by NRB | 15 Dec 2022 | Non-fiction |
DH Lawrence as life coach? Lara Feigel’s examination of the writer’s life and work has a personal application. First, a confession. While I enjoy some of DH Lawrence’s poetry, I have never warmed to his novels. I have a cherished memory of a university lecturer...
by NRB | 12 Sep 2019 | Non-fiction |
Toby Faber delivers a slice of publishing history replete with (now) famous authors. Toby Faber is the grandson of Geoffrey Faber who, in 1929, established the publishing firm Faber & Faber. He tells the story of Faber & Faber mostly through original...
by NRB | 21 Feb 2017 | Fiction |
Gibbons’s parody is a masterpiece of comedy in its own right. Cold Comfort Farm was first published in 1932. Gibbons says at the beginning of the novel that it is set in the ‘near future’ though this only seems to manifest itself in television-phones and the...
by NRB | 8 Mar 2016 | Non-fiction |
The Unknown Unknown illuminates the serendipitous pleasures of book buying. Donald Rumsfeld, former US Secretary of Defense, is not one of my heroes. Yet as Mark Forsyth has argued in this exquisite little essay, Rumsfeld’s 2002 phrase ‘unknown unknowns’ (linking Iraq...
by NRB | 22 Jan 2016 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
I recently listened to a reading of the unabridged version of DH Lawrence’s 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Before that, if I’d been asked if I’d read the book I would have answered that I had, but I found this was not so. At most I might have read the bowdlerised...
by NRB | 22 Oct 2013 | Fiction |
This novel of the aftermath of war, grief and library books is written with elegance and feeling. It’s 1948, and although the war has been over for years, its echoes reverberate. In Thirroul, a small town on the coast south of Sydney, Anikka Lachlan counts...
ANNA DOWNES Red River Road and LISA KENWAY All You Took From Me. Reviewed by Justine Ettler3 October 2024These two new crime thrillers from Australian writers Anna Downes and Lisa [ … ]
KATHERINE WILES No Autographs Please. Reviewed by Sally Nimon2 October 2024Katherine Wiles’ life as a professional opera singer seems glossed with [ … ]
ANTONIA PONT The Memory Library. Reviewed by Ann Skea1 October 2024Memories are not merely recounted in Antonia Pont’s novella. How would you like [ … ]
ALINA BELLCHAMBERS The Order of Masks. Reviewed by Amelia Dudley26 September 2024Spies, magic, intrigue, and the human cost of an expanding empire all feature [ … ]