KRISTEL THORNELL Night Street. Reviewed by James Tierney
Artist Clarice Beckett inspires this award-winning debut novel. Kristel Thornell’s Dobbie and Vogel Award-winning novel Night Street takes the apparently narrow life of interwar Australian artist Clarice Beckett and imaginatively deepens her life’s hue, working with...EMILY MAGUIRE Fishing for Tigers. Reviewed by Linda Funnell
Emily Maguire’s vivid novel of expats in Hanoi reveals some uncomfortable truths. Mischa is a thirty-something Australian woman who washes up in Hanoi in the aftermath of an abusive marriage: I wanted to lose myself so thoroughly that I would never find...BELINDA CASTLES Hannah and Emil. Reviewed by Linda Funnell
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...SUMNER LOCKE ELLIOTT Water Under the Bridge. Reviewed by Tony Bremner
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...DUNCAN LAY The Bridge of Swords; JENNIFER FALLON The Dark Divide. Reviewed by Folly Gleeson
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...SUSAN JOHNSON My Hundred Lovers. Reviewed by Linda Funnell
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...STEVE LEWIS and CHRIS UHLMANN The Marmalade Files. Reviewed by Linda Funnell
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?...JANETTE TURNER HOSPITAL Forecast: Turbulence. Reviewed by Linda Funnell
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...WENDY JAMES The Mistake. Reviewed by Linda Funnell
There’s more than one side to this story of a mother accused of murdering her child. It’s impossible to read Wendy James’s fourth novel and not think of the real-life case of Keli Lane, jailed for the murder of her baby Tegan, whose body has never been found. In...LINDY CAMERON Redback. Reviewed by Linda Funnell
A girls’-own-adventure with the lot. A beautiful-yet-deadly commander of a crack retrieval team; terrorists of US, European, Arabic and Asian strains; high-tech comms systems implanted into earlobes; assault helicopters; conspiracies; multiple explosions … Add a frank...MARGO LANAGAN Sea Hearts. Reviewed by Linda Funnell
A vibrant and imaginative fable of magic and tragedy. Sea hearts are a type of shellfish that children gather for their mothers along the blustery shores of Rollrock Island: Some folk ate the best hearts raw, particularly mams; they drank up the liquor inside, and if...
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