Like all heresies, his novels challenge our most fundamental beliefs: our belief in the moral integrity of ‘fiction’, our belief in the usefulness of storytelling when the daily truths thrown up by our misbegotten world cry out for immediate, practical…
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A review of The White Earth by Andrew McGahan
This is a passionate, powerful and beautifully written story which contains all of the elements of good fiction, and is the culmination of a skill which has been growing with each of McGahan‘s exceptional novels. In The White Earth McGahan’s prose maintains…
A review of Girlosophy – Real Girls Eat By Anthea Paul
The book’s content is all about empowerment through food knowledge: respecting your body through choosing to cook, understand nutrition, and choosing to eat and exercise in a way that will give you the energy to do whatever you want. Paul…
A review of 10 Minutes to the Pitch by Chris Abbott
Abbott is exactly the person you want to take this kind of advice from. She’s one of the most well known writer-producers in the business, with a welter of successful television and film credits to her name (including Magnum PI…
A review of Among the Blacks: Two Works by Raymond Roussel and Ron Padgett
The translation is a delicate, accomplished work that captures perfectly the placid emptiness that lies at the heart of Roussel’s world. A flurry of outlandish and bizarre events is related to the reader, but in a manner that is formal,…
A review of The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
The humour is at its strongest when it mixes the exotic with the homely. At one point Marlborough, a kind of latter-day Noah, says of his sisters, one of whom is a werewolf who comes to mate with a wolf,…
A review of Peninsula by Trevor Hewett
Hewett observes and writes about those things which others tend to ignore, and allows the close, and very quiet perspective he takes to reveal its own meaning, without judgement or fanfare. This is an easy to read, and tenderly chosen…
A review of Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany
The novel is set amidst the heat, drought and plagues of Wycheproof, a real country Victorian town around 290 miles north west of Melbourne. Robert and Jean work together to apply Robert’s stringent and certain rules for scientific living to…
A review of Murder in Memoriam by Didier Daeninckx
Murder in Memoriam is a police procedural that is entertaining, suspenseful and thought-provoking. There is a clandestine feel to much of the story, a sense that there are espionage agencies working in the shadows, and it is similar to Michael…
A review of 100 Bullets: First Shot, Last Call by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso
Brian Azzarello’s story is top-notch and is written with a street dialogue that even Elmore Leonard might envy. Eduardo Risso’s artwork is evocative and vivid. He can paint a bleak cityscape of housing projects and basketball courts, move from the…