by NRB | 13 Aug 2012 | Fiction, SFF |
The master of Discworld enters a new dimension. People who buy a new Terry Pratchett usually do so in the hope of finding themselves in the comfortable, funny and wise purlieus of Discworld; full of well-known characters with personalities hovering on the edge of...
by NRB | 8 Aug 2012 | Fiction |
Susan Johnson’s new novel is both a woman’s search for love and a meditation on the senses. As Samuel Beckett reminds us, we are all born ‘astride of a grave’, so there is no reason why turning fifty per se should signal impending decrepitude. Western culture has...
by NRB | 1 Aug 2012 | Fiction |
This slickly sliced satire offers an insider’s view of federal politics. In a political world that contains all the strange twists of, say, the James Ashby/Peter Slipper case, or the Malcolm Turnbull/Godwin Grech imbroglio, how could fiction possibly top reality?...
by NRB | 25 Jul 2012 | Fiction, Non-fiction |
This fictonalised memoir is a book of revelations. Two little girls, sisters, dare each other to touch tongues. I’ve done it, but always thought we were the only ones! The description of the act recalls vividly the singular weirdness of the Tongue Touch – the...
by Jean Bedford | 23 Jul 2012 | Fiction |
Cats, Newtown, street art … this charming book has everything. It was my seven-year-old grandson who first spied The Stripey Street Cat with his beady eye and insisted we buy it, but it’s also a novelty book for adult eyes. Cat-lovers, Newtown-lovers and those...
by Jean Bedford | 17 Jul 2012 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
Iceland’s economic crash gives texture to two crime novels. Arnaldur Indridason is a well-known and best-selling Icelandic author, many of whose novels have been translated into English. His books are police-procedurals, usually featuring detective Erlendur Sveinsson...
by NRB | 11 Jul 2012 | Fiction |
These stories of family trauma find their echoes in the elements. In ‘Moon River’, the chapter of memoir that comes at the end of this collection of short stories, there is an image of the Brisbane River swollen and raucous in flood. It occurs six months after the...
by Jean Bedford | 28 Jun 2012 | Fiction, SFF |
An imaginative interweaving of magic, fairytale and history. Kate Forsyth is well known for her conventional fantasy novels – particularly for the Witches of Eileanan and Rhiannon’s Ride series. She’s also a poet, an author of several children’s fantasy books and a...
by NRB | 21 Jun 2012 | Fiction |
Families and their enduring effect on individuals give the author of Novel About My Wife a deep well to draw from. Dorothy and Evelyn, the sisters at the heart of Emily Perkins’s novel The Forrests, are so close in age and similar in...
by NRB | 19 Jun 2012 | Fiction |
This timely novel of estranged sisters and a family consumed by history gives a compelling insight into contemporary Greece. The house on Paradise Street, Athens, is home to three generations of the Perifanis family. Told alternately by Maude (or Mondi, as the Greeks...
by Jean Bedford | 14 Jun 2012 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
Murder and malice at a writers’ retreat. This is the fifth novel in a series featuring Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope of the Northumberland police. Like many of the more successful English crime series, these books depend heavily on a sense of continued character...
by NRB | 12 Jun 2012 | Fiction |
Nearly 200 years later, Oliver Twist is still a great read. As it is the 200th anniversary of his birth, I decided to revisit Dickens, and read, for the first time, Oliver Twist, which was originally published between 1837 and 1839 in serial fashion. The first...
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