Book Review: In Darkness
The world watched in horror as, in 2010, Haiti's main city Port au Prince collapsed under a shocking earthquake, its buildings crashing down and killing around a quarter of a million people.
The world watched in horror as, in 2010, Haiti's main city Port au Prince collapsed under a shocking earthquake, its buildings crashing down and killing around a quarter of a million people.
Emily Perkins' sumptuous new book, The Forrests, is a novel to savour slowly: line by line, character by character, revelation by revelation.
I have to confess a prejudice against novels where the characters are continually lighting cigarettes and lifting drinks, and where the author continually tells you they're doing so.
April 25 may be a public holiday on both sides of the Tasman, but a batch of new picture books and novels will ensure its meaning is not forgotten for another generation of young readers.
Sadie Jones’ highly entertaining third novel seems perfectly conceived to appeal to two popular tastes — fascination with the Edwardian country house and the revival of the English ghost story.
Georgina Harding's Painter of Silence is set in Dumbraveni in Romania, and spans the period from the onset of World War II, through the war's ongoing impact, to the imposition of Communism.
We're stuck in the past this month, or so it would seem from our selection of hot new novels.
Nick Duerden’s daughters are hooked on Enid Blyton. But, 70 years on, why is the writing of the Noddy and Famous Five author still so compelling?
Dear Heart takes its title from a poem by Michele Leggott addressed to her dead mother and is a pointer to what makes Green's collection different from its predecessors.
Tanveer Ahmed has written a memoir that entertains but also gives you something to think about. The Exotic Rissole explores mixed cultural relations.
Lenny is "a perfectly unremarkable 20-year old who just happens to be in a wheelchair". He's there because of a rugby accident and he doesn't want to live any more. So he kills himself, in front of a parish priest.
If you were to write a story set in Bombay, as the poet Jeet Thayil prefers to call the city now known as Mumbai in his outstanding debut novel, you don't have to work too hard.
Tumbling tresses, midnight-pool eyes, alabaster brow. None of these features in the debut novelist's publicity photo should be held against her.
Those who are nervous about speaking in public usually have the perfect way out. They simply don't do it.
It would be hard to imagine a more downbeat heroine for an historical novel than Minnie Dean.
The memoir can be a difficult genre to deal with, for author and reader alike.
There are some 500 items in this fascinating selection of Frank Sargeson’s letters — a number that nevertheless represents only about a quarter of the more than 6000 which survive.
At first sight, Lysander Rief, standing on the corner of the Augustiner Strasse in 1913 Vienna, looks like a hero.
To judge by online reviews, Californian arthouse film-maker Miranda July's movies are something you either love or hate. And it seems her writing is much the same.
Sales pitch: 'I want to write a book that is a sort of summary of a wilfully ambiguous science fiction movie made by a Russian director more than 30 years ago.'
Recently, while sitting in the airport lounge in Sydney waiting for a flight home, I glanced up from my hardcover book and surveyed the other travellers in my immediate vicinity.