CATEGORIES

There are few books more suited to the Ones I Wish I’d Written category than Jeffrey Brown’s Darth Vader and Son. A pint-sized picture book, it’s brilliantly as much a book for big kids as small ones. In fact, I suspect many a new parent who grew up with Star Wars will be buying it [...]

Alongside To Kill A Mockingbird, Animal Farm would have to be up there as one of the most-loved books we were required (forced) to read at school. While I struggled with Shakespeare (though the waffle is clever, my small brain still found it waffle), Brave New World (the book’s extremely dated) and anything poetry-related, Animal [...]

I’ve blogged a bunch about Matthew ‘Oatmeal’ Inman’s genius blogs*. Now I get to blog about his just-released book, The Dog Paradox, which is built on his comic by roughly the same title. If you haven’t had the pleasure and pain of laughing so hard you think your ribcage might combust, then being struck by [...]

I’ve been reading and hearing about an award-winning transmedia app created by former McSweeney’s managing editor Eli Horowitz. Suffice to say, I was both intrigued enough to want to download this app, but wary enough that it might be so hipster I’d want to avoid it. I gave it a whirl after finding out The [...]

In a recent article about women’s writing it was claimed that respect and a wide readership is more likely if the author adopts a male perspective. Kate Worsley’s book half fulfills this criterion by offering a male and a female perspective in alternating chapters, but it also subverts it. However, to explain just how Worsley [...]

I’d heard lots about writer and researcher Charlotte Nash. Not only had we completed the same post-grad writing and editing course, we also had mutual friends. But it took until last week for me to meet her officially, when she joined Write Club, our informal but occasionally productive support-meets-gossip group. It turns out Nash, who [...]

The problem with writers penning runaway bestsellers is that they’re the outliers but they’re viewed as the benchmark norm. Quibble however you will over the quality (or lack thereof) of their work, but JK Rowling, Dan Brown, and EL James are the notable exceptions to the authorial rule: They might have made so much money [...]

The mature thing to do when you both have enormous, suffocatingly impending deadlines as well as knee surgery and an enforced lay-off coming up would be to save up a good book for the latterly mentioned respite. I, of course, did nothing of the sort, head-in-the-sanding it ostrich style to pretend that I didn’t have [...]

“What follows is a record of where Meadow and I have been since our disappearance.” So, begins the opening statement of Schroder, and it is prefaced by the e.e.cummings poem “here is the deepest secret nobody knows“. This sounds tantalizing, especially when you know from the cover blurb that Meadow is the narrator’s six-year-old daughter and [...]

Kate Summerscale’s book is more than just the story of a Victorian wife’s romantic indiscretions and a scandalous divorce case. It is a glimpse of a changing society. One in which a  woman’s sexuality could be discussed in terms of hysteria and insanity caused by disorders of the womb. One in which gynaecology and psychology [...]

This review follows on from Random Romance Part 1 of 2: Breaking the Rules. In Bloom, 36-year-old married mother of three Emma Eddington feels fat, forgotten, and all-round frumpy. Her husband works all the time and her children see her as their housekeeper meets taxi driver. She’s also frustrated because the misbehaving family dog has [...]

The merger between Random House and Penguin sparked much speculation about what the new company’s title would be, with ‘Random Penguin’ a clear, outlying favourite. That the company opted for the less fun ‘Penguin Random’ was a slight disappointment to us all, and we’ve all continued to run with ‘Random Penguin’ instead. Random House Australia [...]

I had my own Sylvia Plath moment this week, by eerie coincidence just days before the 50th anniversary of her death. The ancient, galvanised something-or-other pipes that channel gas to my apartment’s stove sprung, well, the plumber stopped counting at four leaks. I spent days inhaling gas, first inadvertently and then deliberately as I tried [...]

The first third of this book is about sex: love and sex; sex and love. In the first five chapters, Sarita remembers how she fell in love with Karun and the details of  her increasingly adventurous attempts to get him to consummate their marriage. The next five chapters deal with Jaz’s homosexual seduction of Karun, [...]

It’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally here. Well, actually, it was here in June last year. I’ve just been a little slow in getting around to writing about it.  Walking Shadows, the sequel to Narrelle M Harris’s 2007 vampire novel, The Opposite of Life, was released in June last year. It has [...]

The Columbian folk-tale figure of the Robber of Memories haunts this book in many different ways. Michael Jacobs’ journey to the source of the Magdalena River in Columbia is a record of his travels but it is also about memory and loss – about history, conflict, disappeared people, and about personal experiences of loss.  Jacobs’ [...]

There was a time when Christmas meant a new Patricia Cornwell. I’d be so excited I’d even fork out for the hardcover—and I hate hardcovers. Then Cornwell went off the boil and I, well, fell off the Kay Scarpetta-worshipping wagon. Which is why I hadn’t realised Cornwell had penned some Scarpetta novels in recent years—I’d [...]

Futh is in his forties, newly separated from his wife, and taking a walking holiday in Germany. He hasn’t been doing much walking recently but he plans on doing fifteen miles a day and coming home fit and tanned. And he remembers walking with his mother and father as a child and, especially, a sunny [...]

A body in the swimming pool is always a good start. But this is no ordinary mystery story. And Kitty Finch is no ordinary body. Her appearance at the tourist villa which the Jacobs have rented disturbs everyone – Joe, Isabel and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Nina, and their friends Mitchell and Laura. Jurgen, the German [...]

