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 [...]
Category Archives: Reviews + Analyses
Julia Leigh’s Disquiet
September 9, 2009 – 7:54 am
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 [...]
Eric Garcia’s The Repossession Mambo
August 11, 2009 – 8:08 am
9781921372810
Scribe 2009 (Australia)
(and Harper, US)
In the near future, artificial organs (artiforgs) can be bought to save a person’s life – or simply enhance life’s quality. From kidneys to central nervous systems, the expensive artiforgs can be bought on credit, and if you miss too many payments, they can be repossessed.
When we meet Remy, he [...]
The Danger Game – Kalinda Ashton
July 30, 2009 – 8:03 am
Sleepers Publishing
August 2009, Australia
9781740668132
Three children – one insular, one bold, and one stubborn and growing – dare each other to undertake dangerous or humiliating tasks in the ‘danger game’. Their lives are daring enough, with an unstable father and a mother on-edge, and mature secrets inside each of their little heads.
Only two of them live in the [...]
Kate Grenville’s Dark Places
July 28, 2009 – 7:59 am
A LiteraryMinded review of an Australian classic.
Dark Places
Kate Grenville
(Macmillan 1994 + Text Publishing 2008)
Dark Places charts the life of a pitiful, self-absorbed and knowingly empty man, Albion Gidley Singer. From a young age he attempts to fill a void that exists within him – a void associated with his lack of knowledge of the feminine. He [...]
Guest review: Sam Cooney on Mark Mordue’s Dastgah
July 21, 2009 – 8:05 am
Dastgah, Mark Mordue
Allen & Unwin (2001, Australia).
Also published overseas.
Review by Sam Cooney.
Dastgah is an account of Australian writer, journalist and editor Mark Mordue’s first trip overseas: a one-year journey through the regions of India, Nepal, the United Kingdom, Turkey and Iran, and the cities of Paris and New York. The blurb calls it ‘a refined [...]
How to Eat a Wolf by Sharanya Manivannan: a poem
July 16, 2009 – 8:17 am
Does all lust start and
end like this? Don’t get me
wrong. I loved my wolf.
I held him tethered like
a pussycat. I nursed
the rumble in his belly
with hands gentle as a burglar’s.
He lived on milk
and blood and ocean. He
had violets for his furs.
It’s just that he was
beginning to devour me.
He nuzzled me with claws,
fondled me with fangs
sharp [...]
Peter Goldsworthy’s Everything I Knew
July 14, 2009 – 8:06 am
Penguin Aus
ISBN 9780143009634 (paperback – out August 2009)
It’s 1964 in small-town South Australia and Robert Burns (like the poet) is on the cusp of adolescence. ‘Happiness is a default state’, he narrates, looking back. Reading it, no matter when or where you grew up, one can relate to that simplicity, the time before ‘adult’ aspects of [...]
Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth
June 30, 2009 – 8:03 pm
The Forest of Hands and Teeth
Carrie Ryan
Gollancz
9780575090859
2009
Mary’s village is surrounded by tall fences to keep out the ‘Unconsecrated’. It is the only world she has ever known, but she remembers her mother’s stories of the world before the return – tales of tall buildings, and a vast expanse of water: the ocean. Unlike her religious [...]
J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
June 29, 2009 – 8:01 am
Disgrace
JM Coetzee
9780099289524
Vintage
Disgrace is centred around David Lurie, a Romantic Poetry Professor at a Cape Town University, and an unapologetic lover of the firm, youthful, accommodating female form. He’s been married twice, and in the story satisfies his hunger with a prostitute, and then a student, becoming enamored with both (i.e. tracking down the prostitute at [...]
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