by NRB | 29 Feb 2024 | Fiction |
Winner of the the ASA/HQ Fiction Prize, Ayesha Inoon’s debut novel explores the experience of moving from Sri Lanka to Australia. It was the silence that she noticed first. As they drove, Canberra unfolded in a series of stunning panoramas … The streets were empty,...
by NRB | 22 Feb 2024 | Non-fiction |
Graeme Davison’s book is an elegant waltz through one family’s history and its connection to large events, from immigration to world wars. One of Australia’s leading historians, Graeme Davison notes in his introduction that ‘history is usually written forwards’...
by NRB | 3 Feb 2022 | Fiction |
The twelfth novel from British-Turkish writer Elif Shafak evokes the history of Cyprus in a story of love and grief. Once upon a memory, at the far end of the Mediterranean Sea, there lay an island so beautiful and blue that many travellers, pilgrims, crusaders and...
by NRB | 5 Oct 2021 | Fiction |
The new novel from award-winning writer John Hughes explores the transmission of trauma down the generations. Memory is a major theme in John Hughes’s corpus. The Dogs, his seventh book and fourth novel, reverberates with intergenerational family trauma and the ghosts...
by NRB | 29 Sep 2020 | Fiction |
The fifth novel from Australian author Alison Booth, The Philosopher’s Daughters is an intriguing and energetic historical fiction that takes us from the genteel world of 1890s London parlour-chat to the sun-crisped, trackless outback of the Northern Territory. The...
by NRB | 12 Mar 2020 | Fiction |
Booker Prize-winning author Aravind Adiga takes on the issue of refugees and asylum seekers in his latest novel Amnesty. Set in Sydney, on a day sometime in the recent past, Amnesty concentrates on Dhananjaya Rajaratnam, aka Danny the Cleaner, as he grapples with his...
by NRB | 11 Feb 2020 | Fiction |
Jeanine Cummins’s novel about the journey of a Mexican mother and son fleeing to the US has sparked a storm of controversy. American Dirt opens with a scene that is as shocking as it is gripping. Eight-year-old Luca is going to the toilet when a bullet fired...
by NRB | 21 Mar 2019 | Fiction, SFF |
Sylvain Neuvel’s novella The Test, about the demonisation of immigrants, packs a punch and could not be more timely. Canadian author Sylvain Neuvel’s new novella, The Test, is a long way removed from his engaging trilogy of novels about alien invasion and...
JUNE WRIGHT Mother Paul series. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm6 December 2024June Wright has faded from view, but in 1948 her novel Murder in the Telephone [ … ]
ANDREW O’HAGAN Caledonian Road. Reviewed by Catherine Pardey5 December 2024This new novel from the author of Mayflies is set in London, but Glasgow is [ … ]
IAIN RYAN The Dream. Reviewed by Ben Ford Smith3 December 2024Iain Ryan’s latest novel continues his fascination with 1980s Queensland and [ … ]
MARINA YUSZCZUK Thirst. Reviewed by Ann Skea28 November 2024Argentinian writer Marina Yuszczuk puts her twist on the vampire novel in [ … ]