by NRB | 12 Feb 2019 | Fiction |
Kangaroo Island is an enduring presence spanning multiple generations in Heart of the Grass Tree. Not too tight, not too loose. You have to keep adding in the rushes – not all at once, she said – like adding to a family. Keep it growing. When you finish you can’t see...
by NRB | 7 Feb 2019 | SFF |
In this new part-noir, part-dystopian novel, Ben H Winters imagines a world where the state records everything and lying is a crime. Ben H Winters has made a habit of writing what might be called crime fiction/dystopian mash-ups. His trilogy The Last Policeman...
by NRB | 5 Feb 2019 | Fiction |
The struggle over the building of the Opera House is part of Australia’s ongoing quest for a national identity and the country’s truncated sense of itself at this time resonates through Shell. Shell is set in Australia in the months before the sacking...
by NRB | 31 Jan 2019 | Non-fiction |
The stories here of the European settlers’ progress from trespassers to squatters to established pastoralists are absorbing, fascinating and well-told. The Squatters tells the stories of the newcomers who, from the time of the First Fleet’s arrival in Australia,...
by NRB | 29 Jan 2019 | Non-fiction |
Yak on Track shares McNeice’s 16-day trekking adventure in Bhutan, while offering a traveller’s insights into the country’s history and culture Nestled in the Himalayas between India and China, the Kingdom of Bhutan is a nation of forested mountain peaks...
by NRB | 24 Jan 2019 | Non-fiction |
In his introduction to this fascinating collection of writing from the American hobo era Iain McIntyre tells us how that way of life, which began due to economic necessity, became so much more. The material gathered in On the Fly! reflects the politics of the early...
by NRB | 22 Jan 2019 | Crime Scene |
David Whish-Wilson is best known for his historical crime fiction set in Perth and surrounds, but The Coves takes us to 1849 San Francisco, gold fever and the Australian gangs who controlled the part of it known as Sydney-town. The Coves is partly the story of a...
by NRB | 17 Jan 2019 | Fiction |
This Stella Prize-winning novel from Heather Rose is a masterpiece of introspection. Passages linger in the mind; her evocative prose demands that we stop and ask What would I do? Rose has wrapped this novel around the life and work of the performance artist Marina...
by NRB | 15 Jan 2019 | Non-fiction |
The scholarly essays and personal reflections collected in Remembering the Myall Creek Massacre probe the broader meanings of one episode of shocking violence while also demonstrating the restorative power of historical truth-telling. In 1838, a group of armed...
by NRB | 20 Dec 2018 | Fiction, Non-fiction |
From fiction to crime to history, essays, memoir and literary letters, the NRB editors choose ten of the reviews we published in 2018 of books we think deserve to go on your TBR pile. Jean’s picks: Ali Smith Winter The first of Ali Smith’s...
by NRB | 18 Dec 2018 | Non-fiction |
The iconic poet continues to fascinate and Sylvia Plath’s letters shed light on her astonishing work ethic, her marriage to Ted Hughes, and the final years of her life. This second volume of Sylvia Plath’s letters takes up her correspondence from where Volume I...
by NRB | 13 Dec 2018 | Non-fiction |
Feminist Roxane Gay brings together dispatches from the front lines of rape culture. This anthology of personal essays asks one of the harder questions about rape: ‘What is it like to live in a culture where it often seems it is a question of when, not if, a...