Much like festive food, I often find bestselling books to be either too saccharine-sweet or over-stuffed for my taste. So I wasn’t expecting to be instantly charmed when I finally picked up a copy of Jonas Jonasson’s debut offering, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. But it had me at [...]

I went to the midnight opening of the ultimate Twilight film adaptation, Breaking Dawn Part 2 (herein referred to simply as Breaking Dawn), by myself. It’s something I don’t actually mind doing, with the midnight sessions making for fascinating people watching. This time around it may have been a little too fascinating, with the guy [...]

There’s no such thing as too much Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey, especially when it’s in the form of a savvy, fun-poking parody. Fifty Shames of Early Grey by Fanny Merkin (AKA Andrew Shaffer) is the first (but certainly not the last) Fifty Shames spoof to emerge. The first three chapters of its existence [...]

“Caterina Pellegrini is a young Venetian musicologist hired to find the truthful heir to an alleged treasure concealed by a once-famous baroque composer”: “A gripping tale of Intrigue, Music and Obsession” The publicity material for this book says that it is based on the true story of the composer Agostino Steffani – with “months and [...]

There is an old-fashioned style about this book. Not just because it was written in the 1920s and is set in France just after the First World War, but because Némirovsky writes in a way which is more leisurely and descriptive than is customary now. Her character live at a more leisurely pace. Social status [...]

I’m sticking with the small press theme of my last post. From Felicity Dowker’s book, Bread and Circuses, we go to Narrelle M Harris’s Showtime. From Ticonderoga Publications we go to Twelfth Planet Press. As well as anthologies, collections, novellas and novels, Twelfth Planet Press is publishing a series of mini-collections by some of Australia’s [...]

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, then you’ll know that I love Aussie small press. One of my favourite small press publishers is Ticonderoga Publications. They consistently produce exceptional genre books, and it’s one of those that I’m going to write about today. Earlier this year I attended a spec fic convention in [...]

I should say from the start that I am not a laugh-out-loud reader of funny books. So, this book is not my usual sort of reading. However, Jonas Jonasson is a superb teller of tall tales; and enough people have found this book hilarious (so the publisher’s blurb tells me) for it to have been [...]

Why do we travel? What is travel? Is it tourism or migration; voluntary or necessary? Something driven by restlessness, curiosity, a desire to learn and see new things or the need to escape? Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel tells the stories of two very different people: Laura, an Australian woman for whom travel has been an [...]

I hadn’t come across Tess Gerritsen’s novels before Last to Die landed up on my desk. Background reading told me that this is the 10th Rizzoli and Isles thriller and that the characters had spawned a hit TV series in the US. This mystery revolves around three young children all orphaned within a week of each other [...]

Having had her life dominated by the 10 or more impossible-to-put-down books in the Sookie Stackhouse series, my friend Carly had requested that she not be told when the next book came out. So I of course sent her a message as soon as I heard Charlaine Harris was releasing Deadlocked. Then I pre-ordered a [...]

This book of poems is described in the press release as “A personal journey through the works of poets that most influenced Kinsella’s work“. Kinsella himself describes it as “creating responses, translations, versions, distractions, takes, adaptations and interpolations“. He goes on to say that “the poems are ‘my’ poems in so far as my own [...]

It helps to know that this new novella by Jeanette Winterson is published under the Hammer imprint and that their new series of books is intended “to bring horror back to the forefront of the market”. This is what it says on the Hammer website, but the blurb sent to reviewers is rather more up-market [...]

Buddhaland Brooklyn is the story of a middle-aged, Japanese Buddhist priest, Seido Oda, who, after a quiet life creating and teaching art in his mountainside monastery in Japan, is suddenly sent to New York to lead a group of American believers and to manage the construction of a new Buddhist temple there. Seido Oda tells his [...]

Craig Taylor is Canadian, but after living for several years in London and growing attached to the place he began to ask “What is a Londoner?”. It seems that there are almost as many answers to that question as there are people living in London but my favourite is that ” a real Londoner would [...]

Hello again! This is my first blog post in a bit as I have been busier than George R R Martin avoiding questions on when he’s finally going to finish the Game of Thrones series. I spent most of last month working on a conference, getting married in Fiji and taking a short honeymoon on [...]

My first impression of Derek B. Miller’s Norwegian By Night was that it was written by an underachiever. An underachiever in the ironic sense, that is. Boston-born, well-travelled Miller is—as the book’s bio tells us—the director of The Policy Lab and a senior fellow with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. Along the way [...]

I’m pretty much standing alone among writers in saying that the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon is a good thing. The general stance is that it’s poorly written commercial drivel leading the reading (and non-reading) masses astray. Me? I think the issues and opportunities are—please excuse the pun—a little more grey. First and foremost, there’s [...]

“Now he was Dr Norman Wilfred, Oliver had discovered, once the security guard had unlocked his room and broken the padlock off his suitcase for him, he had an unexpected taste for pure silk underpants and pure silk pyjamas” But Oliver was not Dr Norman Wilfred, however much he had convinced himself and guests at [...]

“Finn fell. I don’t  think, if I used a million words, I could call up the horror. It isn’t a matter of words.” Finn is Martha’s five-year-old son and she sees him fall from the balcony of their home. But there is more to this terrible event than Martha is willing to tell us or [...]

I promised myself that after reading the desolate, desolate Oryx and Crake, I would turn my thoughts to dystopian novels that are more reasonable. Whatever that means. Super Sad True Love Story seemed like one such ‘reasonable’ dystopian, but in retrospect it has affected me just as much as Atwood’s, though not in entirely the [...]