BEM LE HUNTE Elephants with Headlights. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Bem Le Hunte’s third novel explores what happens when Australian mores meet Indian traditions, and old ways collide with new. Siddharth is a successful Delhi businessman. The sort of person who, as Guruji sees, is keen to make it clear that: … he didn’t lead a life of...
KIRSTEN KRAUTH Almost A Mirror: extract
Welcome to the first of our new series of Friday extracts – a little something for the end of the week. If you like the idea, please let us know! We’re delighted to launch with an extract from Kirsten Krauth’s new novel Almost A Mirror. This is a...
LAUREN CHATER Gulliver’s Wife. Reviewed by Sally Nimon
In her first novel, The Lace Weaver, Lauren Chater took readers to Estonia; in her second she imagines the life of the woman left behind in London when Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver went off on his travels. There’s an old saying: behind every great man there’s...
DONNA WARD She I Dare Not Name: A spinster’s meditations on life. Reviewed by Shelley McInnis
Donna Ward’s memoir explores spinsterhood, solitude, and shattering stereotypes. Publisher and poet Donna Ward describes this, her first book, as a meander through her life. In describing it this way she is thinking poor, as she admits to doing when she was...
KIM KELLY Walking. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart
Kim Kelly’s newest novel is a story of love, ambition and prejudice in the medical world. When Kim Kelly stumbled across the true story of how a brilliant German–Australian orthopaedic surgeon, Dr Max Herz, had been interned as an enemy alien during World War I,...
SOPHIE HARDCASTLE Below Deck. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Sophie Hardcastle’s second novel explores the lure of the sea, and the cost of violence. It starts below deck. Olivia (Oli) has been kidnapped. Well, not actually kidnapped but rescued late at night, in a drunken stupor, by Mac, an old man who now needs to...
EVIE WYLD The Bass Rock. Reviewed by Linda Funnell
Evie Wyld won the Miles Franklin Award for her last novel, All the Birds, Singing. Her latest, set on the coast of Scotland, contains both beauty and violence. The Bass Rock opens with a small girl, who we will shortly meet as the grown-up Viv, finding the body of a...
LILI WILKINSON After the Lights Go Out. Reviewed by Amelia Dudley
An outback mining town is the setting for the apocalypse in Lili Wilkinson’s novel. In a parallel universe, a version of me gets to have a normal life, where ‘being prepared’ means bringing a cardigan… Pru’s father is a doomsday prepper. She and her twin sisters...
MELISSA LUCASHENKO Too Much Lip. Reviewed by Suzanne Marks
Melissa Lucashenko’s latest novel reveals the impact of history on contemporary Indigenous lives, and richly deserves its Miles Franklin Award. In telling the truth about the reality of many Aboriginal families’ lives, Melissa Lucashenko has created a...
PETRONELLA MCGOVERN Six Minutes. Reviewed by Sally Nimon
Petronella McGovern’s debut thriller contains a lesson for the digital age. Six Minutes. A lost child. That’s it in a nutshell. As the world witnessed in horror the unfolding of the infamous James Bulger case in the early 1990s, or Madeline McCann’s...
TANYA HEASLIP Alice to Prague and YONGEY MINGYUR RINPOCHE with HELEN TWORKOV In Love with the World. Reviewed by Ann Skea
These two memoirs of travel and dislocation present contrasting approaches to venturing into the unknown. Alice to Prague and In Love with the World are very different books with contrasting styles and perspectives and different stories to tell. Yet, fundamentally,...
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