Part One of this interview can be found here.
Pictured: Emily Maguire and I before the Sleepers Salon in October.
I ask Maguire about the setting. Is it pertinent for this story to be set in Sydney? She says it probably could have been a few cities, but ‘western Sydney is – the cliché is ‘melting pot’, [...]
Category Archives: Reviews + Analyses
This cumulative kind of effect when you stop: an interview with Emily Maguire on Smoke in the Room, part two
November 5, 2009 – 7:53 am
This cumulative kind of effect when you stop: an interview with Emily Maguire on Smoke in the Room, part one
November 3, 2009 – 12:23 pm
In Smoke in the Room, three characters end up in a share house in Sydney. Katie works on instinct and is weighted by an overwhelming empathy. Adam, an American, is grieving and needs to save money to get home. Graeme, an aid worker, has rid himself of possessions and simplified his existence. In this novel, [...]
Guest review: Lorelei Vashti on Linda Neil’s Learning How to Breathe
October 22, 2009 – 7:55 am
9780702237348
UQP
September 2009 (Australia)
Review by Lorelei Vashti
When I was first offered this book to review I thought: Well, Ms Meyer, it seems that not only are you literary-minded but you’re also literally minded, because what you have given me here is a book about a Brisbane girl returning home to her family. Which, Angela—as you very [...]
Guest review: Elena Gomez on Mic Looby’s Paradise Updated
October 13, 2009 – 7:57 am
9780980374667
September 2009 (Australia)
Affirm Press
If you didn’t already know that Mic Looby was once a Lonely Planet writer and editor, it’s not difficult to guess, reading his debut novel, Paradise Updated. In it, the satirically named ‘SmallWorld’ publishers dominate the guidebook industry and the bloke who made them what they are today, legendary Robert Rind, expert on [...]
Mo Zhi Hong’s The Year of the Shanghai Shark
September 29, 2009 – 7:59 am
Penguin New Zealand 2008
9780143008934
The Year of the Shanghai Sharkcharts a series of encounters, tales and incidents in one year of a boy’s life in Dalian, China. His immediate existence is determined by his Uncle, who possesses many big books and conducts dubious business, his best friends Po Fan and Xiao Wang, plus basketball, fast food and his [...]
Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol goes well with cheap wine, corn chips and reading into the morning
September 23, 2009 – 7:54 am
The most blockbustery blockbuster of the year found its way into my lap and with curiosity piqued (and a break needed from festival preparations) I indulged in one solid reading session – cover to cover – and was mainly intrigued, despite a few small snags.
In The Lost Symbol, Harvard Professor Robert Langdon is called to [...]
Guest review: Rhys Tate on Mary Richardson’s Truckers
September 15, 2009 – 7:56 am
Truckers
Mary Richardson
Mark Batty Publisher
June 2009 (USA)
9780979966682
Reviewed by Rhys Tate.
A few months ago, as an ex-truckie and sometime poet, I was invited to submit some lines to Sydney outfit Red Room and their collection of trucker poetry, a pairing even I find incongruous. My poem was titled ‘There’s nothing romantic about driving a truck’ and [...]
Julia Leigh’s Disquiet
September 9, 2009 – 7:54 am
9780143009573
Penguin
In an active, atmospheric introduction, a woman and her two children arrive at the gate, and then the house, of the woman’s childhood. The woman, Olivia, explains to her mother she ‘had to come home’ and is accepted. Soon arrives Olivia’s grief-stricken brother and wife, with their baby’s body (who has just died in birth).
From [...]
MJ Hyland’s This is How
September 2, 2009 – 6:53 pm
Text Publishing
July 2009 (Australia)
9781921520532
At the beginning of This is How, Patrick Oxtoby arrives at a boarding house. The landlady wants to hang up his coat. He’d prefer to leave it on. When he finally takes it off and puts it on the rack, it falls off. Neither of them pick it up.
This is how life [...]
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