June–July 2019, issue no. 412

Ferocious grace

Felicity Plunkett on Nick Cave and trauma's aftermath

Calibre Prize: 'Floundering'

Runner-up Sarah Walker's personal essay on pregnancy

#MeToo: A reckoning

Zora Simic on #MeToo, a compilations of essays on the movement

Spring is here

Jack Callil on Ali Smith's new novel

Tell us your Favourite Australian Novel (since 2000)

And be in the running to win great prizes!

Ted Chiang's Exhalation

Lisa Bennett on the author's new collection of short stories

Welcome to the June–July issue of ABR!
Highlights include:

Ferocious grace
Felicity Plunkett on Nick Cave and trauma's aftermath

Calibre Prize: 'Floundering'
Runner-up Sarah Walker's personal essay on pregnancy

Spring is here
Jack Callil on Ali Smith's new novel

Bedlam at Botany Bay
Alan Atkinson on James Dunk's history of New South Wales

#MeToo: A reckoning
Zora Simic on #MeToo, a compilation of essays on the movement

The ABR Favourite Australian Novel poll
Vote now and win one of three great prizes!

Sign up to ABR newsletters

Ceridwen Spark reviews Sea People: The puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson

Ceridwen Spark

When asked to review Sea People: The puzzle of Polynesia, I thought it might be hard work – improving, but not necessarily fun. I could not have been more wrong. The book is a triumph. Exploring the remarkable history of Polynesian migration to the ‘vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island’, it is magnificently researched, assured, and elegant ...

Gabriel García Ochoa reviews Homeland by Fernando Aramburu, translated by Alfred MacAdam

Gabriel García Ochoa

ETA, a terrorist group formed in the late 1950s, was predominantly active in the Basque Country. Its name is an acronym in Basque for ‘Euskadi Ta Askatasuna’, which means ‘Basque Country and Freedom’. Fernando Aramburu’s Homeland is not the first novel to deal with the decades of ETA’s terror ...

Epiphany: 'Braving Glyndebourne' by Robyn Archer

Robyn Archer

It was during the still relatively tentative explorations I was making into the world of international arts festival direction that I swallowed hard and made my first visit to Glyndebourne. I had lived in London throughout the 1980s, had performed there many times in various venues from the National to the Drill Hall to Wyndham’s in the West End ...

Free

Stephen Dedman reviews Eight Lives by Susan Hurley

Stephen Dedman

Eight Lives is a meticulously crafted first novel by Susan Hurley, a 2017 Peter Carey Short Story Award nominee and a medical researcher with more than thirty years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry. It’s an intricate thriller told in a multiple first-person style by friends, family, and associates of the late Dr David Tran, all of whom feel some responsibility for his horrific death ...