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Australian Fiction

Black Glass, speculative fiction with a sentimental edge, explores a nation controlled by an intrusive surveillance culture and subliminal social engineering...

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Darkwater by Georgia Blain & This is Shyness by Leanne Hall

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April 2011, no. 330

Darkness, both literal and symbolic, pervadesthese two recent books. Darkwater, the first Young Adult title by established writer Georgia Blain...

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Prime Cut sounds like the title of a glossy Hollywood thriller. Fortunately, Alan Carter’s début novel is a gritty and engrossing look at crime and racism in a small Western Australian town. Cato Kwong is a Chinese-Australian detective who has been working in the lowly ‘Stock Squad’ since a disastrous arrest some years before. In the novel’s openin ...

Having been ‘completely screwed over by men’, Libby Cutmore is on a self-imposed and inevitably short-lived ‘man-fast’. Although she loves her job at the (fictional) National Aboriginal Gallery in Canberra, memories of New York adventures with her friend Lauren (Manhattan Dreaming, 2010), and Libby’s own sense of exclusion now that her two closest ...

The final offering in Patrick Holland’s first collection of short stories is also its best.

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Gone by Jennifer Mills

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April 2011, no. 330

Writing in the Guardian late last year, Philip Pullman said this of what he regards as the dominant style in contemporary fiction: ‘What I dislike about the present-tense narrative is...

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Jane Sullivan’s novel, which was runner-up in the 2010 CAL Scribe Fiction Prize for a novel by a writer over thirty-five years of age, blends the powerful theme of ...

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Those Who Come After by Elisabeth Holdsworth

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April 2011, no. 330

Wirklich, ich lebe in finsteren Zeiten. 
(Truly, I live in dark times.)

When her mother uttered that line from Bertolt Brecht’s great poem ‘An die Nachgeborenen’, Juliana – the narrator of Elisabeth Holdsworth’s first novel – knew they were in for a hard time. Janna had returned to the Netherlands from Da ...

Maris Morton’s novel is the winner of the Scribe CAL Fiction Prize for 2010...

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Jessica Rudd’s fiction début, Campaign Ruby, is witty and warm-hearted chick lit set against a convincingly painted and disconcertingly prescient political backdrop.

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