What Am I Reading?
The Silent Listener – Lyn Yeowart
The Silent Listener (Penguin Random House 2021) by Lyn Yeowart is an accomplished rural literary psychological thriller that takes us backwards and forwards in time as mysterious events unfold and secrets, motivations and lies are revealed. We meet Joy Henderson and...
The Boy, the Mole, The Fox and the Horse – Charlie Mackesy
This book! The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (Penguin Random House 2019) is the most beautifully illustrated, wonderfully worded expression of love, friendship and hope, by author and illustrator Charlie Mackesy. I was gifted this gorgeous hardcover edition by...
Mind Your Brain: The Essential Australian Guide to Dementia – Dr Kailas Roberts
Mind Your Brain: The Essential Australian Guide to Dementia (UQP 2021) by consultant psychiatrist and psychogeriatrician Dr Kailas Roberts, is a comprehensive, well-researched, accessible and easy-to-read guide to all aspects of dementia, including how to reduce your...
The Family Doctor – Debra Oswald
From screenwriter, playwright and author Debra Oswald comes a new novel The Family Doctor (Allen and Unwin 2021), a thought-provoking and suspenseful tale about domestic violence, love, grief, and women’s friendship and their fury. This book asks the questions: ‘Can a...
White Throat – Sarah Thornton
White Throat (Text 2020) is the second crime novel in the Clementine Jones series by author Sarah Thornton, continuing on from her debut Lapse. Although I enjoyed Lapse, this new book is clearly a step up, both in the writing and the plotting. Also, in the...
The Death of Francis Bacon – Max Porter
The Death of Francis Bacon (Faber 2021) is the third work of the talented writer Max Porter, author of Lanny, and Grief is the Thing with Feathers, both of which I loved (and both a mixture of prose and poetry). This offering is more formally a work of poetry – ‘A...
Mexican Gothic – Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Wow, I inhaled this book – a gothic, fantasy, supernatural, horror romance with a feminist perspective. Not my usual genre! Mexican Gothic (Jo Fletcher Books Hachette 2020) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a mesmerising and haunting tale set in 1950’s Mexico. A young...
The Price of Two Sparrows – Christy Collins
Christy Collins’ writing previously won a Seizure la Novella Prize, and her first novel The Price of Two Sparrows (Affirm Press 2021) confirms her place as an author to watch. Collins’ interest in race, religion, ethnicity, poverty, classism, exclusion and intolerance...
A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing – Jessie Tu
The title of this novel by Jessie Tu – A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing (Allen and Unwin 2020) – is absolutely apt. Jena is indeed a lonely girl, disassociated from friends, lovers, family, her musical genius, her work, and that does make her dangerous, not only to...
The Abstainer – Ian McGuire
The Abstainer (Scribner 2020) by acclaimed author Ian Maguire, is set in Manchester in 1867, when Stephen Doyle, an Irish-American veteran of the Civil War, arrives from New York and joins the Fenians, a secret society intent on destroying the British rule over...
Lament – Nicole Kelly
Everybody knows the story and the legend of Ned Kelly, but what if he could have escaped his past and built a different life for himself? Author Nicole Kelly (presumably no relation, but who knows?!) explores this idea in her novel Lament (Hawkeye Publishing 2020)....
Welcome to Blackwood – Khaiah Thomson
Welcome to Blackwood (Hawkeye Publishing 2020) by Khaiah Thompson is a young adult paranormal fiction novel about a town where ‘nothing is as it seems’. Featuring shape shifters, handsome strangers, a fairy-tale feel, Truth-Seekers, the Mundanes, genetics,...