by NRB | 18 May 2023 | Non-fiction |
Josephine Baker, the most glamorous and highly paid female entertainer of her time, was also an Allied spy in World War II. In The Flame of Resistance Damien Lewis has drawn on a profusion of new historical material, including previously undisclosed letters and...
by NRB | 21 Mar 2023 | Fiction |
The new novel from the author of The Electric Hotel uncovers wartime secrets in an Italian village. Hugh Fraser is an American academic whose Italian mother, Hazel, used to take him to her home village in Italy for their summer holidays. He has fond memories of...
by NRB | 19 Apr 2022 | Fiction |
Catherine Chidgey’s latest novel has been shortlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award and longlisted for the Women’s Prize. Buchenwald Concentration Camp was liberated by US Forces on 11 April 1945. In the days immediately following, the Americans...
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 | 2 Sep 2021 | Crime Scene, Fiction |
The fourth book in Robert Gott’s ‘Murders’ series frees its cast from the constraints of the newly formed Homicide Squad and plunges them straight into a baffling case that threatens many of their number. Readers who are new to this series might be fine starting...
by NRB | 18 Mar 2021 | Fiction |
The deceptions in Suzanne Leal’s third novel span World War II Czechoslovakia and the Holocaust to present-day Sydney. The genesis of this novel was the story of a Czech gendarme who had formed a relationship with a young Jewish woman he was guarding. Leal had...
by NRB | 4 Feb 2021 | Fiction |
Set in wartime London, Rebecca Starford’s debut novel brings a true story of espionage to life. When I was halfway through this book I discovered, by accident, that it is based on real wartime espionage that occurred in London between 1939 and 1940. Evelyn, the...
by NRB | 22 Oct 2020 | Non-fiction |
In telling their personal stories, Catrine Clay brings to life the Germans who resisted Nazism, reminding us that the Fuhrer’s cheering crowds did not represent everyone. Catrine Clay is an award-winning BBC documentary-maker and author of three previous works...
by NRB | 3 Sep 2020 | Fiction |
You don’t need to have read War and Peace to enjoy Steven Conte’s second novel. Steven Conte returns to World War II as the mise en scène for his accomplished second novel, The Tolstoy Estate. His first, The Zookeeper’s War, won the 2008 Prime...
by NRB | 16 Jul 2020 | Non-fiction |
This revised edition of Stephen Garton’s The Cost of War, on the impact of war on individuals and society, remains all too relevant. Let us begin with the proposition that war is hell; that those who become involved in it become agents of terror, or victims, or...
by NRB | 7 May 2020 | Fiction |
A successful Israeli writer unexpectedly finds himself dealing with his family’s wartime past in Emuna Elon’s new novel. The image flickered on the wall for just a heartbeat, but even in that fleeting second, Yoel managed to discern that the woman in the...
by NRB | 24 Sep 2019 | Non-fiction |
Winner of the 2018 Nib Literary Award and longlisted for the 2019 Colin Roderick Award. Helen Lewis traces her father’s experiences in World War II and how he witnessed the devastating results of the Holocaust. Part memoir, part war history, The Dead Still...
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 [ … ]
HARRIET CONSTABLE The Instrumentalist. Reviewed by Ann Skea10 October 2024Harriet Constable’s debut novel takes inspiration from a real-life Venetian [ … ]