CHRIS WOMERSLEY Cairo. Reviewed by Robyne Young
Award-winning novelist Chris Womersley delivers a provocative portrait of the artist as a young art thief. There is a sense of anticipation and foreboding present throughout Chris Womersley’s third novel, Cairo, as its teenaged protagonist Tom Button, with a...ROBERT HARRIS An Officer and a Spy. Reviewed by Peter Corris
The Dreyfus Case, notorious for its betrayals and anti-Semitism, inspires this new thriller from the author of Fatherland. In the Acknowledgments to his new novel Robert Harris thanks his wife: … who has been obliged to share our house with successive waves of Nazis,...The Godfather: Peter Corris on going to the dentist, then and now
In one of my novels I have Cliff Hardy remark that painless dentistry and being able to pause live television are the two crowning technological improvements of the past 20 years. It was a joke, of course, but close enough to truth regarding dentistry. When very...SAMANTHA SHANNON The Bone Season. Reviewed by Folly Gleeson
The Bone Season offers a parallel future of clairvoyants and alien races in a complex and vibrant thriller. This is a very grim story threaded with startlingly good flashes of originality. That is not to say that brave young women, invading aliens and mind...FIONA MCFARLANE The Night Guest. Reviewed by Kylie Mason
This mesmerising and suspenseful novel examines isolation, trust and the vagaries of memory. Ruth Field and her cats reside in a house set among the dunes on the New South Wales South Coast. Ruth is a widow who lives a self-contained life, her hours and days filled by...The Godfather: Peter Corris on the changing foodscape
My eight-year-old grandson has recently expressed a preference for snow peas over avocado when required to eat something green. His young brother has stuck with avocado. Another grandson enjoys lashings of parmesan cheese on his spaghetti bolognaise while his cousin...MATT MURPHY Weight of Evidence. Reviewed by Linda Funnell
Forgery, drunkenness, prejudice, injustice – the notorious Newtown Ejectment Case of the 1850s provides a fascinating slice of colonial life. Scandalous land deals are nothing new in New South Wales. The Newtown Ejectment case ran for 10 years in the middle of the...ROSS FITZGERALD and KEN SPILLMAN (eds) Australia’s Game: Stories, Essays, Verse & Drama Inspired by the Australian Game of Football. Reviewed by Nicole Hayes
Footy – for spectators and participants – has the power to connect and the power to crush. There’s much to love in this book. As a lifelong footy fan, I hunted through this collection for the things that interest me most: stories written by or about women who...The Godfather: Peter Corris on his favourite western films
Of my three favourite western films,* one was based on a novel, one was an adaptation of a foreign film and one was an original screenplay. In chronological order they are: 1 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). Based on the 1927 novel by the mysterious and...EVELYN CONLON Not the Same Sky. Reviewed by Candida Baker
Evelyn Conlon sidesteps the traps of historical fiction in this moving story of four young Irishwomen sent to Australia during the Great Famine. ‘Australia without the Irish would be unimaginable. Australia without the Irish would be unthinkable. Australia without the...Crime Scene: DAVID WHISH-WILSON Zero at the Bone; STUART LITTLEMORE Harry Curry, Rats and Mice. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
Frank Swann PI moves through the wild and sometimes dangerous world of 1970s mining-boom-town Perth, and in the law courts of Sydney, Harry Curry rests his case. In Zero at the Bone, the second book in this series, Frank Swann has moved more sideways than on. Working...
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