by NRB | 24 Jun 2019 | Giveaways |
This week’s giveaway features two works of historical fiction: Leah Kaminsky’s The Hollow Bones and Matthew Hooton’s Typhoon Kingdom. To go in the draw to win both books, simply email editors@newtownreviewofbooks.com.au by midnight Monday 24...
by NRB | 3 Apr 2018 | Fiction |
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...
by NRB | 1 Feb 2018 | Fiction |
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...
by NRB | 28 Nov 2017 | Fiction |
Half Wild is heart-warming, confusing and deeply unsettling all at the same time. This debut novel by Pip Smith is based on the life of the person variously known as Eugenia Falleni, Harry Crawford and Jean Ford. It is a work of impressive scope, covering three...
by NRB | 20 Apr 2017 | Fiction |
This new novel from Natasha Lester is best read with gin and jazz. Natasha Lester gives us all the glitz and glamour of classic romance in her third novel, a work of romantic women’s fiction that takes us back in time to the 1920s. There is gin, there is dancing, but...
by NRB | 21 Apr 2016 | Fiction |
This is historical fiction at its best in the final volume of the Tales of Ancient Rome trilogy. Call to Juno is the final volume of the story of Aemilia Caeciliana, a Roman who was married as a teenager to Vel Mastarna, a powerful Etruscan warrior, in 406 BC. This...
by NRB | 28 Jan 2016 | Crime Scene |
Sulari Gentill’s award-winning historical crime series is written with verve and spirit, the fiction woven seamlessly into actual events of the time. In 2010 a new crime fiction series was launched, set in 1930s Australia where the effects of the Great...
by NRB | 21 May 2015 | Fiction |
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...
by NRB | 16 Jan 2015 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
I’m sometimes asked which of my books has meant the most to me. My glib answer, because it made me the most money, has been The Empty Beach, the fifth Cliff Hardy book, which went through three or four printings before it was filmed. Although the film was a failure,...
by NRB | 20 Mar 2014 | Fiction |
This compelling account of a little-known period is rich in history and plot. The fifth novel by Australian author Boyd Anderson is set in a relatively unknown time in history, covering several years in Malaya from Japanese occupation until the ’emergency’, when...
by NRB | 8 Oct 2013 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
The Dreyfus Case, notorious for its betrayals and anti-Semitism, inspires this new thriller from the author of Fatherland. In the Acknowledgments to his new novel Robert Harris thanks his wife: … who has been obliged to share our house with successive waves of Nazis,...
by NRB | 5 Sep 2013 | Fiction |
Eighteenth-century France is a feast for the senses in Jonathan Grimwood’s enjoyable romp. Set in the years leading up to the French Revolution, this is the story of Jean-Marie Charles D’Aumont, whom we first encounter eating beetles from a dung heap. His parents are...