by NRB | 21 Mar 2024 | Fiction |
Liam Murphy’s debut novel is both a road trip across the US and a journey into the past. It’s tempting to invoke the first stanza of Philip Larkin’s famous poem ‘This Be The Verse’ here. That’s because The Roadmap of Loss is about unresolved childhood psychological...
by NRB | 20 Mar 2024 | Fiction |
Through the story of Matilda, Robyn Bishop’s novel reveals the constrained lives of women in rural New South Wales in the late 1800s. It is July 1892 and Matilda is just old enough to help Clara out of her cot, change her nappy and dress her, but not old enough to...
by NRB | 19 Mar 2024 | Fiction |
In this new novel, New Yorker Michael Cunningham takes inspiration from lockdowns and their impact on relationships. In his most recent novel, Day, Michael Cunningham takes on the difficult business of fictionalising the Covid experience. In his Pulitzer-winning novel...
by NRB | 14 Mar 2024 | Non-fiction |
Renewable energy requires significant quantities of minerals. Can mining companies be trusted to supply them responsibly? Christopher Pollon is a Canadian journalist who has spent the past two decades ‘writing about natural resources, including the environmental and...
by NRB | 13 Mar 2024 | Fiction |
Tracy Ryan’s latest novel evokes the social divisions of sixteenth-century France and the stories of two independent-minded women. In The Queen’s Apprenticeship, Tracy Ryan tells the stories of two women. One, Jehane/Josse, the daughter of a journeyman printer who...
by NRB | 12 Mar 2024 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
The new novel from the author of The Spiral and The Student delivers a noir excursion into the underbelly of the Gold Coast in the 1980s. Steeped in corruption, incompetence, and alcohol, 1980s Queensland seems like the perfect setting for a distinctly Australian...
by NRB | 7 Mar 2024 | Fiction |
Susan McCreery’s novel recounts the lives of the residents of a block of flats in 1990s Bondi and the complexities of love. A few short sentences and a scene is set, a mood caught, a character revealed: all this is beautifully done. Then short passages are linked...
by NRB | 5 Mar 2024 | Fiction |
The new novel from the award-winning author of Too Much Lip entwines Brisbane’s past and present to reveal the impact of colonisation. As I was reading it, Edenglassie received the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction. It is an ambitious novel and as I read...
by NRB | 29 Feb 2024 | Fiction |
Winner of the the ASA/HQ Fiction Prize, Ayesha Inoon’s debut novel explores the experience of moving from Sri Lanka to Australia. It was the silence that she noticed first. As they drove, Canberra unfolded in a series of stunning panoramas … The streets were empty,...
by NRB | 27 Feb 2024 | Fiction, SFF |
Mykaela Saunders’ stories imagine a future where the connection to land and culture is central. Mykaela Saunders won an Aurealis award for her exciting and thought-provoking anthology of First Nations speculative fiction This All Come Back Now. In the same year her...
by NRB | 22 Feb 2024 | Non-fiction |
Graeme Davison’s book is an elegant waltz through one family’s history and its connection to large events, from immigration to world wars. One of Australia’s leading historians, Graeme Davison notes in his introduction that ‘history is usually written forwards’...
by NRB | 20 Feb 2024 | Non-fiction |
Sarah Ogilvie tells the stories of the thousands of volunteers whose assiduous reporting created the Oxford English Dictionary. About eight years ago, Sarah Ogilvie was making a nostalgic visit to the Dictionary archive in the basement of the Oxford University Press....
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 [ … ]