Category: Book Reviews

Book Reviews

A Review of Manil Suri’s The Death of Vishnu

The Death of Vishnu takes place on a small stage, with most of the external action occurring in the narrow stairwell of a Bombay apartment building. The characters are all ordinary, from dying alcoholic Vishnu, to the the warring neighbours…

A review of Joan London’s Gilgamesh

It is 1939, just prior to the outbreak of World War 2. A young Australian woman and her baby make the near impossible journey to Armenia to find the baby’s father. It is a journey based on love, and romantic…

A Review of Screenteen Writers by Christina Hamlett

A Review of Screenteen Writers by Christina Hamlett By the end of this book, readers should have a nicely paced, ready for submission screenplay, along which a much better understanding of what it takes to produce, and sell a screenplay.…

A Review of The Empty Cafe by Michael Hoffman

 All Hoffman’s stories show events occurring on a plane different from the one that we occupy. And they concern truths that have their own imperatives. However much this demands of the reader, this strange world is in the hands of…

A Review of Billie’s Ghost by Chad Hautmann

Chad Hautmann has chosen a difficult subject for this book. A story of the pain and heartache at the loss of someone we love and the long road back to life among the living. He does this with gut-wrenching descriptions…

A Review of A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain

Does the idea of eating a still beating cobra heart and following it up with a blood chaser appeal to you? How about a potentially deadly puffer fish? Lamb gonads? Tete de veau (sweetbread stuffed calves face)? An old rubbery iguana? Birds nest soup? What about a sublime 20 course meal at The French Laundry in Napa Valley Ca, or roasted bone marrow at St. John restaurant, London. A Cook’s Tour is partly a foodie’s book, covering both the delectable and the disgusting, and it is also a travel book, tracing Boudain’s course through Tokyo, Vietnam, Cambodia, Portugal, Spain, France, Morocco, Russia, Mexico, California, Scotland, and England.

A Review of Abaza by Louis Nowra

This approach frees the narrative from the mainstream pattern of beginning, middle and end. In some ways this is no different from the controlled narrative disclosures of such books as John Banville’s Eclipse or Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But there is in the case…