by NRB | 1 Jul 2019 | Giveaways |
This Monday we’re giving away two very different novels about life outside Australia’s cities: Jennifer Mills’s Dyschronia, set in a small coastal town and longlisted for the 2019 Miles Franklin Award, and previous Miles Franklin winner Sofie...
by NRB | 13 Jun 2019 | Fiction |
Leah Kaminsky’s second novel explores science, Nazi ideology, and the dangerous seduction of going with the flow. The bones in Leah Kaminsky’s new novel, The Hollow Bones are bird bones: hollow and light, made for flying. The image of birds in flight and birds...
by NRB | 3 Jun 2019 | Giveaways |
This week week our giveaway features two remarkable convict women: Meg Keneally’s new novel Fled, based on the life of Mary Bryant, and Jessica North’s biography Esther, about the First Fleet girl who became First Lady of the colony. To go in...
by NRB | 28 May 2019 | Fiction |
This new novel from the author of the award-winning The Memory Trap explores what happens when an imagined life meets reality. The preface of Andrea Goldsmith’s Invented Lives cites Romanian author Norman Manea’s The Fifth Impossibility. ‘We are all exiles,’ writes...
by NRB | 16 May 2019 | Fiction |
Where is the truth? Jaclyn Moriarty’s second novel for adults pairs a single mother and a mysterious guidebook to deliver a story that reflects the lived experience of the 21st century. ‘Oh!’ he said suddenly. ‘Oh, you’re thinking it’s a metaphor! No! No!’ His...
by NRB | 9 May 2019 | Fiction |
Shortlisted for the the Richell Prize for Emerging Writers in 2017, this debut novel from Julie Keys explores the life of a woman artist in Sydney in the 1920s. The first couple of times I passed her house there was no one around. Not that I saw anyone much at that...
by NRB | 16 Apr 2019 | Non-fiction |
The 1970s in Australia was more than flared jeans and satin pantsuits: in this overview Michelle Arrow charts the decade’s transformation of the social and political landscape. The seventies was a decade of upheavals in political, economic and industrial life....
by NRB | 11 Apr 2019 | Fiction |
The True Story of Maddie Bright captures the challenges of the writing life with wit and romance. Intriguing from the opening scenes, which play out in the grim between-wars London of 1921 and a possum-ridden Brisbane house 60 years on, Mary-Rose MacColl’s sixth and...
by NRB | 4 Apr 2019 | Non-fiction |
This biography recounts how Esther went from being convicted in London’s Old Bailey and transported to Botany Bay with the First Fleet, to becoming First Lady of the colony. Do not be misled, as I was, by the cover of this book, which shows a young...
by NRB | 2 Apr 2019 | Fiction, SFF |
In Melissa Ferguson’s imaginative and original debut, Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal clones inhabit a bleak and desperate dystopia. The Shining Wall questions the nature of humanity and compassion in a world bereft of both. The depiction of an unhappy future, societal...
by NRB | 14 Mar 2019 | Fiction |
Kelly Rimmer’s fifth novel ranges from family stresses in present-day Florida to uncovering secrets from the darkness of Poland during World War II. Australian author Kelly Rimmer is establishing herself as a master of gritty journeys of the heart, of families...
by NRB | 12 Mar 2019 | Fiction |
Katherine Collette’s Germaine may not be ‘good with people’ but The Helpline charms and delights. The plot of The Helpline sounds a bit dull: late-thirties mathematician Germaine Johnson is made redundant from her role at an insurance company and,...