KATE GRENVILLE One Life: My mother’s story. Reviewed by Robyne Young
One Life provides a loving appreciation of a woman of her time who paved the way for the women of now. A few years after her mother died, Kate Grenville got out the papers she had left and found a number of exercise books with stories of her forebears, her childhood...
SANDRA LEIGH PRICE The Bird’s Child. Reviewed by Lou Murphy
An unusual and imaginative novel, The Bird’s Child traverses surreal territory in a historical setting. The unlikely bringing together of the stories of a pogrom orphan, an albino runaway and a charming drifter cruelly scarred by war creates in The Bird’s...
ELLEN VAN NEERVEN Heat and Light. Reviewed by Linda Funnell
This award-winning young writer delivers a debut collection of stories that ranges widely across themes of longing, identity, destiny and desire. Heat and Light is divided into three parts: ‘Heat’, ‘Water’ and ‘Light’. Each part has a distinct character, but a...
LEE KOFMAN The Dangerous Bride: A memoir of love, gods and geography. Reviewed by Walter Mason
Beyond monogamy: Lee Kofman’s original, intelligent memoir explores the sexual landscape. In an increasingly censorious age, Lee Kofman’s memoir gives the finger to the anti-sex Establishment. The Dangerous Bride is an account of a lifetime flirting with non-monogamy,...
SHADY COSGROVE What the Ground Can’t Hold. Reviewed by Jacqui Dent
The past makes uneasy company for five avalanche survivors trapped in the Andes. Shady Cosgrove’s novel is quietly arresting to the very last page. ‘Snow falls in layers. Maybe the top one looks fine but there are more below. A warm day melts them …’ He balled...
KRISTY CHAMBERS It’s Not You, Geography, It’s Me. Reviewed by Kylie Mason
The author of Get Well Soon! My (un)Brilliant Career as a Nurse takes more luggage than a backpack on her travel adventures. As a rule of thumb, the worst travel experiences tend to make the best stories, and the best travel experiences are bilge in the story...
MICHELLE DE KRETSER Springtime: A ghost story. Reviewed by Lou Murphy
The award-winning author of Questions of Travel delivers a delicious reinvention of a familiar form. Michelle de Kretser’s new novella charts the relationship of Frances and Charlie as they embark on a new life together. They’ve moved interstate from Melbourne...
TRACY FARR The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt. Reviewed by Jeannette Delamoir
Longlisted for the 2014 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Tracy Farr’s first novel cheekily rewrites history. A Russian scientist developed the world’s first electronic musical instrument, the theremin, during the late 1920s; Farr relocates its invention from the...
LORELEI VASHTI Dress, Memory. Reviewed by Kylie Mason
An extraordinary collection of dresses inspires an extraordinary recollection of a young woman’s life. Memory is an individual thing. For some people, it’s a place or a fragrance that triggers a memory, for others it’s a word or an object. For Lorelei Vashti, her...
FAVEL PARRETT When the Night Comes. Reviewed by Robyne Young
The fragility of life and the beauty of the Antarctic combine in Favel Parrett’s new novel. I came to the reading of Favel Parrett’s When the Night Comes with my heart still full of the memory of the tears shed over the young characters in her debut novel, Past the...
JANETTE TURNER HOSPITAL The Claimant. Reviewed by Michael Richardson
Above all, The Claimant is an examination of identity. In the author’s note that follows her new novel, Janette Turner Hospital writes that ‘The Claimant is The Great Gatsby in reverse.’ It is an apt description. Spanning decades and continents, told from the point of...
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