With the novella Vertigo, award-winning author Amanda Lohrey (The Philosopher’s Doll, Camille’s Bread) once more taps into the Australian zeitgeist. Luke and Anna, 30-something corporate editors living in Sydney’s Glebe, are affected by a familiar convergence of affluenza, crippling mortgages and pollution. They are also linked by a shared tragedy. In pursuit of the ‘rural [...]
This short, shatteringly beautiful memoir gets five stars out of five from me; I read it in one sitting and was mesmerised. It may be short in terms of pages but it is masterful in the scale it encompasses. The story is very simple and is told very simply. Gaberielle Carey’s mother, Joan, aged 80, [...]
Featuring a gutsy female investigative journalist, Maralinga is a compelling story of romance, power and espionage set during the 1950s when the British government conducted an extensive series of nuclear tests in the desert of South Australia, an area inhabited and traditionally owned by Indigenous Australians. Very little was known about these events at the [...]
Published UQP, 2009 Print ISBN: 978 0 7022 3711 9 This is the remarkable story of Shia Muslim, Iraqi-born couple, Selma Masson and Mohammad al Jabiri (now Australian citizens), and the personal impact of Saddam Hussein’s regime on their lives and families. Australian Michelle McDonald was working with asylum seekers when she met Selma Masson [...]
Two lawyers and an ex-copper — the crime novels of three women writers Nicole Watson (The Boundary), PM Newton (The Old School) and Shamini Flint (Detective Singh Investigates series) feature unconventional detectives and a different approach to writing crime. The authors discussed the ways in which they came to the genre, the perseverance required for [...]
Fiction in History In this session about historical fiction and telling the stories of those who may have been forgotten, Carol Major spoke with poet/novelist Judy Johnson (The Secret Fate of Mary Watson) and Jesse Blackadder (The Raven’s Heart). All three writers are Varuna alumni. Judy Johnson’s novel is set in far-north Queensland and is [...]
**** (four stars as per Bookseller & Publisher ratings system) Published by NewSouth, $34.95 pb, ISBN 9780868408606 Savage or Civilised? traces the evolution of manners in Australia from the early days when Europeans arrived with their rigid imagining of ‘the savage’ to ‘new publics’ and the modernisation of our cities. Exploding the myth of the [...]
In The Secret Cure, an unusual novel which requires the reader simply to surrender to its extraordinary beauty, Woolfe successfully combines a complex, heart wrenching love story with explorations into Asperger’s Syndrome, autism, science, genetics, psychology, the human condition and the very nature of love. The bulk of The Secret Cure is presented as the [...]
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