Oct 23, 2021 | What Am I Reading?
Checkout 19 (Penguin Random House 2021) is the much anticipated second book from Irish/British author Claire-Louise Bennett after her acclaimed short story collection Pond. In this highly literary novel, praised by Anne Enright and Roddy Doyle, Bennett writes in a...
Oct 12, 2021 | What Am I Reading?
John F Kennedy’s famous quote ‘If not us, who? If not now, when?’ is the perfect epigraph – sitting alongside the words of Greta Thunberg – for the latest YA novel by Mark Smith, If Not Us (Text Publishing 2021). Smith is known for his Road to Winter trilogy of young...
Oct 6, 2021 | What Am I Reading?
Kathryn Heyman is furious, and she has channelled over 30 years of that emotion into her memoir Fury (Allen and Unwin 2021), a confronting, powerful and triumphant story of abuse, poverty, class and ultimately, the joy of knowing your true self and what you are...
Oct 4, 2021 | What Am I Reading?
From Anna Downes, the acclaimed author of The Safe Place, comes another contemporary psychological thriller The Shadow House (Affirm Press 2021). This disturbing novel features contemporary themes with gothic – perhaps even supernatural – overtones in a page-turning...
Sep 28, 2021 | What Am I Reading?
Mark Brandi’s eagerly anticipated third novel The Others (Hachette 2021) is another genre-bending mix of crime, literary fiction and suspense. The story is told in the form of a diary written by 11-year-old Jacob, who lives with his father on the farm with the sheep,...
Sep 23, 2021 | What Am I Reading?
Laura Elizabeth Woollett is an extraordinary writer and I loved her previous book, Beautiful Revolutionary. Her latest novel The Newcomer (Scribe 2021) is painful, exquisite, confronting, authentic and compelling reading. I have some concern that this book is...
