by NRB | 26 Jul 2018 | Non-fiction |
The Coal Truth brings into sharp focus why the proposal to mine coal in the Galilee Basin in Central Queensland is so critical to our common future. The unassuming word Adani has come to represent an immense conflict over how Australia’s, and the world’s, future...
by NRB | 24 Jul 2018 | Non-fiction |
Sport can be examined from many angles. The first of these books takes a single sport and the second a single life as its subject. I might be the worst person to review Footballistics since I decry the over-quantification of the game. If I’m allowed to wear...
by NRB | 20 Jul 2018 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
Evan Whitton, who died this week aged 90, was editor of the National Times when I worked at the paper in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The winner of five Walkley Awards for investigative journalism and the Graham Perkins Journalist of the Year Award for his coverage...
by NRB | 17 Jul 2018 | Non-fiction |
Clearly written and ambitious, David Christian’s Origin Story manages to weave a comprehensive narrative about the evolution of the universe and the human species. Origin Story begins with a manifesto: a defence of Christian’s field. Big History, he explains, is the...
by NRB | 13 Jul 2018 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
I was exposed to poetry in primary school – Walter de la Mare, perhaps, and ‘My Country’ by Dorothea Mackellar almost certainly. The greatest impact was from the Australian bush ballads by Lawson, Paterson, Gordon, et al. A fourth-grade teacher, Mr Harry, was an...
by NRB | 12 Jul 2018 | Non-fiction |
Honesty and self-actualisation are at the core of this debut collection of essays by Durga Chew-Bose. The 14 pieces in Too Much and Not the Mood, varying in length and form, draw inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, as does the book’s title. The...
by NRB | 10 Jul 2018 | Crime Scene |
Two authors returning to crime writing after more than a decade are among an eclectic longlist for New Zealand’s 2018 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel. After considering a total of 69 entries in the New Zealand crime fiction awards (the Ngaio Marsh Awards) across two...
by NRB | 6 Jul 2018 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
I’ve just finished Sebastian Faulks’s take on PG Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells (2013). Taking up this kind of challenge … or perhaps accepting this kind of commission from a dead writer’s estate, more accurately, has become something of an industry among...
by NRB | 5 Jul 2018 | Fiction |
Time and its ramifications of past and present and even a small look at the future are perhaps the main themes of Winter, with plenty of fun, wordplay and space in between. Ali Smith has planned a suite of novels based on the seasons. The first of these, Autumn,...
by NRB | 3 Jul 2018 | Fiction |
Richard Holt explores the possibilities of microfiction with great inventiveness and style. The short short stories collected in Richard Holt’s startling first book, What You Might Find, are precisely constructed and darkly surprising. With impressive economy and...
by NRB | 29 Jun 2018 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
‘Don’t be Ashamed of Your Age’ – country song by Willie Nelson The Biblical age of three score years and ten should only be of symbolic weight but sometimes, to me and some of my contemporaries, it appears to have more significance. So I offer these suggestions to...
by NRB | 28 Jun 2018 | SFF |
Connect is a big-ideas technothriller, with roots in cyberpunk and crazy artificial-intelligence science fiction. In 2010, Irish author Julian Gough created a stir when he called out the Irish writing establishment for not writing about anything contemporary. In 2018...
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MARK SMITH Three Boys Gone. Reviewed by Michael Jongen14 January 2025Mark Smith’s first novel for adults is both a psychological thriller and an [ … ]
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