book reviews
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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?)
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It’s hard to explain what is meant by a distinctive voice in fiction – after all, every voice is distinctive in its own way. But when you come across a book with a strong voice, you recognise it immediately. My two latest reads are both ones I could ‘hear.’ The first, The Shepherd’s Hut by
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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 that the briney air of that island casts quite a spell on its writers. This one
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Reading is what fuels my writing, and possibly since deleting my Twitter account I’ve gotten back into it big time. Here are a few books I’ve adored recently. How to End a Story by Helen GarnerOof. Helen Garner’s account of her marriage breakdown to ‘V’. Beautiful writing, as always, and so much narrative tension I
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Thanks to Readings Books for adding The Night Village to their list of the best crime books of 2021 – their resident crime reader and bookseller Fiona Hardy (who is also an award-winning author) wrote a wonderful review of The Night Village for Books & Publishing right before it came out, which got it off
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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
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‘My dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you’re born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through Immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train’s pulled into Piccadilly Circus they’ve become a Londoner.’
Zoe Deleuil 