DAVID CARLIN The Abyssinian Contortionist: Hope, friendship and other circus acts. Reviewed by Michelle McLaren
A biography like no other, this is an unfalteringly clever work of creative non-fiction. Throughout The Abyssinian Contortionist, David Carlin’s biography of circus performer Sosina Wogayehu, Carlin describes Wogayehu juggling as many as eight balls at a time,...
KATE GRENVILLE One Life: My mother’s story. Reviewed by Robyne Young
One Life provides a loving appreciation of a woman of her time who paved the way for the women of now. A few years after her mother died, Kate Grenville got out the papers she had left and found a number of exercise books with stories of her forebears, her childhood...
MARGARET POMERANZ and PHILIPPA WHITFIELD POMERANZ Let’s Eat: A cookbook celebrating film, food and family. Reviewed by Jeannette Delamoir
This charming volume gives us a combination of food, occasions, glamorous name-dropping and glorious places, all mixed up with the closeness and fun of family. Film critic Margaret Pomeranz appeared on SBS and the ABC for almost 30 years, the longevity...
NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE Priscilla: The hidden life of an Englishwoman in wartime France. Reviewed by Peter Corris
Imprisonment, the Resistance, intrigue – Nicholas Shakespeare peels away the layers of his aunt’s unlikely story. In a nice Euro joke, German Chancellor Angela Merkel fronts up to French passport control. Officer: Name? Merkel: Angela Merkel. Officer: Nationality?...
PATTI MILLER Ransacking Paris: A year with Montaigne and friends. Reviewed by Jeannette Delamoir
This memoir provides a multi-dimensional and complex picture of the author. Patti Miller introduces her memoir of a year spent writing in Paris with a quote from Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), here translated as: ‘Bees ransack flowers here and flowers there, but...
MICHAEL WILDING Wild Bleak Bohemia: Marcus Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall. Reviewed by Paul De Serville
This book offers an extraordinarily rich and detailed picture of three literary lives and of 19th-century Victoria. Wild Bleak Bohemia is a remarkable exercise in Australian literary history and it is hard to think of another work which compares with it in scope and...
LUKE BARR Provence, 1970: MFK Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard and the reinvention of American taste. Reviewed by Jeannette Delamoir
The big personalities of American food writing reveal themselves in unguarded moments one summer in France. Do not expect one of those ‘running away to Provence’ books. Yes, this non-fiction work is set largely in southern France, but it doesn’t recount some lucky...
CLINTON WALKER Buried Country: The story of Aboriginal country music. Reviewed by Annette Hughes
Clinton Walker takes the reader up close and personal in this seminal work on Aboriginal country music. In 1960, the year I was born, ‘Little Boy Lost’ by Johnny Ashcroft was the top Australian hit song. It tells the true story of Australia’s greatest land and air...
ROBERT DESSAIX What Days Are For. Reviewed by Stephen Sargent.
Complex layers of discussion inform this memoir on the fragility of life. In 2011, the actions of two strangers saved Robert Dessaix from ‘being deported from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady’, as Christopher Hitchens...
JOHN LAHR Tennessee Williams: Mad pilgrimage of the flesh. Reviewed by Walter Mason
This biography treats the life of a wounded genius with immense sensitivity. John Lahr’s edition of Joe Orton’s homoerotic diaries was the go-to book for Queer literary types in the late 1980s. I was always strangely thrilled that the son of the Cowardly Lion (his...
NADEZHDA TOLOKONNIKOVA and SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj. Reviewed by Joshua Barnes
The lived experience of punitive cruelty colours these vibrant theoretical exchanges between Pussy Riot’s Nadya and Slavoj Žižek. ‘Virgin Mary, mother of God, banish Putin!’ So went Pussy Riot’s ‘Punk Prayer’, an insurrectionary protest song aimed at Vladimir...
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