by NRB | 16 Jan 2025 | Non-fiction |
Cher is a genuine superstar who has had an extraordinary career across music, film and television. Now her memoir recounts how she got there. Cher prefaces Part 1 of her long-awaited memoir by recalling her reaction to seeing Elvis Presley performing at 1956 concert...
by NRB | 15 Jan 2025 | Non-fiction |
Peter Godwin’s memoir charts a life of exile, ranging from the horror of civil war to family eccentricity and life in London and New York. Exit Wounds is a curious title for a memoir, especially when Godwin, early in the book, tells of an illustrated lecture on...
by NRB | 14 Jan 2025 | Fiction |
Mark Smith’s first novel for adults is both a psychological thriller and an exploration of a shocking moral dilemma. Mark Smith, a Victoria-based educator, is best known as the author of the critically acclaimed YA Winter Trilogy and If Not For Us, a very enjoyable YA...
by NRB | 19 Dec 2024 | Fiction, Non-fiction |
Welcome to our most popular reviews of the year. Is your favourite among them? It’s that time of year when we go through our stats to learn which reviews appealed to readers most. Is one of your favourite books on the list? Or perhaps there are a few titles...
by NRB | 17 Dec 2024 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
Ronni Salt’s debut is historical crime fiction at its best, with a strong sense of place and time and wonderful characters at its core. Ronni Salt will be well-known to denizens of what was Twitter, now X, and followers of independent media. A pseudonym that has...
by NRB | 12 Dec 2024 | Non-fiction |
Historian Timothy Snyder asserts that freedom is something we must work for – and collective action is imperative to maintaining it. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Timothy Snyder was in Czechoslovakia, working as a graduate student in economics and studying...
by NRB | 11 Dec 2024 | Non-fiction |
Sue Prideaux separates the man from the myth in this new account of the controversial nineteenth-century French artist. Who was Paul Gauguin? Was he a ‘colonialist’; ‘the bad boy who spread syphilis around the South Seas’; a ‘defender of native vices’, a ‘subverter of...
by NRB | 10 Dec 2024 | Fiction |
Not just for Kylie fans: the editors of this anthology inspired by Kylie Minogue have assembled a diverse range of authors and genres. Each of the 24 writers featured in Spinning Around has taken a Kylie Minogue song – ranging across her repertoire from 1987’s ‘I...
by NRB | 6 Dec 2024 | Crime Scene, Fiction, Flashback Friday |
June Wright has faded from view, but in 1948 her novel Murder in the Telephone Exchange outstripped sales of Agatha Christie in Australia. Between 1948 and 1966, Australian author June Wright published six mystery books, raised six children, and maintained a marriage...
by NRB | 5 Dec 2024 | Fiction |
This new novel from the author of Mayflies is set in London, but Glasgow is never far away. Andrew O’Hagan is again drawing upon his Glaswegian background for Caledonian Road, with characters who are slightly similar and far more sinister than those in his previous...
by NRB | 3 Dec 2024 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
Iain Ryan’s latest novel continues his fascination with 1980s Queensland and the tentacles of corruption that captured police and politicians. The Gold Coast, 1982: Queensland is deep in recession and mired in corruption reaching from the premier all the way down to...
by NRB | 28 Nov 2024 | Fiction |
Argentinian writer Marina Yuszczuk puts her twist on the vampire novel in Thirst, set amid Buenos Aires’ oldest cemetery. There’s something defiant about how she doesn’t look away when I fix my eyes on her. Her dark hair is a long, tangled mess; she looks like a bag...
