by Jean Bedford | 27 Sep 2012 | Fiction, SFF |
Do we need to be afraid? Liz Jensen’s vision of the near future is terrifying. The Uninvited is a near-future dystopian novel that also taps into the category of ‘weird’ fiction some critics have recently noted in the contemporary English novel. Liz Jensen is...
by NRB | 24 Sep 2012 | Fiction |
The creator of the immensely popular Les Norton died on Thursday 20 September 2012. He was a more complex figure than his public image suggested. Bob Barrett loved to stir. The first time I saw him was in a newspaper photograph of the opening...
by Jean Bedford | 19 Sep 2012 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
A sinister series of student deaths ignites this gripping thriller. In Cambridge, unprecedented numbers of students seem to be killing themselves, or attempting to; more of them than could be expected from peer-emulation cluster suicides. There is clearly something...
by NRB | 17 Sep 2012 | Fiction |
Pat Barker returns to the haunting fictional territory of World War One. There have been many fine novels with World War One settings, such as A Farewell to Arms, All Quiet on the Western Front, A Very Long Engagement and Birdsong. While this book isn’t in that class...
by NRB | 12 Sep 2012 | Fiction |
This third novel from Belinda Castles is a love story, a family saga, and a slice of twentieth-century European and Australian history. Hannah and Emil first see one another across a crowded room in 1933. The venue is a trade union conference in Brussels, where...
by NRB | 10 Sep 2012 | Fiction |
The unlikely story of 1920s lady missionaries in exotic Kashgar entwines with the tale of a modern woman in contemporary London. Evangeline English has inveigled her way onto a 1923 missionary expedition, led by the enigmatic Millicent, to explore the mysterious East...
by NRB | 5 Sep 2012 | Fiction |
A book of dark humour and beautifully polished prose. Men have returned from the Great War to hard times and meagre living, many out on worthless, waterless selections with ‘a few skinny cows’. At the dawn of the Australian twentieth century, Jessie is on...
by NRB | 3 Sep 2012 | Fiction |
Witchcraft, the gothic, religious persecution and the aesthetics of a talking head: the NRB editors discuss Jeanette Winterson’s new novel. Linda Funnell: This short book is like a little black cat: sleek and swift and twisting, an omen of trouble, its eyes full of...
by NRB | 29 Aug 2012 | Fiction |
Sumner Locke Elliott’s portrait of Kings Cross and Sydney’s class divides is a classic worth revisiting. My mother was a wonderful snob. ‘You know Macleay Street, of course,’ I overheard her say once, giving directions to our Potts Point apartment. (I love...
by NRB | 27 Aug 2012 | Fiction, SFF |
Celtic and Japanese cultures give visual and emotional charge to two recent fantasy novels. There is much richness and complexity on offer in fantasy writing, as well as extraordinarily varied and layered resources available to the writer. Two recently published books...
by Jean Bedford | 22 Aug 2012 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
Åsa Larsson The Black Path, Kathy Reichs Bones Are Forever, Karin Slaughter Criminal, Camilla Lackberg The Drowning, Tess Gerritson Last To Die, Anne Holt The Blind Goddess. Åsa Larsson’s The Black Path is the fourth in the Rebecka Martinsson series to be translated...
by NRB | 20 Aug 2012 | Fiction |
The strange case of Roger Casement. The ghost of Roger Casement is beating on the door. W B Yeats This a difficult book to review, but not because it’s boring or poorly written – I read it comparatively quickly with great interest – but because it is more like a...
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