Spring 2022 Giveaway #4
Welcome to our fourth spring giveaway for 2022! Yes, here are more goodies for you to win in our spring giveaways. To go in the draw to win all four of the titles below, simply email editors@newtownreviewofbooks.com.au with ‘Spring 4′ in the subject line and your name...
JULIE BUNTIN Marlena. Reviewed by Justine Ettler
We know from the beginning of Marlena that things won’t end well, but the how and the what and the why are cleverly withheld. How much would it take to send your private-school-educated 15-year-old daughter off the rails? It starts out with getting in with the wrong...
ROXANE GAY Difficult Women. Reviewed by Linda Godfrey
Women’s difficult lives are laid bare with a surgeon’s precision in this collection. This is a collection of 21 short stories about women in relation to the men in their worlds. I had to think long and hard about the title. The more I read the stories, the...
SARAH FLANNERY MURPHY The Possessions. Reviewed by Sally Nimon
The Possessions is an unsettling debut conjuring a world where the dead may speak through the living. What makes you you? Is it the lipstick you wear? The way you talk? An unselfconscious moment captured in a photograph? Or is it the impression you leave on other...
KENT HARUF Our Souls at Night. Reviewed by Robin Elizabeth
Haruf writes about companionship, love, and the damage small minds can do to gentle hearts. Our Souls at Night is Kent Haruf’s seventh and final book. It was published after his death from interstitial lung disease in 2014. It was perhaps Haruf’s own impending death...
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...
BEN LERNER 10.04. Reviewed by Adrian Phoon
This new novel from the author of Leaving the Atocha Station presents a worldly and liberating take on modern fiction-writing. Ben Lerner’s 10:04 takes its title from Back to the Future, from the moment when lightning strikes a clock tower and sends Marty McFly, a...
JANE SMILEY Some Luck. Reviewed by Robyne Young
Smiley returns to Iowa, the setting of her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel A Thousand Acres, in this first book of an epic new trilogy. It was chance that took the 19-year-old Jane Smiley to Iowa in 1972, and some further luck that gave her a place in the renowned Iowa...
MIRANDA JULY The First Bad Man. Reviewed by Donna Lu
Beneath the quirkiness Miranda July’s debut novel is a tale of connection and longing. Critics of writer, filmmaker and artist Miranda July’s work might swiftly dismiss The First Bad Man, her first novel, as another glib narrative filled with quirky characters who do...
LYDIA DAVIS Can’t and Won’t. Reviewed by Phoebe Chen
In her ninth collection of flash fiction Lydia Davis writes with complex emotional ambiguity about the spaces in between. Lydia Davis began her career as a translator of French literature, and perhaps as a kind of reprieve from the unwieldy sentences...
RICHARD POWERS Orfeo. Reviewed by Virat Nehru
This sophisticated meditation on the nature of genius was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. Richard Powers is primarily a philosopher who’s managed to disguise himself as a literary novelist. He sets up his literary canvases as projects of philosophical...
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