It is 1965 and the sleepy innocence of Western Australia is being shaken by the Vietnam draft and Edgar Cooke’s murderous spree. Even the fictional, rural mining town of Corrigan is feeling the pinch with its young men being conscripted and upstart, slant-eyed migrants taking jobs that could go to hard drinking Australian blokes. When the fifteen year old daughter of the well heeled Shire President goes missing all eyes turn to Jasper Jones: the town’s mixed race bad boy and all purpose pariah. Read the rest of this entry »
Jasper Jones Review and Reading Guide
Apr
22
On Beauty and Howard’s End: A Guide for Book Groups
Apr
20
Being the conscientious (some might say anally retentive) reader that I am, when the Marlborough Street Book Group read Zadie Smith’s On Beauty I put together this comparison guide for members who were not familiar with E.M. Forster’s gorgeous Howard’s End. Book Groups reading Smith in isolation or with Forster as a companion pair might find this useful. Read the rest of this entry »
The Sinkings by Amanda Curtin
Apr
15
The Sinkings opens with a grisly axe murder in the Western Australian town of Albany in 1882. The description of the murder takes little more than a page before the reader finds themselves in the present day, watching armchair researcher Willa Sampson ferret around in the State Records Office. Willa is looking for archival material relating to the murder. Willa is neither a descendant of the murdered man (a real historical personage), or a devotee of convict history. But there is a fillip of evidence in the records that intrigues her and gives her a sense of ‘ownership’ over the deceased’s story. Read the rest of this entry »
The Year of the Flood
Mar
28
A new novel by Margaret Atwood is always a treat to be savoured. I am a rabid fan of her work and picked up The Year of the Flood with the sense of anticipation I’ve had for her fiction since The Handmaid’s Tale shook me to my readerly core as a teenager. Read the rest of this entry »
The Nature of Ice
Mar
14
Robyn Mundy’s debut novel The Nature of Ice posed some challenges for me. Couple my horror of cold weather with the unsettling part frozen wastelands play in my dreamscapes and a novel set almost entirely in Antarctica was going to be problematic. But the book drew me in nonetheless. Read the rest of this entry »