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...
by NRB | 21 May 2019 | Fiction |
Nigel Featherstone’s new novel explores what it means to be a man. This latest work of fiction from Australian writer Nigel Featherstone is in many ways a timeless novel of love between men in wartime. But while its elegant structure turns on revelations of...
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 | 5 May 2015 | Non-fiction |
Imprisonment, the Resistance, intrigue – Nicholas Shakespeare peels away the layers of his aunt’s unlikely story. In a nice Euro joke, German Chancellor Angela Merkel fronts up to French passport control. Officer: Name? Merkel: Angela Merkel. Officer: Nationality?...
by NRB | 26 Jun 2014 | Fiction |
The limits of loyalty and discretion are tested in Christine Piper’s Vogel Award-winning novel about a Japanese doctor interned in South Australia during World War II. Christine Piper’s provocative and at times confronting debut tells the story of a Japanese doctor,...
by NRB | 14 Mar 2014 | The Godfather: Peter Corris |
I recently had an email from a friend saying he’d written his autobiography and wished he’d recorded his father’s memories of the area where they’d both grown up. He saw it as an opportunity missed for his project and the implication was that it would have been...
by NRB | 3 Sep 2013 | Fiction |
The novelist reveals himself a poet in this story of love in wartime London that channels TS Eliot. Steven Carroll is a fine writer, with a Proustian ability to explore the minutiae of the instant. He loves to tell us that ‘while this is happening here, over there...
by NRB | 19 Jun 2012 | Fiction |
This timely novel of estranged sisters and a family consumed by history gives a compelling insight into contemporary Greece. The house on Paradise Street, Athens, is home to three generations of the Perifanis family. Told alternately by Maude (or Mondi, as the Greeks...
by NRB | 17 Feb 2012 | Fiction |
From wartime Sydney to Papua New Guinea, love, bigotry and bebop infuse Mandy Sayer’s latest novel. It’s hard to conceive of a time when there were laws in the US against whites and blacks marrying each other – though Australians can hardly be complacent: there was a...
EVA MENASSE Darkenbloom. Reviewed by Ann Skea22 January 2025In Austrian writer Eva Menasse’s new novel, the residents of a small border [ … ]
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PETER GODWIN Exit Wounds. Reviewed by Ann Skea15 January 2025Peter Godwin’s memoir charts a life of exile, ranging from the horror of civil [ … ]