by NRB | 26 May 2022 | Fiction |
Edwina Preston’s second novel conjures a rich portrait of the artist as a young woman. The protagonist of Bad Art Mother, Veda Gray, finds herself unable to reconcile her duty to motherhood with her duty to her inner life of the mind. Much is bound up in the title....
by NRB | 10 May 2022 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
Jane Caro’s new novel deals frankly with coercive control. Though I knew the gist of the issues raised by The Mother before I began – I’d read the devastating stories of victims of domestic violence, watched the news, and thought I understood the issues – this...
by NRB | 14 Apr 2022 | Fiction |
Diana Reid’s debut novel poses some philosophical dilemmas. University campus culture was fresh for Diana Reid when she began writing Love & Virtue. She had recently graduated from The University of Sydney in early 2020 when Covid kyboshed her plans to tour...
by NRB | 2 Dec 2021 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
The ninth novel from Wendy James is a classic page-turning mystery that is both psychologically complex and authentically Australian. Best known as the ‘queen of domestic noir’, James brings a keen understanding of social and political history to her richly layered...
by NRB | 9 Nov 2021 | Non-fiction |
Stretching from France to the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Carol Major’s memoir is a meditation on family, grief and love. This memoir by Carol Major comprises three strands woven into one heartbreaking narrative of a woman and her daughter. Written as a...
by NRB | 26 Oct 2021 | Fiction |
Miles Franklin-winner Michelle de Kretser offers unsettling possibilities and questions to ponder in her latest fiction. Scary Monsters is really two novels in one book. The publishers decided to print each novel so that it starts from the opposite end of the book....
by NRB | 21 Oct 2021 | Fiction |
Emily Bitto won the Stella Prize in 2015 for her first novel The Strays. Her second, Wild Abandon, was worth the wait. Wild Abandon is a kind of coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of two very different sides of America (the book itself is divided into two...
by NRB | 12 Oct 2021 | Fiction |
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...
by NRB | 8 Oct 2021 | Fiction, Flashback Friday |
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...
by NRB | 30 Sep 2021 | Fiction |
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...
by NRB | 16 Sep 2021 | Fiction |
Charlotte McConaghy follows up her international bestseller The Last Migration with a story of wolves and the Scottish Highlands. When I was eight, Dad cut me open from throat to stomach. Such a dramatic first line promises a dramatic story and Once There Were Wolves...
by NRB | 9 Sep 2021 | Fiction |
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,...