The House on Half Moon Street by Alex Reeve Raven Books In 1880, Victorian London was full of desperate characters that profited from other people’s weaknesses. It was a terrible time for most women and there is no way to romanticize the exploitation and the conditions in which the majority of the population struggled to […]
Bluebottle by Belinda Castles Allen & Unwin “After midnight the heat swelled in the house on the cliff while the cool surf pounded below.” Set on Sydney’s Northern beaches, sixteen year-old Lou, fifteen year-old Jack and younger sister Phoebe live in a house overlooking the sea with their parents Charlie and Tricia. Although the novel […]
Big Rough Stones by Margaret Merrilees Wakefield Press Reading Margaret Merrilees’ latest novel is a bit like doing a jigsaw. The narrative is littered with lesbians who all connect in some way. Poet Miriel Lenore says at the beginning of the book that to build a lesbian wall, you need big rough stones. Some bits […]
The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara ONEWORLD When Blondie and Diana Ross were pumping on the radio, Angel was 16 years old and they realised they were a she. She didn’t need to actually be a woman to have the air of a woman and the sass of Bette Davis, and when she […]
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi Allen & Unwin Ada was born in Nigeria where her mother Saachi was a nurse and her father Saul a doctor. Author Akwaeke Emezi, who was also born in Nigeria, inhabits Ada as she goes from foetus through the birth process and then as she grows up. Overlaid with Igbo, […]
Munmun by Jesse Andrews Allen & Unwin Imagine a world where physical size is directly proportional to how much money you have. In this Gulliver’s Travels world, the littlepoor are rat-sized and the bigrich are the size of skyscrapers. Difficult to imagine but there is a munmun scale at the front of the book to […]
Little Gods by Jenny Ackland Allen & Unwin Olive Lovelock has just turned twelve. She is an only child but her extended family, where her mother and two sisters seem to have paired up with three brothers, spend a lot of time together on the family farm in north-western Victoria. Olive is “willful, fanciful and […]
The Fortress by SA Jones In world much like our own that has never been affected by the #MeToo campaign, Jonathon Bridge has a good life. He has a top-tier job, a fascinating wife, a child on the way and a string of nubile young women or ‘poodles’ available for sex at his workplace. He […]
A Certain Light: A Memoir of Family, Loss and Hope by Cynthia Banham Allen & Unwin Cynthia Banham is an interesting person who grew up in Sydney and became a solicitor before moving to Canberra, where she met her husband Michael, as the Foreign Affairs and Defence Correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald. […]
Fool’s Gold by Fleur McDonald Allen & Unwin There are several stories that intersect in Fleur McDonald’s latest red dust mystery novel which is set in the Western Australia’s goldfields. Here, the red earth stretches for miles with lumps of quartz and ironstone promising that gold isn’t far away. The oldest story is […]
