ZOË NORTON LODGE Almost Sincerely. Reviewed by Ashley Kalagian Blunt
Almost Sincerely is a hilarious and playful memoir of growing up and other random events in Sydney’s Annandale, offering a sophisticated depth that makes repeated readings joyful. Appearing at the recent Creative Non-Fiction Festival in Sydney, Zoë Norton Lodge said,...
DRUSILLA MODJESKA Second Half First. Reviewed by Shelley McInnis
Interiority and double vision make Drusilla Modjeska’s memoir compelling reading. How wonderful it must have been, living in the house on the corner that features in Second Half First. In that house at an undisclosed location in Enmore, Sydney, there were,...
DEBRA ADELAIDE The Women’s Pages. Reviewed by Michelle McLaren
The Women’s Pages is as captivating as it is irresistibly clever. In the closing moments of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Lockwood, the novel’s narrator, visits the graves of Catherine, Edgar and Heathcliff, the soil covering Heathcliff’s grave...
TEGAN BENNETT DAYLIGHT Six Bedrooms. Reviewed by Tracy Sorensen
These short stories of the messiness of life unfold like a concept album. The world of Six Bedrooms will be familiar to Gen X Sydneysiders who lived in share houses in the 1980s. There’s the Mardi Gras parade, someone playing a Style Council record and a junkie...
MAGDA SZUBANSKI Reckoning. Reviewed by Shelley McInnis
This memoir untangles intergenerational trauma with intelligence and insight. In Magda Szubanski’s memoir, Reckoning, the author outs herself as many things: a secret reader of forbidden books, a one-time sharpie from the wrong side of the tracks in Croydon, Victoria,...
JENNY ACKLAND The Secret Son. Reviewed by Michelle McLaren
This charming and inventive first novel is audaciously told and richly woven. Growing up near Beechworth in the mid-1880s, James Kelly inhabits a small but blissful world that revolves around his adoring mother, his favourite picture book, the bull in the paddock...
CHARLOTTE WOOD The Natural Way of Things. Reviewed by Kylie Mason
Wood’s remarkable insight into human nature and deft control of her characters create a narrative that strikes to the heart of gender relations. Yolanda and Verla meet in a bare room, dressed in identical cumbersome outfits and beset by a post-sedative haze. It isn’t...
CARMEL BIRD My Hearts Are Your Hearts. Reviewed by Jeannette Delamoir
Love, pain and mortality are intertwined in a collection that also takes us behind the scenes of the writing. Carmel Bird’s new collection promises ‘twenty new stories and their origins’. Most of the stories have been published elsewhere and so are not brand new...
LISA GORTON The Life of Houses. Reviewed by Lou Murphy
The cyclical nature of life, intergenerational distance and the elasticity of time are all captured beautifully in this novel. A literary exercise in artistic foreshortening, The Life of Houses traverses distortions of perspective in time and place, meandering through...
EILEEN CHANIN and STEVEN MILLER Awakening: Four lives in art. Reviewed by Annette Hughes
These four Australian women reached out and took what the world had to offer in the new light of modernism. Awakening is a compelling work of cultural history which looks at the lives of four Melbourne women from diverse backgrounds, and follows their respective...
KAREN LAMB Thea Astley: Inventing her own weather. Reviewed by Suzanne Marks
The first full biography of Australian writer Thea Astley is a rollicking read that reveals a complex maverick who pushed against both the limits of her time and her own doubts. ‘There was never a time when multi-award-winning Australian novelist Thea Astley was...
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