LAUREN CHATER The Lace Weaver. Reviewed by Sally Nimon
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...
ADA LANGTON The Art of Preserving Love. Reviewed by Kim Kelly
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...
PIP SMITH Half Wild. Reviewed by Robin Elizabeth
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...
NATASHA LESTER A Kiss from Mr Fitzgerald. Reviewed by Robin Elizabeth
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...
ELISABETH STORRS Call to Juno: Tales of Ancient Rome Book 3. Reviewed by Folly Gleeson
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...
Crime Scene: SULARI GENTILL The Rowland Sinclair series. An overview by Karen Chisholm
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...
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...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on The Gulliver Fortune
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,...
BOYD ANDERSON The Heart Radical. Reviewed by Suzanne Rath
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...ROBERT HARRIS An Officer and a Spy. Reviewed by Peter Corris
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,...JONATHAN GRIMWOOD The Last Banquet. Reviewed by Michael Jongen
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...
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