JENNIFER MILLS The Airways. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart
The Airways is Jennifer Mills’ third novel and ranges from Sydney to Beijing as it explores themes of infection and the banality of violence. Someone recently tweeted that if we gave male violence the same attention as Covid, men would have been under curfew for...
TONI JORDAN The Fragments. Reviewed by Michelle McLaren
Welcome to Flashback Fridays! This is a new monthly feature where we review books we overlooked when they first appeared. This week, Michelle McLaren discusses Toni Jordan’s 2018 novel of intrigue and literary obsession, The Fragments. All Has an End was Inga...
JOHN HUGHES The Dogs. Reviewed by Paul Anderson
The new novel from award-winning writer John Hughes explores the transmission of trauma down the generations. Memory is a major theme in John Hughes’s corpus. The Dogs, his seventh book and fourth novel, reverberates with intergenerational family trauma and the ghosts...
LIANE MORIARTY Apples Never Fall. Reviewed by Sally Nimon
The new novel from the author of Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers delivers a family mystery told from multiple perspectives. Apples Never Fall, the latest novel from New York Times bestselling author Liane Moriarty, opens with a mystery. We witness a...
AMANDA LOHREY The Labyrinth: A pastoral. Reviewed by Linda Godfrey
Amanda Lohrey’s Miles Franklin-winnning novel explores notions of impermanence and healing in a small coastal town. This book’s epigraph is ‘The cure for many ills, noted Jung, is to build something.’ In Part One of this novel, the main character, Erica Marsden,...
KATHERINE BRABON The Shut Ins. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Katherine Brabon’s timely and thought-provoking second novel explores a phenomenon with resonances beyond its Japanese setting. There is a world we live in, on this side, and another world, achiragawa, [the other side] that is a place of dreams, death and...
MICHAEL MOHAMMED AHMAD The Other Half of You. Reviewed by Paul Anderson
Michael Mohammed Ahmad completes an enthralling trilogy of autofiction with The Other Half of You, his third novel. These three books portray the young life of Bani Adam, Ahmad’s alter ego, who is also a Muslim Arab-Australian writer from Western Sydney. Bani is in...
BRIOHNY DOYLE Echolalia. Reviewed by Amy Walters
The new novel from Briohny Doyle, author of The Island Will Sink and Adult Fantasy, explores motherhood and capitalism. In 2015, 35- year-old mother of seven Akon Guode drove her car into a lake in Melbourne’s outer west, resulting in the deaths of three of her...
CLAIRE THOMAS The Performance. Reviewed by Michelle McLaren
Set during a bushfire, Claire Thomas’s second novel juxtaposes the performance of a play with the inner lives of its audience. We turn to art for strange reasons. We see it as a ticket to help us escape from reality and somehow also as a way to make us more...
ADAM THOMPSON Born into This. Reviewed by Linda Funnell
Adam Thompson’s vivid stories encompass resistance, revenge, and hard truths. The 16 stories that comprise Adam Thompson’s debut collection are all set among Tasmania’s Aboriginal community. Many of them are set on the islands of Bass Strait, and one of the...
EMILY MAGUIRE Love Objects. Reviewed by Linda Godfrey
The sixth novel from the author of An Isolated Incident and Fishing for Tigers explores hoarding, shame and class. Narrated from the points of view of three people from the same extended family, Love Objects is a study of hoarding, violations of private spaces,...
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