Welcome to our mega summer issue. Readers (and authors!) are always keen to know what our key writers regard as the ‘Books of the Year’. This year 26 critics nominate their favourite books – and tell us why they like them. They include Alex Miller, Brenda Niall,Kerryn Goldsworthy and Tony Birch. Nick Hordern reviews John Cantwell’s strikingly candid book Exit Wounds. We have reviews of new fiction by David Foster, J.K. Rowling and Christopher Koch; a short story by John Bryson; and a new poem by John Kinsella.
December 2012–January 2013 no. 347
Nick Hordern reviews 'Exit Wounds'
To go into any bookshop, if you can still find one, is to be amazed at the space devoted to militaria: endless shelves of books not just about the two world wars and Vietnam, but all wars in all times. This vicarious fascination with war echoes another phenomenon of o ...
Jane Goodall reviews 'Tales from the Political Trenches' by Maxine McKew
By its title, Tales from the Political Trenches promises reportage from the front line, eyewitness accounts of what really happens in the hidden zones of the political battlefield. The tales told here follow a rollercoaster sequence of political events: the meteoric rise of Kevin Rudd, Maxine McKew’s triumph over ...
Don Anderson reviews 'Lost Voices' by Christopher Koch
‘There is another world, but it is in this one.’ That is Paul Éluard, channelled by Patrick White as one of four epigraphs to The Solid Mandala (1966), a ‘doubleman’ of a novel avant la lettre.Other quotations appended to this story of Waldo and ...
'Patrick White to the Rescue' by David Carter
With the centenary of Patrick White’s birth being celebrated this year, it seems appropriate to highlight the great legacy that White left Australian writers in the form of the Patrick White Literary Award. On 16 November, the 2012 Award was presented to novelist, s ...
