How do we measure our success today? When do we know our lives have been fully lived? Amidst the noise of constant communication, what does it mean to whisper? Rachel Elliot’s cacophony of social anxiety throws these questions in our lethargic faces. Whispers through a Megaphone is the author’s debut in the written word. She Read More
The Anatomist’s Dream comes with impressive recommendations. It was long listed for the Bailey’s Prize for Fiction earlier this year, and nominated for the Man Booker prize in 2015, when it lost out to A Brief History of Seven Killings. Clio Gray, the novelist and short story writer, is known to create worlds set in Read More
Jackie Copleton’s first novel is ambitious in its themes and in the spread of history it encompasses: A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding is set mainly in Nagasaki across the years before, during and after the dropping of the atomic bomb. The plot revolves around Amaterasu, a mother and grandmother, whose desperate search to find her Read More
Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory is a startlingly vivid and rich narrative recounting the story of Zimbabwean death row inmate Memory, or Mnemosyne. Through meticulously interweaving and patching a gamut of memories together to form a story, Gappah’s debut novel simultaneously evokes feelings of intrigue, pathos, wonder and hope. The early isolation of Memory informs Read More
Sometimes there is irony in a book’s appearance and format. This ‘Little Red Book’ is not a collection of quotes by Chairman Mao, but a novel that echoes the great American jazz-age classic, The Great Gatsby. The (anti?) hero in this case is Roman Gorsky, a billionaire Russian oligarch who has settled in London, during Read More
The Secret Chord in the title of Geraldine Brooks’s latest publication about the life of David is the same Secret Chord celebrated in songwriter Leonard Cohen’s very successful song, Hallelujah, the first lines of which read: “I heard there was a Secret Chord That David played and it pleased the Lord” In tackling the telling Read More
Australian Shirley Barrett is predominantly known for her screenwriting and directing, with her first film Love Serenade winning Best First Feature at Cannes Film Festival in 1996 and her script for South Solitary winning the Queensland Premier’s Prize in 2010. Rush OH! is Barrett’s first novel, chronicling the whaling industry in a small community in Read More
“Hell is other people” Jean-Paul Satre’s famous words permeate the text of Emily St John Mandel’s fourth novel, Station 11, where a virus wiping out 99% of the Earth’s population leads its survivors to realise how alone in the world they can truly be. The story opens with a production of Shakespeare’s King Lear, starring Read More
Bearing in mind the danger of conflating the experiences of an author with those represented in their work, it is striking that the first sentence on Grace McCleen’s website runs as follows: “Grace McCleen was raised in a fundamentalist religion and for most of her life did not have much contact with unbelievers.” Madeline, the Read More
“Well, that was the clerk class for you. They might be completely without culture, but they certainly knew how to make themselves comfortable …” Sarah Waters fans will love her latest mighty tome (almost 600 pages), this time set amid the economic upheavals which followed the First World War. Frances Wray and her mother, living Read More