You knew I'd write a book about you someday. You said once that I'd dredge up the whole hit parade minus you. I'll never know how you would tell it. For me it begins here. Like this. I did it! I've caught up on all my outstanding reviews before New Year! Before Christmas I needed … Continue reading Heart the Lover | Lily King
The Honourable Phryne Fisher stared moodily out the window of the Bendigo train. It is generally admitted that the Australian countryside has insufficient geography to go around, and the flat basalt plains outside Melbourne to the north and west not a great deal to commend them. My Phyrne Fisher experience began with book 18 back … Continue reading Murder in the Cathedral | Kerry Greenwood
I meet my parents at a fish shop in an inner-city mall. By the time I get there, they are waiting in their windbreakers and matching hiking shoes. I greet their outdoor energy with a wave hello. 'This mall has good parking,' Dad says. End of May and the first half of June turned out … Continue reading Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You | Candice Chung
Heaven is never-ending light. It is jasper and crystal, pearls and gold. It is lightning and rainbos and a great, rushing river. It is white horses and doves and angels singing holy holy holy and there is no sadness or pain, no hunger or thirst. Before picking up Rapture by Emily Maguire, I spent a … Continue reading Rapture | Emily Maguire
Blackboards chalked 'Positions Vacant' hang against the wall. She feels like she has walked all morning to get here. She hurries past loiterers with worn faces and sagging hats. They spit and slouch in her wake, watching. Inside, she sits on the nearest bench, as rigid as wood. A crowd of women seated on the … Continue reading Miles Franklin Undercover | Kerrie Davies
Cathy @746 Books regularly updates her readers about new fiction on the Irish horizon. I really appreciate the heads up and often find myself adding several books to my TBR wishlist. I also have an Australian new release wishlist and thought that I would share it with all of you in the same spirit as … Continue reading Coming Soon: New Australian books to check out
Lena Derwent had worked at Mason's for less than a week when they started making fun of her. Highway 13 is a collection of short stories by Australian writer, Fiona McFarlane. The stories are entirely fictional but they are based on real events - the horrific true crimes commited by Ivan Milat, the so-called backpack … Continue reading Highway 13 | Fiona McFarlane
'The Great Australian Silence' was how the anthropologist Bill Stanner characterised the history of colonisation and settlement. In a series of consequential lectures in 1968, Stanner made his now famous observation that we had a national 'cult of forgetfulness', a deliberate amnesia about the past - not so much denying trauma of the colonial invasion … Continue reading A Very Secret Trade | Cassandra Pybus
A long long time ago, when I was a little chick, not even a chick but a pink and naked thing, a scar a scrap a scrape fallen on roots and wriggling, when I was catching my death and all I knew of sky was the feel of feathers above me, the belly of black … Continue reading The Axeman’s Carnival | Catherine Chidgey
For some years of my twenties I was very much in love with a man who would not leave his wife. For not one moment of this relationship was I unaware of what every single popular culture representation of such an arrangement portended my fate to be. I confess that I had no intention of … Continue reading Green Dot | Madeleine Gray
Tommy had intended to spend the last night at the old house sweating through three shirts and four pairs of underwear. I cannot remember the last time I devoured a book in a weekend. However, Michael Thompson has written an engaging, easy-to-read story with a fascinating premise that I couldn't put down. How To Be … Continue reading How To Be Remembered | Michael Thompson #AUSfiction
Accidentally Kelly St illustrated by Briony Stewart with lyrics by Tim O’Connor from Frente! For people of a certain age, or perhaps people who had young children in 1992/93, you will remember the bubbly, joyful, effervescent pop group Frente! bouncing around our screens in colourful clothes, hair rollers and pearls. Accidentally Kelly Street was the … Continue reading A few Australian children’s books to finish off AusReading Month 2022
Opening Line: Here she is, standing in the schoolyard. She is six years old, dressed in a crisp green uniform. Other children are on the swings and seesaw, but she has taken herself off to stand alone under the eucalyptus at the edge of the playground. Nothing Ever Happens Here: A Memoir of Loss and … Continue reading Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here | Heather Rose #AWWmemoir
The Sun Walks Down | Fiona McFarlane (2022) The boy met a god by the hollow tree. ‘Go away,’ said the boy, and the god, formless, passes on in the direction of the red hill. I believe I have just read my favourite and best book of 2022. Although I am a little reluctant to … Continue reading The Sun Walks Down | Fiona McFarlane #AWWfiction
The Edith Readalong has been my priority of late. But before I got started with it, I was determined to finish a few of the half read books by my bed which included a trip to Nigeria, dabbling with some poetry and a peek inside a leper colony. Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, … Continue reading June Mini Reviews
