by NRB | 30 May 2024 | Fiction |
Set in 17th-century London, Lauren Chater’s new novel brings together a royal artist, a young woman’s quest and the real-life Anne Hyde. What do you do if the king invites you to share his bed but you find the idea repulsive? A wave of nausea ripples through her...
by NRB | 29 May 2024 | Fiction |
Gabrielle Zevin’s bestselling novel set in the world of game designers has a lot to say about writers, too. In Macbeth’s soliloquy beginning ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,’ Macbeth foreshadows his own death, the finality of it and the ephemerality of life....
by NRB | 23 May 2024 | Fiction |
The bestselling creator of the Grishaverse turns to the history of 16th-century Spain for this story of a young woman with magical powers. If the bread hadn’t burned, this would be a very different story. So it would. Luzia would not have used her magical skills, Doña...
by NRB | 16 May 2024 | Fiction, SFF |
John Wiswell gives an outsider’s view of human behaviour in this novel of a shape-shifting monster told with violence and dark humour. John Wiswell must be in the running for title of the year for his debut fantasy novel Someone You Can Build a Nest In. The title not...
by NRB | 14 May 2024 | Fiction |
The protagonist of Cameron Stewart’s novel finds solace in solitude as he walks through Australia, encountering both kindness and cruelty. NOW I EAT ROADKILL. When I’m desperate for food I drag dead animals off the road. Rabbit, kangaroos, goannas – as long as the...
by NRB | 7 May 2024 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
Devil’s Breath is the first novel in a new crime series built around a neurodivergent professor of botanical toxicology, Eustacia Rose. Eustacia Rose is currently ‘separated’ from her position at a university, disgraced after an incident in her laboratory. She...
by NRB | 2 May 2024 | Fiction |
Shubnum Khan’s magical debut set on the east coast of Africa features a djinn, a house, and a story that reaches down the generations. A djinn, according to various encyclopedias, is a creature created by Allah from smokeless flames. It has a subtle body and is...
by NRB | 1 May 2024 | Fiction |
The disparate residents of the sharehouse at the heart of Max Easton’s second novel reveal a microcosm of Australia’s housing crisis. New Year’s Eve 2022 bookends this social novel set in Sydney, in which good nature and resilience are demonstrated in the face of what...
by NRB | 30 Apr 2024 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
In BM Carroll’s latest crime novel, one family’s celebration turns to disaster as a teenager disappears amid a crowd of concert-goers. The Sullivan family feels like a loving unit, perhaps because Rachel’s brush with breast cancer made them closer, more...
by NRB | 24 Apr 2024 | Fiction |
Kevin Jared Hosein’s debut novel is both a mystery story and a window into the lives of Caribbean indentured labourers and their families. The place is Trinidad, ‘sometime in the 1940s’. Four boys ventured to the river bank to perform a blood oath. Two brothers...
by NRB | 18 Apr 2024 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
In Aoife Clifford’s third novel, the death of a local celebrity brings two old schoolmates together to answer some troubling questions. In a small town, news spreads, and in this particular small town – Welcome by name, though not always by nature – glamorous Vanessa...
by NRB | 16 Apr 2024 | Fiction |
Miranda Darling deploys all the voices in her protagonist’s head to reveal a fraught relationship in this allusive novella. Winona Dalloway, like Mrs Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s novel of that name, often finds herself ‘lilting between observing life from the outside...
ANNA DOWNES Red River Road and LISA KENWAY All You Took From Me. Reviewed by Justine Ettler3 October 2024These two new crime thrillers from Australian writers Anna Downes and Lisa [ … ]
KATHERINE WILES No Autographs Please. Reviewed by Sally Nimon2 October 2024Katherine Wiles’ life as a professional opera singer seems glossed with [ … ]
ANTONIA PONT The Memory Library. Reviewed by Ann Skea1 October 2024Memories are not merely recounted in Antonia Pont’s novella. How would you like [ … ]
ALINA BELLCHAMBERS The Order of Masks. Reviewed by Amelia Dudley26 September 2024Spies, magic, intrigue, and the human cost of an expanding empire all feature [ … ]
