Reviewed by Wendy Lipke The Honey Badger guide to Life by Nick Cummins, as the title, cover and author suggest, is a blokey book, so why did I, a female septuagenarian decide to see what this book was all about? I suppose it was the cover which on the front sports a formally attired Cummins
Reviewed by Antonella Townsend When a kind person sends you Lorraine Murphy’s latest book, Get Remarkably Organised, it is best to squash the urge to tell them to get remarkably lost. A better strategy is to look around, maybe open a few cupboards and let the piling, spilling, messy, evidence speak for itself. Another response
Reviewed by Antonella Townsend The answer to the old clichéd question ‘if there was a fire what would you grab before fleeing the house?’ has recently been up-dated in my head. Beyond bundling the dog out the nearest door, I would now ignore the family photo album and grab Peter Kuruvita’s latest book Lands of
Reviewed by Norrie Sanders “The first sign of a boom is always the same: strangers. From nowhere they appear, first in drips, then as a flood. They are people in fluoros and suits no one has seen before. As more follow, there are more cars on the road and more car accidents, and, eventually, when
Reviewed by Ian Lipke Most readers today will not be familiar with the name John Cleland, the author of this often censored book which has been resurrected in its unexpurgated form and then edited by Richard Terry and Helen Williams. The sexual content of the book has always been at the root of the various
Reviewed by Wendy Lipke On reading Joanne Nell’s novel The Single Ladies of Jacaranda Retirement Village, I was reminded of the movies about the Exotic Marigold Hotel, about a small group of elderly people looking for a place to retire. The setting for Nell’s book is a retirement village not far from the beach and
Reviewed by Ian Lipke Enter the fantasy world of Chris Wooding with the action adventure story The Ember Blade. Designed for a Young Adult generic there is plenty of action to satisfy most young people. Beneath the gloss is a series of action scenes cobbled together by not much else. Thirty years before the
Reviewed by Ian Lipke This novel is presented as a story by Wilbur Smith with one reference to David Churchill. It is never clear whether Smith created and wrote the story or gave David Churchill the right to write the story on behalf of the Wilbur Smith Foundation. A little research unearths some information about
Reviewed by Ian Lipke For purposes of this review I have focused on Injury Time and The River in the Sky. Clive James published a book in 2015 called Sentenced to Life in which he took the view that his time left on Earth was to be severely limited. To his astonishment his sojourn was
Reviewed by Rod McLary 2028 is set in the not-too-distant future in Australia. The Prime Minister of the time calls a snap election and the book chronicles the progress of the election campaign – a campaign which is full of surprises and comedy. 2028 – the year not the book – is almost within touching
Reviewed by Clare Brook I am happy and healthy, All my organs have healed, My body and its organs have healed, I have faith in life. Imagine you are a really happy successful 51-year-old, then without warning you suffer a seizure. The next day you are diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour – Stage Four
Reviewed by Ian Lipke Miles Taylor’s mammoth study of the relationship between Queen Victoria and India is a pleasing, authoritative, engaging, scholarly piece of writing that should be read by all those with an interest in ways that a queen, as distinct from the government she heads, builds and maintains the governance and respect of
Reviewed by Rod McLary The Coves – referring to Sydney Coves or Sydney Ducks – is set in San Francisco in 1849 during the gold rush. ‘Sydney Coves’ is slang for the Australian emancipated and escaped convicts who flocked to California during its gold rush to make their fortunes. They brought with them their criminality
Reviewed by Ian Lipke The latest J.D. Robb thriller retains the hard edge that Robb maintains in all her crime novels based on the New York-based Lieutenant Eve Dallas. There have been many of them. Her latest, Leverage in Death has all the tangled twists we have come to associate with this writer. It’s difficult
Reviewed by Ian Lipke It has been many years since I have enjoyed the comprehensiveness of a major poet, and striven to reach the intellectual level at which Judith Beveridge’s verse lies, relaxed and casually presented in her Sun Music: New and Selected Poems. I am a huge fan of her breadth and especially the