GREGORY DAY Archipelago of Souls. Reviewed by Annette Marfording
Post-traumatic stress is at the heart of Gregory Day’s lyrical and profound fourth novel. Wesley Cress has spent the Second World War as a soldier under British command on the Greek island of Crete, home of the ancient Minoan civilisation. After his return to...
JENNY ACKLAND The Secret Son. Reviewed by Michelle McLaren
This charming and inventive first novel is audaciously told and richly woven. Growing up near Beechworth in the mid-1880s, James Kelly inhabits a small but blissful world that revolves around his adoring mother, his favourite picture book, the bull in the paddock...
CHARLOTTE WOOD The Natural Way of Things. Reviewed by Kylie Mason
Wood’s remarkable insight into human nature and deft control of her characters create a narrative that strikes to the heart of gender relations. Yolanda and Verla meet in a bare room, dressed in identical cumbersome outfits and beset by a post-sedative haze. It isn’t...
NATASHA PULLEY The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. Reviewed by Jacqui Dent
Readers will delight in this historical fantasy, a story built precisely as a piece of clockwork. The year is 1883 and Thaniel Steepleton is working as a clerk in London when an unknown person breaks into his bed-sit, does the washing up and leaves the present of a...
SUSAN JOHNSON The Landing. Reviewed by Robyne Young
This novel artfully articulates the search for the perfect self, the perfect emotional and sexual mate, and the perfect life. In the opening sentence of her new novel, The Landing, Susan Johnson pays homage to one of the greatest writers on love and matrimony, Jane...
MIREILLE JUCHAU The World Without Us. Reviewed by Annette Marfording
This is a story of loss and grief, motherlessness and environmental destruction – but also of survival, renewal and the importance of community. Mireille Juchau’s third novel is set in an alternative community in northern New South Wales. Run-off...
LEAH KAMINSKY The Waiting Room. Reviewed by Tracy Sorensen
This debut novel of traumas past and present is both compelling and surprising. Leah Kaminsky’s The Waiting Room starts with a heavily pregnant woman picking through shattered bodies in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. In the mess there are the unseeing eyes of...
JAVIER MARIAS The Infatuations. Reviewed by Adrian Phoon
Subtle psychological insights tumble out from Marías’s prose, taking centre stage even though they seem peripheral to the story. Maria Dolz is an editor who works for a Madrid publisher. She is also a keen, if passive, observer of others. Every day before work she...
JOHN KINSELLA Crow’s Breath. Reviewed by Michelle McLaren
One of Australia’s foremost poets brings inventiveness and economy to this clever collection of microfictions. Crow’s Breath, John Kinsella’s new collection of short stories, opens with an uncommonly wise eight-year-old walking home from the school bus stop when his...
JANE SMILEY Early Warning. Reviewed by Robyne Young
Major events in US history provide the backdrop to this continuing family saga. I finished Some Luck, the first instalment in Jane Smiley’s trilogy, The Last Hundred Years, highly anticipating this next volume, Early Warning, that would continue her story of an Iowan...
CARMEL BIRD My Hearts Are Your Hearts. Reviewed by Jeannette Delamoir
Love, pain and mortality are intertwined in a collection that also takes us behind the scenes of the writing. Carmel Bird’s new collection promises ‘twenty new stories and their origins’. Most of the stories have been published elsewhere and so are not brand new...
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