by NRB | 10 Oct 2024 | Fiction |
Harriet Constable’s debut novel takes inspiration from a real-life Venetian prodigy who was both a student of and rival to Vivaldi. Anna Maria della Pietà is destined for greatness. At eight, she knows it as surely as string knows bow, as lightning knows storm, as...
by NRB | 9 Feb 2023 | Non-fiction |
The author of The Magician is also a skilled essayist, ranging across the personal, religion, and literature. In the first essay in this collection, ‘Cancer: My Part in Its Downfall’, Colm Toibin describes being diagnosed with testicular cancer. At first he ignores...
by NRB | 12 Nov 2021 | Fiction, Flashback Friday |
This month’s Flashback Friday explores Nick Earl’s entwined Wisdom Tree novellas from 2016: Gotham, Venice, Vancouver, Juneau, and NoHo. The Tolstoy quotation about unhappy families could easily have been the epigraph to every one of the five novellas that...
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 | 24 Aug 2021 | Fiction |
Christine Mangan weaves a tale of Venice, writers and publishing in her latest novel. Christine Mangan is the American author of the bestselling and widely praised debut Tangerine, a literary thriller largely set in Tangier in 1956. That book was sold in a...
EMILY TSOKOS PURTILL Matia. Reviewed by Ann Skea22 October 2024Emily Tsokos Purtill’s debut novel ranges across continents to tell the stories [ … ]
STEVEN HAMILTON and RICHARD HOLDEN Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck17 October 2024Australia’s Covid response may have had problems, but Steven Hamilton and [ … ]
ELIZABETH STROUT Tell Me Everything. Reviewed by Michael Jongen15 October 2024Pulitzer-winner Elizabeth Strout explores themes of isolation and connection in [ … ]