VIC contributor
The War Lords and the Gallipoli Disaster: How globalized trade led Britain to its worst defeat of the First World War by Nicholas A. Lambert
The Wealth of Refugees: How displaced people can build economies by Alexander Betts
Leadership by Don Russell & A Decade of Drift by Martin Parkinson
Lost in Thought by Zena Hitz & The Battle of the Classics by Eric Adler
Picturing a Nation: The art and life of A.H. Fullwood by Gary Werskey
Women vs Hollywood: The fall and rise of women in film by Helen O’Hara
The quiet had left me. That’s how I put it, but I meant Maree. Most of her cosmetics abandoned in a swollen-stuck bathroom drawer. Hydrators, anti-aging, complexion correction. Potions, I called them, like an old man describing a woman’s things. A few days after she left I tried them on myself, mostly for the smell of her. Of course they did not correct anything, did not make me beautiful, only streaked me to an unlikely shade – Maree’s – darker and more lustrous than my own. I accepted why she’d gone. She’d made a choice, and it was not the wrong choice – her folks old and susceptible, too proud to see it and too stubborn to budge. Bad reception where they are. Have to climb a hill to make a call. But she never climbs the bloody hill. And her emails, when they come, arrive in business hours.
... (read more)Is it tautological to describe a work of fiction as ‘family Gothic’? After all, there’s nothing more inherently Gothic than the family politic: a hierarchical structure ruled by a patriarch, as intolerant of transgression as it is fascinated by it, sustaining itself through a clear us/them divide, all the while proclaiming, ‘The blood is the life.’ Yet three new Australian novels Gothicise the family politic by exaggerating, each to the point of melodrama, just how dangerous a family can become when its constituents turn against one another.
... (read more)