HEATHER MORRIS The Tattooist of Auschwitz. Reviewed by Clare O’Brien
The Tattooist of Auschwitz gives a harrowing insight into how a person might survive and how love persists in the darkest of places. Beyond the yard, disappearing into the darkness, is a further compound. The tops of the fences are lined with razor wire. Up in...KIRSTY MANNING The Jade Lily. Reviewed by Kim Kelly
Through the lens of friendship and romance The Jade Lily traces the way war smashes and transforms identity and truth. Sometimes the secrets we keep are gifts of love, and it’s this kind of refreshingly unvarnished love that sits at the heart of Kirsty Manning’s...
KIM KELLY Lady Bird and the Fox. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart
An Australian Pride and Prejudice? This love story spans race and class in colonial Australia. In Kim Kelly’s new novel, her seventh, a simple scaffold of romantic historical fiction allows for a more sophisticated commentary on race, privilege and the place...
LAUREN CHATER The Lace Weaver. Reviewed by Sally Nimon
In The Lace Weaver the narrative twists and turns like the weave of the lace at its core. ‘Estonia has five seasons’, we are told in the opening lines of The Lace Weaver, the debut novel from Sydney writer Lauren Chater. There are the usual four that most...
WENDY SCARFE The Day They Shot Edward. Reviewed by Kim Kelly
A slim volume but vast in scope, The Day They Shot Edward is a novel that asks who the grownups really are. Beautifully original historical fiction, The Day They Shot Edward is an intricately layered story of life and death and love set in Australia during the First...
ADA LANGTON The Art of Preserving Love. Reviewed by Kim Kelly
Ada Langton’s The Art of Preserving Love is a carefully controlled, rambling rose bush of a tale. From the opening chapter title of this delightful debut, it’s clear this is historical fiction told with warmth and a hint of mischief: Early in the...
ANNA GEORGE The Lone Child. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
The Lone Child focusses on character development, imbued with sadness, longing, regret and loss. Following on from her stunning debut novel, What Came Before, Anna George has created another claustrophobic and compelling character study of somebody struggling with the...
EMMA VISKIC And Fire Came Down. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
Emma Viskic explores difference, and its consequences, in this sequel to Resurrection Bay. Even before Viskic’s debut novel Resurrection Bay won the 2016 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction and an unprecedented three Davitt Awards, readers were impatiently...
HELEN HAENKE Helen Haenke at Rockton: A creative life. Reviewed by Jeannette Delamoir
The life of Helen Haenke highlights the vitality and value of regional arts and their crucial interconnections with place. Who was Helen Haenke? Where is Rockton? This non-fiction publication from the University of Queensland Press (edited by Joanne Holliman) reveals...
NIKE SULWAY Dying in the First Person. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart
Nike Sulway’s new novel is a powerful and extraordinarily beautiful story of family, love and sacrifice. In Dying in the First Person Nike Sulway has created a world we enter slowly, uncovering the past and its hurts in small steps. It draws the reader into a...
ELIZABETH TAN Rubik. Reviewed by Justine Hyde
Rubik is a wonderful experiment in fiction, exploring a vast landscape within the contained borders of a novel. Experimental fiction can be a risky gamble for the reader, but when it is beautifully executed, as in the case of Elizabeth Tan’s debut, Rubik, the...
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