KIM FALCONER The Blood in the Beginning: Ava Sykes #1. Reviewed by Lou Murphy
A killer ride packed with punches, this riveting cross-genre urban-fantasy thriller is set in dystopian Los Angeles. Ava Sykes is a 24-year-old in her final year of studying medical science at UCLA. After graduation she hopes to be accepted for an internship with the...
BELINDA ALEXANDRA Southern Ruby. Reviewed by Sally Nimon
Southern Ruby is an epic story with deep themes, presented in an entertaining way. Southern Ruby, the seventh novel by Australian author Belinda Alexandra, is an epic traversing two continents and three generations in pursuit of one central question: are we the...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on H Rider Haggard
If your name were Henry Rider Haggard, what would you select as a professional name if you aspired to be a popular novelist? Not Henry Haggard, obviously; what else but H Rider Haggard, with its suggestion of dash and painfully acquired experience? Rider Haggard was a...
ROBBI NEAL After Before Time. Reviewed by Suzanne Marks
Robbi Neal has captured a truthful, no-holds-barred and deeply sensitive range of Indigenous Australian experience. For seven years from 2008, Robbi Neal and her family lived and worked in a Cape York Aboriginal arts community. There, Neal heard the narratives of six...
CHARLOTTE WOOD The Writer’s Room: Conversations about writing. Reviewed by Kylie Mason
The winner of this year’s Stella Prize brings together 12 conversations from The Writer’s Room journal. Ten seconds’ googling will find a plethora of writing advice from amateurs and professionals alike. List after list of writing ‘rules’ to follow for success and...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on meetings
I’ve always disliked meetings. At school I was fidgety and resentful at assemblies and gatherings to commemorate notable events like the death of King George VI and the Battle of the Coral Sea (when did that particular anniversary slip off the school calendar – or has...
BRENDAN MURRAY The Drowned Man. Reviewed by Peter Stanley
The Drowned Man investigates a murder in the Australian Navy, mixing fact and imagination with varied results. Books are sometimes like buses. You wait 20 years for a book dealing with the murder committed aboard HMAS Australia in March 1942, and then three come along...
ANN PATCHETT Commonwealth. Reviewed by Carmel Bird
Revelations ebb and flow in Ann Patchett’s new novel. Ideally, a family exists for the common good of its members. In this engrossing novel, the principal two families are fractured so that the members, in particular the children, no longer have access to that...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on asking for more
I went to the RTA Centre in Marrickville to renew the photo ID card issued to non-drivers and accepted by all and sundry. The very pleasant female clerk asked whether I wanted it to extend for five or 10 years. My first impulse was to opt for five, which is what I...
GREG DE MOORE AND ANN WESTMORE Finding Sanity: John Cade, lithium and the taming of bipolar disorder. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress
This is an outstanding biography of Australian lithium pioneer John Cade, whose life merits major recognition. Let’s start with a statistic. The year 1948 marked a peak for deaths in Melbourne asylums, 183 at the Royal Park Mental Hospital alone, and John Cade kept a...
Crime Scene: STEVE P VINCENT The Foundation: Jack Emery 1; Fireplay: Jack Emery 0.5. Reviewed by Michael Jongen
The Foundation is the first book in a fun and gripping thriller series featuring a tough and resourceful Australian journalist. We first meet Jack Emery in The Foundation as he wakes from a drunken slumber, late for his morning meeting at his newspaper. Life is tough;...
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