Wallace’s fiction forces the reader to look beneath the surface. His characters, like most human beings find it difficult to communicate directly. More often than not what they are really concerned with must be parsed out through indirection, as though…
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A review of Bright Planet by Peter Mews
This is a fast moving, enjoyable adventure tale which resolutely refuses to become too serious about its purpose. Instead it is a very visual, funny, historically rich, and occasionally silly trip through an Australia that may or may not have…
A review of Passionate Spectator by Eric Kraft
Here, in short, is another perfect book by an author with few faults and whose works are almost completely unknown. It would seem that there is no appetite for books that are, among other qualities, great intellectual fun. Reviewed by…
A review of What Rough Peace by Josh Davis
But Davis is already impatient of mere imitation and almost every page shows flashes of originality. Usually these are statements so condensed that they are poetic explosions and not sober prose. Reviewed by Bob Williams What Rough Peace by Josh…
A review of Totem by Luke Davies
This is a very concentrated piece of work, a poem cycle if you will which touches on the biggest and most important themes – love, life and death in its broadest most cosmological sense, and the relationship between these. Keeping…
A review of Writing.Com by Moira Anderson Allen
Writing.com is a very well paced, clearly written and nicely organised reference book which writers will find significantly more useful than any Dummies guide or technical manual. While no single book could cover everything that the Internet has to offer…
A review of The Lemon Table by Julian Barnes
Minutely detailed, beautifully paced, and often wryly fun, each of the stories in The Lemon Table can be read on its own. Together however, the book becomes a rich and varied exploration through the pain, frustration, and vanities of aging,…
A review of Blueback by Tim Winton
Winton called this novel a contemporary fable, and there is certainly a clear and obvious moral with a positive answer to the question of how can we live in the modern world with our morality and respect for the environment…
A Review of Liam’s Going by Michael Joyce
So often novels have style but little substance and often there is a struggle to express substance but the project is doomed without style. Here is a book with both in abundance and a sense of poetry that illumines both…
A review of The Master by Colm Toibin
Although readers of The Master can’t help comparing this fictional James against the figure who is so well known and written about, the focus of the novel isn’t James the real writer. Instead the reader moves between life and longing…