Book reviews of mainly modern & contemporary fiction
For the fifth year in a row, I signed up to do the Australian Women Writers Challenge in 2020. My aim was to read 20 books; I ended up reading 22. Here is a list of all the books I read; all are fiction bar two. They have been arranged in alphabetical order by author’s… Continue reading 22 books by women: completing the 2020 Australian Women Writers’ Challenge
Fiction – paperback; Text Publishing; 320 pages; 2020. Love and loss, the goldfields of Kalgoorlie, growing up in outback Australia, and strained relationships between sisters all feature heavily in Gail Jones’ latest novel Our Shadows. Outback setting This gently nuanced novel is largely set in the outback gold mining town of Kalgoorlie, about 600km east… Continue reading ‘Our Shadows’ by Gail Jones
Fiction – paperback; Allen & Unwin; 304 pages; 2020. A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing is Jessie Tu’s debut novel. It’s an uncompromising look at a talented young violinist trying to fill the void left behind when her fame as a child prodigy has died out. It’s about trying to find your feet as… Continue reading ‘A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing’ by Jessie Tu
Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 170 pages; 1999. Earlier this year the ABC’s streaming service, iView, placed a whole bunch of Australian films online, one of which was The Hunter, starring Willem Dafoe, Sam Neill and Frances O’Connor. This strangely hypnotic film, where not much seems to happen, is essentially a mood piece about one man’s… Continue reading ‘The Hunter’ by Julia Leigh
Fiction – paperback; Text Publishing; 256 pages; 2019. Joey Bui’s Lucky Ticket is a collection of short stories recently shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction 2020, which is why I read it. A Vietnamese-Australia writer, Bui comes to these stories with an eye for the outsider. Her fiction tends to champion the… Continue reading ‘Lucky Ticket’ by Joey Bui
Fiction – Kindle edition; Macmillan Australia; 384 pages; 2020. Review copy courtesy of the publisher. Jane Harper’s latest novel The Survivors switches focus from the Queensland outback of her previous novel to the island state of Tasmania. Here, on the windswept coast of a small local community (the fictional Evelyn Bay) a young woman in… Continue reading ‘The Survivors’ by Jane Harper
The season has changed and #20BooksOfSummer is long over, but I am a little behind in my reviewing. That’s why I’ve decided to produce this small wrap-up of the last three books I read as part of that challenge. The three books featured here are all very different from each other, probably a good representation… Continue reading 3 Recommended Reads: Alan Carter, Kristina Olsson and Bernhard Schlink
Fiction – paperback; Hamish Hamilton; 344 pages; 2019. If you live in Australia, you would probably have to be living under a rock not to know this novel by Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch. The Yield won this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award, arguably this country’s greatest literary prize, as well as the Christina Stead… Continue reading ‘The Yield’ by Tara June Winch
Fiction – paperback; Orion Publishing; 144 pages; 2020. It’s really no surprise that I would find much to like in Lauren Aimee Curtis’ Dolores, a perfectly paced novella about a teenage girl who hides her pregnancy from the Spanish nuns who take her in. It’s written in that stripped-back prose I so adore and the… Continue reading ‘Dolores’ by Lauren Aimee Curtis
Fiction – paperback; Giramondo; 2019; 275 pages. What an unexpected treat Yumna Kassab’s The House of Youssef turned out to be. Shortlisted for this year’s Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, this short story collection revolves around Lebanese immigrants living in the western suburbs of Sydney. It is divided into four parts: the first, Motherland,… Continue reading ‘The House of Youssef’ by Yumna Kassab
Reading Matters 