GREGORY DAY The Bell of the World. Reviewed by Paul Anderson
Gregory Day’s new novel explores the sublime through the life of a young woman in his beloved Otways. In the essay ‘Otway Taenarum’ in his previous book, Words are Eagles (2022), Day recounts how, at a formative age, he looked for ‘imaginative texts...
ASHLEY KALAGIAN BLUNT Dark Mode. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
This fierce, unflinching thriller asks timely questions about threatening behaviour. Why don’t we recognise it? Stop it? Dark Mode is a novel, as the note at the beginning makes clear: While the characters and their precise circumstances are fictitious, the...
ELEANOR CATTON Birnam Wood. Reviewed by Ann Skea
New Zealand guerilla gardeners meet a US doomsday prepper in this new novel from Booker-winner Eleanor Catton. Twenty-nine-year-old horticulturalist Mira Bunting is looking for some under-utilised land that she and the activist Birnam Wood collective can quietly...
FRANK BONGIORNO Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress
Dreamers and Schemers provides an expert overview of Australia’s political history. There is always a place for big history such as this. Near the end of his introduction, author Frank Bongiorno outlines his approach: The book begins in deep time, among Indigenous...
NIKKI MOTTRAM Crows Nest. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
This latest offering of Australian rural noir contrasts urban and small-town sensibilities from the perspective of a child protection officer. Readers of Crows Nest will not be surprised to learn that author Nikki Mottram has an extensive background in child...
LEIGH BARDUGO Hell Bent. Reviewed by Amelia Dudley
Leigh Bardugo’s Alex Stern continues her adventures among Yale’s elite societies, picking up where Ninth House left off. ‘… This is what your magic is for, isn’t it? This is what it does. Props up the people in power, lets the people with everything take a...
KATIE KITAMURA Intimacies. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart
Within the layers of Katie Kitamura’s fourth novel are questions of agency, identity and interpretation. This exquisite novel charts many different intimacies, both physical and metaphorical – intimacies of confidences and private rituals, of eating and touching, and...
SAMANTA SCHWEBLIN Seven Empty Houses. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for her novel Fever Dream, Argentine writer Samantha Schweblin has a talent for unsettling stories. These stories are weird and wonderful, and, given the strange behaviour of people that we hear about every day, completely...
MARYROSE CUSKELLY The Cane. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
Maryrose Cuskelly’s novel seems to have taken Arthur Conan Doyle’s maxim to heart: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ Cuskelly was born in Queensland, where there were several high-profile child...
COLM TOIBIN A Guest at the Feast. Reviewed by Michael Jongen
The author of The Magician is also a skilled essayist, ranging across the personal, religion, and literature. In the first essay in this collection, ‘Cancer: My Part in Its Downfall’, Colm Toibin describes being diagnosed with testicular cancer. At first he ignores...
JOHN DALE The Faculty. Reviewed by Airlie Lawson
This insider’s satire of university life is no advertisement for an academic career. The premise of John Dale’s new novel is simple, age-old even: ambitious young thing gets dream job – but discovers that, in reality, it’s closer to a nightmare. The book opens with a...
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