Writer, editor & reader
This was such a good month for reading, I travelled back to Australia for Christmas and had a fair few 3am wake ups to read through, and after finishing the Wolf Hall trilogy I felt like I could tackle anything (except Middlemarch, which I’m circling. So many people love it. Maybe I should try audio?) … Continue reading Castles, ghosts, heart surgery, Paris
It took me a while to read Tim Winton’s most recent novel and I was surprised, actually, that it was published in 2017 and I still hadn’t got around to it… but that’s moving countries, a pandemic and a supply chain crisis for you. I would have stumbled across it in Perth at some point, … Continue reading A unexpected conversion in the Grunewald
A long time ago I became friends with someone because her partner was my then-boyfriend’s uncle. The three of them lived together in an old terrace house in Fremantle, and we bonded over our love of red wine, books and morbid humour. She was twenty years older than me, but we somehow clicked, and when … Continue reading ‘Leaping into Waterfalls’ and losing track of old friends
All the animals at Berlin's Anoha museum are handmade from recycled objects by various Berlin artists The cure for many ills, noted Jung, is to build something, and this is the epigraph and theme of Amanda Lohrey’s atmospheric novel, The Labyrinth (Text). It’s my second read by a Tassie author this month and further proof … Continue reading Amanda Lohrey’s ‘The Labyrinth’ and making things by hand
The word ‘mischief’ has always summoned up for me an unpleasant memory of being in the stuffy, bureaucratic waiting room of the local teacher’s union with my little sister as my mother went to another room for a meeting. Looking back, I can imagine her reservations about leaving us alone in the waiting room, and … Continue reading The History of Mischief by Rebecca Higgie
Sylvia Plath lived her short life at break-neck, ravenous speed – she was a star student who went from Smith College to a nervous breakdown to Cambridge University as a Fulbright Scholar, where she met her future husband, the poet Ted Hughes, then back to the USA and then to Devon and London where she … Continue reading Red Comet – The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark
Zoe Deleuil 