels – Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015) – which...
Image of cover of book Everyone This Christmas Has A Secret by Benjamin Stevenson reviewed by Naomi Manuell in the Newtown Review of Books.

BENJAMIN STEVENSON Everyone This Christmas Has A Secret. Reviewed by Naomi Manuell

The author of Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone returns with another witty homage to the Golden Age of crime fiction. There’s a whiff of unseriousness around some whodunnits. Many readers still think of the form as stuck in detective fiction’s Golden Age with...
Image of cover of book Twenty-two Impressions by Jessica Friedmann reviewed by Ann Skea in the Newtown Review of Books.

JESSICA FRIEDMANN Twenty-two Impressions: Notes from the Major Arcana. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Part memoir, part guidebook, part history, Twenty-Two Impressions shows the strangeness and wonder of the tarot. In 1442, an apprentice beats sheets of gold leaf out of a coin, 100 sheets to the florin, as dictated by the guild. This gold, together with paints made...
Image of cover of book The Men Who Killed the News by Eric Beecher reviewed by Bernard Whimpress in the Newtown Review of Books.

ERIC BEECHER The Men Who Killed the News. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress

Eric Beecher’s vital new book provides a history of world journalism, good and bad, with a pessimistic view of the future. Beecher knows his territory. In his youth he was an investigative journalist at the Melbourne Age during the glory days of Graham Perkin’s...
Image of cover of book Juice by Tim Winton reviewed by Robert Goodman in the Newtown Review of Books.

TIM WINTON Juice. Reviewed by Robert Goodman

Tim Winton’s new novel dives into a post-climate-change world where violence seems the only solution. The opening of Tim Winton’s new novel Juice cannot help but put readers in mind of Cormac McCarthy’s seminal work The Road. A man, possibly an ex-soldier, and a young...

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My Sister Kate by Jean Bedford.