I love thinking about place in literature, so I was intrigued when Chrystopher Spicer, cultural historian and adjunct senior research fellow at North Queensland's James Cook University, offered me his book Cyclone country: The language of place and disaster in Australian literature for review. Unfortunately, I've taken a while to get to it. Place can … Continue reading Chrystopher J. Spicer: Cyclone country: The language of place and disaster in Australian literature (#BookReview)
21st century literature
Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet (#BookReview)
Not unusually, I'm late to this book that was all the talk in 2020 - and, I may not have read it at all if it hadn't been for my reading group. I'm talking, as you will have guessed from the post title, of Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet. As most of you will know, Hamnet's plot … Continue reading Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet (#BookReview)
Nancy Jin and Rosalind Moran, These strange outcrops (#BookReview)
Bagging Canberra - often used synonymously for the Federal Government - is almost a national sport, but in recent years anthologies have appeared to counter this with more complex stories about this place. The first two I've read - The invisible thread, edited by Irma Gold (my review) and Meanjin's The Canberra issue (my review) … Continue reading Nancy Jin and Rosalind Moran, These strange outcrops (#BookReview)
Irma Gold and Susannah Crispe, Where the heart is (#BookReview)
I don't normally review children's books, particularly children's picture books, but I do make exceptions, one being Irma Gold. I have multiple reasons for this. Irma Gold is local; she is one of the Ambassadors for the ACT Chief Minister's Reading Challenge; she writes across multiple forms (including, novels, short stories and children's books, in … Continue reading Irma Gold and Susannah Crispe, Where the heart is (#BookReview)
Marie Younan with Jill Sanguinetti, A different kind of seeing: My journey (#BookReview)
In many ways, Marie Younan's A different kind of seeing: My journey is a standard memoir about a person overcoming the limitations of her disability which, in this case, is blindness. It's told first person, chronologically, from her grandparents' lives through her birth in Syria to the present when she is in her late 60s … Continue reading Marie Younan with Jill Sanguinetti, A different kind of seeing: My journey (#BookReview)
Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain (#BookReview)
How to write about a book that has made such a big splash that it has already been extensively reviewed. What more can one say? This is what I'm facing with Douglas Stuart's debut and Booker Prize-winning novel, Shuggie Bain. I haven't, in fact, read much about it, because I prefer to come to books … Continue reading Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain (#BookReview)
Claudine Jacques, The Blue Cross/La Croix bleue (#Review, #WITmonth)
I haven't taken part in Women in Translation month (#WITmonth) before but decided to dip my toes in this year with a translated short story. I hoped to find one online and I did, "The Blue Cross" (or, in its original French, "La Croix bleue") by New Caledonian writer Claudine Jacques. Coincidentally, I found it … Continue reading Claudine Jacques, The Blue Cross/La Croix bleue (#Review, #WITmonth)
Nardi Simpson, Song of the crocodile (#BookReview)
Nardi Simpson's Song of the crocodile is a tight multi-generational saga set in the fictional town of Darnmoor over the last decades of the twentieth century. It tells the story of the people of the Campgrounds, who are ostracised, exploited and abused by the white townspeople. Between the Campgrounds and the town proper, with its … Continue reading Nardi Simpson, Song of the crocodile (#BookReview)
Emma Ashmere, Dreams they forgot (#BookReview)
Emma Ashmere's short story collection, Dreams they forgot, is different again from recent short story collections I've read. Certainly very different from the most recent, Adam Thompson's Born into this (my review). One of the things that makes it different is its breadth in terms of time and place. Thompson's collection, for example, is mostly … Continue reading Emma Ashmere, Dreams they forgot (#BookReview)
Jonathan Shaw, None of us alone (#BookReview)
Some of you will know of Jonathan Shaw as the blogger at Me fail? I fly! If you read his blog, you will also know that he loves poetry: he writes it, he reviews it. None of us alone is his first commercially published collection, though he has self-published five collections and has had a … Continue reading Jonathan Shaw, None of us alone (#BookReview)
Whispering Gums 