Reviewed by Antonella Townsend I love true stories and I love elephants, so though the target demographic for Kate Simpson’s How to Move a Zoo is for children four to eight years, this large hard cover book will remain on my coffee table for all my adult friends to appreciate a slice of Sydney history.
Reviewed by Norrie Sanders River journeys are a familiar genre. Whether it be the mighty Nile, Amazon or Congo, or the less mighty Thames or Murray, historians, geographers, anthropologists and hikers, to name a few, have felt the need to explore and write about it. Closer to home, our more modest Brisbane River has been
International Booker Prize 2024 The novel Kairos, written by Jenny Erpenbeck and translated from German by Michael Hofmann (Granta), has won the £50,000 (A$95,325) International Booker Prize. Kairos was chosen from a shortlist of six by a judging panel that included writer and broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel (chair), poet Natalie Diaz, Booker Prize–shortlisted novelist Romesh Gunesekera, artist William Kentridge, and writer,
Reviewed by Wendy Lipke Less than 40 miles from the front line of fighting, during the first World War, a group of three hundred and fifty women from the US, Canada and Great Britain worked to rebuild northern France from 1917 to 1924. This novel, The Librarians of Rue de Picardie, by Janet Skeslien Charles
Reviewed by E. B. Heath Ageing and death are currently hot topics in the publishing world. No doubt influenced by a wave of Baby Boomers now facing the inevitable. But they are not the only group chasing immortality. There are many in affluent countries who are opting for their bodies to be preserved using the
Reviewed by Rod McLary The subtitle to this ultimately hopeful book is Finding our way back to compassion, hope and humanity implying of course that compassion, hope and humanity were lost somewhere along the way. This is the story of the 2017 review of the Oakden Older Persons’ Mental Health Service in Adelaide. The book’s
Reviewed by Antonella Townsend Bren MacDibble’s middle grade novel, 9-13 years of age, imagines the aftermath of a world impacted by global warming and a pandemic that devastates mainly the male population. The story is centred in a village of women and children who subsist in a caring community living off the land in a
The winners of the 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards were announced on 20 May. Ali Cobby Eckermann’s verse novel She Is the Earth won the overall $10,000 Book of the Year award, as well as the $30,000 Indigenous Writers’ Prize. The winning titles in selected categories are: Book of the Year ($10,000) She Is the Earth (Ali Cobby
Reviewed by Richard Tutin The mention of Italy conjures up many thoughts in our minds. It might be the food, the wine or the coffee. It could also be the days of the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire. In amongst the reminiscences, there is often the question about the way in which this
Reviewed by Patricia Simms-Reeve This slender volume by Sydney writer, Sara Haddad, comes at a time when the world’s eyes are trained on the catastrophic events that daily occur in the Middle East. While much of the West is appalled by the relentless destruction wrought by Israel, Sara Haddad’s book does not engage in the
Reviewed by Patricia Simms-Reeve A small community in 1990s Ireland is the backdrop of Alan Murrin’s first novel, The Coast Road. Its focus is on three women’s battle with lives constrained by having to deal with their country’s law which made divorce illegal even in the face of challenging marriages. Colette, a passionate, uncompromising character
Award Winners 2024 Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright (Giramondo) has won the fiction award in the 2024 James Tait Black Prizes. Wright’s novel was chosen from a shortlist of four fiction works for the £10,000 (A$18,958) prize. Fiction judge Benjamin Bateman, of the University of Edinburgh, called Praiseworthy ‘a kaleidoscopic and brilliantly conceived novel that interweaves matters of climate and Indigenous
ABIA awards 2024 The winners of the 2024 Australian Book Industry Awards have been announced, with The Voice to Parliament Handbook (Thomas Mayo & Kerry O’Brien, HG Explore) taking out the overall book of the year award, as well as winning in both the general nonfiction book of the year and social impact book of
Reviewed by Rod McLary Apparently, there are a number of ‘ghost cities’ in China all of which have the infrastructure but lack any population. These uninhabited cities are the inspiration for this imaginative and labyrinthine novel by Brisbane writer Siang Lu. There are a number of narratives running through the novel but the consistent one
Reviewed by Patricia Simms-Reeve Ouyang Yu’s view of the modern world is humorously summed up when he suggests that if Shakespeare wrote the famous quote “To be or….”, it would become “To be or not to be entertained”…. The general population is obsessed with money, sex, distractions, food and are merely ‘animals with clothes’. Poetry,