Reviewed by Wendy Lipke Deborah FitzGerald, senior journalist, editor and writer who had worked across major media organisations was asked by the Mackellar family to undertake the project of providing the first definitive biography of Australian poet and writer Dorothea Mackellar. This undertaking led to the author’s Doctor of Arts thesis and then this book.
Reviewed by Rod McLary Set in West Java in 1941, Sunbirds is a tale of love and duty elegantly told by an author who was the winner of the 2020 Queensland Literary Prize and the ARA Historical Novel Prize for her first book Stone Sky Gold Mountain. The van Hoorn family – Dutch colonials –
Reviewed by Wendy Lipke When I first read the title of this book I wondered if it would be like an Australian version of the 1993 movie, Sleepless in Seattle, with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. This book by Australian writer, Susan Duncan, is nothing like that story. Susan Duncan has had tragedy to face
Reviewed by Wendy Lipke As with all her books, Kirsty Manning has used historical records and re-imagined a story around them, shifting some events and combining others to suit her narrative. In the Acknowledgement section, she tells the reader that it took her four years to decide the best way to tell this story so
Reviewed by Wendy Lipke In his twenty-first novel, Vendetta, Tony Park has once again taken his reader to South Africa and specifically in this story, to the South African apartheid-era Border War. The book includes two storylines, 1987 in Angola and the present in South Africa and Namibia. In the current storyline, middle-aged veteran of
Reviewed by Wendy Lipke Alice Hoffman is an American novelist and young-adult and children’s writer, best known for her 1995 novel Practical Magic, which was adapted for a 1998 film of the same name. Many of her works fall into the genre of magic realism and contain elements of magic, irony, and non-standard romances and
Reviewed by Gerard Healy This is a delightful work by Hannah Dolby, peopled with strong central characters, interesting minor ones and a great sense of humour. Violet Harrison is the very appealing main character in this engaging yarn set in sea-side Hastings, England in 1896. When Violet instigates a search for her missing mother Lily,
Reviewed by Rod McLary The Visitors is a re-imagining of that fateful day in January 1788 when the eleven ships of the First Fleet entered what we now know as Sydney Cove. The events of the day are described from the perspective of a group of seven Elders, each representing one of the First Nation
Reviewed by Patricia Simms-Reeve Learned By Heart, Emma Donoghue’s latest novel, is a heartbreaking account of Eliza Raine, possibly the first love of the famed lesbian, Anne Lister, and her tragic life which ensued. It is a beautifully reconstructed tale of boarding school life at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which provides a background
Reviewed by Wendy Lipke Before beginning to read this third novel by Australian writer Kate Mildenhall, I needed to remind myself what The Hummingbird Effect was. The computer told me that the hummingbird effect demonstrates that an event in one field can trigger completely unexpected outcomes in wholly different domains. This connectivity cannot be predicted
Reviewed by Richard Tutin We often forget that recorded history has many dimensions. While many complain that they have only be taught or shown one side of historical events – usually that of the winners – it doesn’t take long before other stories begin to emerge. Some of these other stories are very serious and
Reviewed by Patricia Simms-Reeve Many respected critics have predicted that Jenny Erpenbeck, born in 1967 in the former East Germany, will receive the Nobel Prize for Literature within the next few years and her latest novel, Kairos, is indeed evident of a brilliant if not a great writer. This layered account of a doomed, intense
Reviewed by Norrie Sanders Imagine a time when furniture came already built. A time before flatpack and online retail. When you could see and touch solid wood and dovetail joints. Imagine a time when banks had branches in country towns. And there was a human bank manager who could sit you down in a comfortable
Reviewed by Wendy Lipke My Mother, The Spy was written by Freda Marnie Nicholls in association with Cindy Dobbin, the daughter of Mercia Masson. Fifty years after her mother’s death Cindy was given a book called Australia’s Spies and their Secrets which mentions her mother. At first ‘Cindy found the idea of her mother being
Reviewed by Norrie Sanders Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has led to a media frenzy that sometimes overwhelms us with deluges of content. We have daily updates, analysis, propaganda and predictions that add up to an incoherent and often conflicting narrative. No single voice speaks with authenticity and predictions are frequently proven wrong. Into this