by NRB | 27 Aug 2012 | Fiction, SFF |
Celtic and Japanese cultures give visual and emotional charge to two recent fantasy novels. There is much richness and complexity on offer in fantasy writing, as well as extraordinarily varied and layered resources available to the writer. Two recently published books...
by NRB | 24 Aug 2012 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
Radio and television interviewers sometimes struggle to ask sensible questions of writers. ‘Where do your ideas come from?’ is an old stand-by to which most writers patiently reply with a formula answer like, ‘A combination of imagination and experience’. Crime...
by NRB | 20 Aug 2012 | Fiction |
The strange case of Roger Casement. The ghost of Roger Casement is beating on the door. W B Yeats This a difficult book to review, but not because it’s boring or poorly written – I read it comparatively quickly with great interest – but because it is more like a...
by NRB | 17 Aug 2012 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
In the latter part of the 19th century, after mass education greatly expanded the number of readers, the short story enjoyed a great vogue. In Britain, ‘literary’ writers like Joseph Conrad and Henry James produced them for fashionable magazines and ‘popular’ writers...
by NRB | 13 Aug 2012 | Fiction, SFF |
The master of Discworld enters a new dimension. People who buy a new Terry Pratchett usually do so in the hope of finding themselves in the comfortable, funny and wise purlieus of Discworld; full of well-known characters with personalities hovering on the edge of...
by NRB | 10 Aug 2012 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
The first library I remember was the Footscray City Library. I was nine or ten and travelled there from Yarraville by tram. I imagine the trip cost a penny for a child. The library was quiet and dark, staffed by unsmiling women. I borrowed heavily – W E Johns, Edgar...
by NRB | 8 Aug 2012 | Fiction |
Susan Johnson’s new novel is both a woman’s search for love and a meditation on the senses. As Samuel Beckett reminds us, we are all born ‘astride of a grave’, so there is no reason why turning fifty per se should signal impending decrepitude. Western culture has...
by NRB | 6 Aug 2012 | Non-fiction |
Alcoholism, neurosis, venereal disease … this fascinating compendium of writers’ lives contains plenty of cautionary tales. John Sutherland, an academic himself, seems to have set out to annoy his colleagues. Not for him an analysis of the text with the...
by NRB | 3 Aug 2012 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
My workroom is spacious, light and airy. It is detached from the house, joined to it by a short, covered walkway. It’s built of brick, is very well insulated, and solar panels on the roof supply most of the power to the electronics. The large window in one wall looks...
by NRB | 1 Aug 2012 | Fiction |
This slickly sliced satire offers an insider’s view of federal politics. In a political world that contains all the strange twists of, say, the James Ashby/Peter Slipper case, or the Malcolm Turnbull/Godwin Grech imbroglio, how could fiction possibly top reality?...
by NRB | 27 Jul 2012 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
Malcolm Bradbury was offered a lot of money by an American university for the manuscript of The History Man. He’d thrown it out. He produced another version, complete with crossings out and corrections, and got the dough. I’ve never pulled off such a coup, but I have...
by NRB | 25 Jul 2012 | Fiction, Non-fiction |
This fictonalised memoir is a book of revelations. Two little girls, sisters, dare each other to touch tongues. I’ve done it, but always thought we were the only ones! The description of the act recalls vividly the singular weirdness of the Tongue Touch – the...
JUNE WRIGHT Mother Paul series. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm6 December 2024June Wright has faded from view, but in 1948 her novel Murder in the Telephone [ … ]
ANDREW O’HAGAN Caledonian Road. Reviewed by Catherine Pardey5 December 2024This new novel from the author of Mayflies is set in London, but Glasgow is [ … ]
IAIN RYAN The Dream. Reviewed by Ben Ford Smith3 December 2024Iain Ryan’s latest novel continues his fascination with 1980s Queensland and [ … ]
MARINA YUSZCZUK Thirst. Reviewed by Ann Skea28 November 2024Argentinian writer Marina Yuszczuk puts her twist on the vampire novel in [ … ]