What Am I Reading?
Lioness – Emily Perkins
Lioness (Bloomsbury 2023) by Emily Perkins is a mesmerising and intimate account of the lives of two women as they slowly unravel due to both external circumstances and their interior struggles. It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion. You can see that it’s all...
Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens – Shankari Chandran
It’s taken me a while to get to the 2023 Miles Franklin Award winner, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens (Ultimo Press 2022) by Shankari Chandran, but I’m so glad I did! This is a stunning, immersive, wide-ranging novel with all the readability that its cute title and...
Ordinary Gods and Monsters – Chris Womersley
Chris Womersley’s coming-of age-story ORDINARY GODS AND MONSTERS (Picador 2023) has the beating heart of a thrilling crime novel. Skilfully written, with engaging characters and the familiar themes of adolescents transversing that liminal time between childhood and...
Call Me Marlowe – Catherine de Saint Phalle
I adore Catherine de Saint Phalle’s writing: astonishing, wise, engaging, insightful, warm, compassionate, intimate and always ringing with the heavy weight of a truthful bell. Call Me Marlowe (Transit Lounge 2023) is an endearing, traumatic and hopeful novel set...
A Case of Matricide – Graeme Macrae Burnet
In his third novel featuring the detective Georges Gorski, Scottish author Graeme Macrae Burnet has completed a stunning meta crime fiction series set in the small town of Saint-Louis, on the French-Swiss border. A CASE OF MATRICIDE (Text Publishing 2024) is...
Pictures of You – Emma Grey
An endearing combination of tender romance and witty comedy with an undercurrent of dark secrets, Emma Grey’s novel Pictures of You (Penguin Random House 2024) explores themes of coercive control, identity, memory, desire, friendship, trauma, betrayal, grief and...
Orbital – Samantha Harvey
The recent winner of the Booker Prize, Orbital (Penguin Random House 2023) by Samantha Harvey is not your usual doorstopper of a Booker novel, but a slim, taut and focused story of six astronauts circling the earth, the narrative divided into the 16 orbits of their...
The Blue Hour – Paula Hawkins
The Blue Hour (Penguin Random House 2024) is only my second Paula Hawkins’ book, after years ago reading her international best-selling The Girl on the Train. In this novel, The Blue Hour, I got everything I was expecting in terms of a mysterious, intriguing...
All You Took From Me – Lisa Kenway
It’s difficult to believe the complex plotting and assured voice in All You Took From Me (Transit Lounge Publishing 2024) is from debut writer, Lisa Kenway. This novel reads as a more advanced writer would present a psychological thriller, from the ease of dialogue to...
Dirrayawadha – Anita Heiss
Acclaimed and award-winning author Anita Heiss has said that her latest historical novel Dirrayawadha (Simon and Schuster 2024) is ‘possibly the most important book I’ll ever write’ and I think she is correct on a number of different levels (especially its use of...
Three Boys Gone – Mark Smith
Past teacher and popular author Mark Smith is well known for his YA novels (some of which are included in the school curriculum) but Three Boys Gone (Pan Macmillan 2024) is his first adult psychological thriller, and what a fantastic debut into the crime/mystery genre...
Red River Road – Anna Downes
Strap yourselves in and hold on tight for the ride of your life with Anna Downes’ third psychological novel Red River Road (Affirm Press 2024), a breathtaking, nail-biting, edge of your seat crime thriller that had me firmly gripped from the first pages, with the...