by NRB | 28 Feb 2013 | Fiction |
Three women battle the elements, men and each other in the quest to be the first to set foot on Antarctica. Ingrid Christensen has lived the last twenty years waiting for her husband, Lars, to make good on his promise to take her to Antarctica. In that time, Ingrid...
by NRB | 26 Feb 2013 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
This novel of murder and military intelligence in wartime Melbourne is inspired by history. While The Holiday Murders isn’t, sadly, a new William Powell book, Robert Gott has delivered another masterful crime novel steeped in Australia’s past. It’s...
by NRB | 22 Feb 2013 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
Advancing age is said to enhance the long-term memory at the expense of the short-term. At 70 I’m not aware of any particular loss of short-term memory but I am conscious of an ability to recall the distant past in clearer detail than before. In particular, I’m...
by NRB | 19 Feb 2013 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
This dystopian Finnish crime novel is well above the ordinary. The Healer is set in Finland in the near future of drastic climate change. Floods, earthquakes and disease have ravaged most of the world, causing widespread cultural upheaval, the disintegration of...
by NRB | 15 Feb 2013 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
Lately I’ve had Ernest Hemingway coming at me from all directions. For the second time I watched Woody Allen’s brilliant romantic comedy Midnight in Paris, in which a Hollywood hack writer fantasises that he’s back in the Paris of the 1920s. The look-alike actor...
by NRB | 13 Feb 2013 | Giveaways |
For a copy of Antti Tuomainen’s just published prize-winning Finnish crime novel The Healer – or just for fun – do this quiz and send us your answers by email (nrbooks@ymail.com). The earliest correct entry wins. Good luck! 1. Which Australian writer of...
by NRB | 11 Feb 2013 | Non-fiction |
This book invites readers to drink from a beautifully blended philosophical cup. Philosophers occupy a diffident space in Australian public life. No antipodean philosopher dominates debates here in the manner of Europeans like Slavoj Žižek or Bernard-Henri Lévy,...
by NRB | 8 Feb 2013 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
A number of creative people have played golf. British Poet Laureate John Betjeman did and wrote a poem about it, the first line of which reads: ‘How straight it flew, how long it flew’. Betjeman, it is said, was more interested in how far he could hit the...
by NRB | 7 Feb 2013 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
The lives of paramedics entwine with a police investigation to remind us just how good Australian crime writing can be. Web of Deceit, the sixth book by ex-paramedic Katherine Howell featuring Detective Ella Marconi, continues to build a solid, clever...
by NRB | 6 Feb 2013 | Giveaways |
For a copy of Pamela Burton’s The Waterlow Killings: A Portrait of a Family Tragedy – or just for fun – do this quiz and send us your answers by email to: nrbooks@ymail.com. The earliest correct entry wins. Good luck! 1. Who wrote Mad Dog Moxley? 2. What was the...
by NRB | 4 Feb 2013 | Fiction |
Greaves channels Cormac McCarthy in this compelling Depression-era novel of a couple on the run. If, like me, you’ve been waiting impatiently for Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Passenger, which is said to be ‘forthcoming’, Hard Twisted will do until it gets here. The...
by NRB | 1 Feb 2013 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
For more than 69 years I never had any trouble sleeping. As a kid I was very active, riding a bike to and from school and playing back-yard and street cricket and football after school until darkness fell. Later I pounded a tennis ball against the back wall of the...
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