by NRB | 23 Jan 2025 | Non-fiction |
Helen Garner’s account of a single season of her grandson’s AFL team is about more than football. Helen Garner may have begun her career as a novelist, but she has long been admired for her non-fiction, which has been defined by its fearless honesty and unflinching...
by NRB | 16 Jan 2025 | Non-fiction |
Cher is a genuine superstar who has had an extraordinary career across music, film and television. Now her memoir recounts how she got there. Cher prefaces Part 1 of her long-awaited memoir by recalling her reaction to seeing Elvis Presley performing at 1956 concert...
by NRB | 15 Jan 2025 | Non-fiction |
Peter Godwin’s memoir charts a life of exile, ranging from the horror of civil war to family eccentricity and life in London and New York. Exit Wounds is a curious title for a memoir, especially when Godwin, early in the book, tells of an illustrated lecture on...
by NRB | 19 Dec 2024 | Fiction, Non-fiction |
Welcome to our most popular reviews of the year. Is your favourite among them? It’s that time of year when we go through our stats to learn which reviews appealed to readers most. Is one of your favourite books on the list? Or perhaps there are a few titles...
by NRB | 12 Dec 2024 | Non-fiction |
Historian Timothy Snyder asserts that freedom is something we must work for – and collective action is imperative to maintaining it. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Timothy Snyder was in Czechoslovakia, working as a graduate student in economics and studying...
by NRB | 11 Dec 2024 | Non-fiction |
Sue Prideaux separates the man from the myth in this new account of the controversial nineteenth-century French artist. Who was Paul Gauguin? Was he a ‘colonialist’; ‘the bad boy who spread syphilis around the South Seas’; a ‘defender of native vices’, a ‘subverter of...
by NRB | 26 Nov 2024 | Non-fiction |
There’s more to Joe Aston’s book about Australia’s national carrier Qantas than access to a luxury airport lounge. From 2011 to 2023, Joe Aston wrote the highly entertaining ‘Rear Window’ column for The Australian Financial Review, and delighted in exposing the...
by NRB | 20 Nov 2024 | Non-fiction |
Many great men are remembered for only one thing, and for Charles Todd it is building the Overland Telegraph line from Adelaide to Darwin in the 1870s. David Dufty’s book Charles Todd’s Magnificent Obsession is not a biography but rather a venture story set against...
by NRB | 7 Nov 2024 | Non-fiction |
Award-winning novelist Amitav Ghosh turns to non-fiction to chart the greed and racism at the heart of British and American opium sales to China. In researching his Ibis Trilogy novels – Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015) – which...
by NRB | 31 Oct 2024 | Non-fiction |
Part memoir, part guidebook, part history, Twenty-Two Impressions shows the strangeness and wonder of the tarot. In 1442, an apprentice beats sheets of gold leaf out of a coin, 100 sheets to the florin, as dictated by the guild. This gold, together with paints made...
by NRB | 29 Oct 2024 | Non-fiction |
Eric Beecher’s vital new book provides a history of world journalism, good and bad, with a pessimistic view of the future. Beecher knows his territory. In his youth he was an investigative journalist at the Melbourne Age during the glory days of Graham Perkin’s...
by NRB | 17 Oct 2024 | Non-fiction |
Australia’s Covid response may have had problems, but Steven Hamilton and Richard Holden argue that our country fared far better than others. A mere four years ago our lives were turned upside down by the Covid pandemic. For the overwhelming majority of us, Covid now...
EVA MENASSE Darkenbloom. Reviewed by Ann Skea22 January 2025In Austrian writer Eva Menasse’s new novel, the residents of a small border [ … ]
MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ Annihilation. Reviewed by James Arbuthnott21 January 2025The controversial author of Atomised sets his new – and possibly last – novel [ … ]