What Am I Reading?
Second Sight – Aoife Clifford
Second Sight (Simon and Schuster 2018), the second crime novel by Irish/Australian writer Aoife Clifford, is set in an Australian country town where everybody knows everybody else and they all remember their past shared histories. Lawyer Eliza Carmody is back in...
Butterfly Yellow – Thanhha Lai
Butterfly Yellow (UQP 2020) by Vietnamese / American Thanhha Lai is an extraordinary own voices story of the trauma of a refugee combined with the unlikely friendship between two young people. Inspired by the author’s own experience of being a refugee, this YA novel...
A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature – Belinda Wheeler (editor)
A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature (Camden House 2013), edited by academic and author Belinda Wheeler, is a carefully curated selection of 11 non-fiction essays that collectively cover a comprehensive discourse on writing by Indigenous people. At the time...
Desire Lines – Felicity Volk
Desire Lines (Hachette 2020) is an epic, sweeping drama spanning more than half a century by author Felicity Volk. Featuring a lifelong relationship between Paddy O’Connor and Evie Waddell, this is a love story that transcends time, place and circumstances. In...
How to Grow a Family Tree – Eliza Henry Jones
Eliza Henry Jones is an author who knows how to delve deep into the human condition and explore those confronting, emotional issues that shadow every family in a different way. In her new YA novel How to Grow A Family Tree (Angus and Robertson 2020), she once again...
The Gift – Lewis Hyde
The Gift is a non-fiction book first published by Lewis Hyde in 1979; my edition was published by Canongate Books in 2012. With a foreword by Margaret Atwood, who calls it quite simply ‘a masterpiece’, The Gift is a treatise on ‘How the Creative Spirit Transforms the...
Griffith Review 68 Getting On – Ashley Hay (editor)
The latest edition of Griffith Review has hit the shelves: Getting On (68) and it is a really special publication, chock full of great writing and thought-provoking reading. Every Griffith Review is of a high standard but this issue seems particularly consistently...
Sweetness and Light – Liam Pieper
Sweetness and Light (Penguin Hamish Hamilton 2020), the new novel by Liam Pieper, is an absurdly good rendering of characterisation blended with a compelling plot that manages to cover themes as broad as globalisation and poverty, romance and desire, disadvantage, the...
The Helpline – Katherine Collette
If Don Tillman and Eleanor Oliphant had a love-child, she would be Germaine Johnson, former Senior Mathematician, recently appointed as call centre staff on the Deepdene Council Senior Citizens’ Helpline (it’s a long story…) Katherine Collette’s delightful novel The...
The Last Post – Emma Campbell
I may have started reading The Last Post (New South Publishing 2018) for research after winning a copy from author Emma Campbell in the #AuthorsForFireys bushfire auction, but I continued reading because of the amazing stories and remarkable photographs that comprise...
Peta Lyre’s Rating Normal – Anna Whateley
Peta Lyre’s Rating Normal (Allen and Unwin 2020), the debut novel by author Anna Whateley, is a Young Adult own voices story that allows us access into the head of 16-year-old Peta Lyre, who has been diagnosed with all the letters of the alphabet…ASD, ADHD, SPD…in...
The Brisbane Line – J.P. Powell
An historical crime mystery set in wartime Brisbane, J.P. Powell’s The Brisbane Line (Brio Books 2020) is a tale of murder, corruption, art and love during a week in late 1943, featuring a handful of real-life people combined with fictional characters in a familiar...