CAT SPARKS Lotus Blue. Reviewed by Keith Stevenson
World building is the real star of Lotus Blue, the debut science fiction novel for Australian author Cat Sparks. Very quickly in this novel Sparks creates a vision of a future Australia – an already ancient land – that’s further weighed down by centuries of...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on the History Channel
At the start of every week I run my eye along the offerings of Foxtel’s History Channel hoping to see a program that will interest me. Mostly, but not always, I find something. Back when I first got pay TV (we were living in the country then, when it was called...
BRENTLEY FRAZER Scoundrel Days: A memoir. Reviewed by Annette Hughes
Scoundrel Days takes the reader into each unfolding moment of Frazer’s getting of wisdom. Brentley Frazer has changed names in this memoir to protect the privacy of particular individuals, but every word of it rings true. Children who grew up in far north...
Jane Rawson From the Wreck Giveaway
We have a copy of Jane Rawson’s new novel From the Wreck to give away. To go in the draw, simply email us at editors@newtownreviewofbooks.com.au with WRECK in the subject line and your name and address in the body of the email by 6pm Thursday March...
JANE RAWSON From the Wreck. Reviewed by Linda Godfrey
Jane Rawson’s new novel has its feet planted in the earth as well as in the ocean and the stars. Rawson says that she began this book as an attempt to record and make sense of historical facts from her family’s past. She knew that her...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on Robert Goddard
In 1986, when Jean was working as a commissioning editor for Transworld Publishing, she recommended a book to me. It was an historical novel by Robert Goddard, published that year. The title was Past Caring and the publishers, who had some of their bigwigs in...
ALAIN DE BOTTON The Course of Love. Reviewed by Robin Elizabeth
De Botton’s novel about relationships and keeping love alive comes with an inbuilt commentary from the author. The Course of Love has been touted as the long-awaited sequel to Alain de Botton’s debut novel Essays in Love, which was first published in 1993....
STELLA GIBBONS Cold Comfort Farm. Reviewed by Jean Bedford
Gibbons’s parody is a masterpiece of comedy in its own right. Cold Comfort Farm was first published in 1932. Gibbons says at the beginning of the novel that it is set in the ‘near future’ though this only seems to manifest itself in television-phones and the...
The Godfather: Peter Corris: I, Luddite
The Luddites, protesters in 19th-century England who smashed mechanised weaving devices in factories, have been given a bad name. They were, historians have argued, proto-unionists whose complaint was more against factory owners’ attempts to drive down workers’ wages,...
BOB ELLIS In His Own Words (compiled by Anne Brooksbank). Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress
This anthology of Ellis’s writing reflects his wide range of interests and concerns. Scene 1: A man came up to me in a pub. I was reading Goodbye Jerusalem or Goodbye Babylon – one of the big books. ‘He’s an angry man, Ellis,’ he said. ‘He’s much to be angry...
KENT HARUF Our Souls at Night. Reviewed by Robin Elizabeth
Haruf writes about companionship, love, and the damage small minds can do to gentle hearts. Our Souls at Night is Kent Haruf’s seventh and final book. It was published after his death from interstitial lung disease in 2014. It was perhaps Haruf’s own...
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