iPodolatry - The Song is You by Arthur Phillips

Published by Scribe, paperback RRP AUS$32.95 ISBN 9781921640056

The Song is You is a dazzling and inventive ode to the enslaving and restorative powers of love and music. Phillips’s fourth novel plays out like the four movements of a symphony as it unfolds over Winter through Fall. At its centre is New-Yorker, Julian Donahue, a middle-aged [...]

Book Tweeps - Dr Anita Heiss

Photo of Dr Anita Heiss courtesy Wayne Quilliam
Dr Anita Heiss is a member of the Wiradjuri nation, and is an author, poet, satirist and social commentator. Her published works include the adult novels Not Meeting Mr Right and Avoiding Mr Right, the historical novel Who Am I? The Diary of Mary Talence, Sydney 1937, poetry [...]

Love and Lethal Luggage: Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott

In October 1931, the bodies of two Phoenix women, nurse Agnes ‘Anne’ LeRoi and her roommate, Hedvig ‘Sammy’ Samuelson, were found in two luggage trunks which had been abandoned at Los Angeles’s Southern Pacific Station. The prosecution argued that one of the bodies had been dismembered because it couldn’t be made to fit into the [...]

Blood Born by Kathryn Fox

**** (four stars - an excellent book as per Bookseller+Publisher ratings system)
Published by Macmillan, $29.99 tpb, ISBN: 9781405039314
The list of Kathryn Fox’s crime-writing peers who have praised her earlier novels—Malicious Intent, Without Consent and Skin and Bone is impressive and includes Jeffery Deaver and Lee Child. Fans of her gutsy protaganist Dr Anya Crighton, pathologist [...]

She Played Elvis: A pilgrimage to Graceland by Shady Cosgrove

**** (four stars - an excellent book as per Bookseller+Publisher ratings system)
Published by Allen & Unwin $26.99, pb, ISBN 9781741752748
This is an enjoyable and skillfully delivered memoir combining a road trip and homage to Elvis with a quest for ‘home’ and ‘self’. Humour and wit sit comfortably alongside melancholy and loss—there is rawness and honesty [...]