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Milly Main

Milly Main

Milly Main is a New York City-based writer and editor, originally hailing from Perth, WA. She was the 2012 ABR Ian Potter Foundation Editorial Intern.

Milly Main reviews 'The Lost Girls' by Wendy James

March 2014, no. 359 28 February 2014
Wendy James has been quite prolific since her first book, the historical crime novel Out of the Silence, was published in 2006; she has released a new book every couple of years. Out of the Silence received some accolades, but, excepting the broadly positive critical response to her fiction, James has flown under the radar since then. In her most recent novels, including The Mistake (2012) and Whe ... (read more)

Milly Main reviews 'The Shadow Year' by Hannah Richell

December 2013–January 2014, no. 357 01 December 2013
Shadows, shallows, tides, secrets, aching hearts, and tragedy. ‘The love and the grief and the joy and the pain and all the emotion’ – oh the emotion – in Hannah Richell’s new novel, centred around a secluded lake, can leave one feeling thoroughly water-logged. Richell’s close follow-up to Secrets of the Tides (2012) uses similar techniques to depict another troubled family that must c ... (read more)

Milly Main reviews 'What Was Left' by Eleanor Limprecht

October 2013, no. 355 27 September 2013
Our instinctual reaction to parents who leave their children is one of suspicion. ‘Child abandonment’ elicits such images as a swaddled foundling in the woods, a parent in a train station losing hold of her child’s hand and disappearing into the crowd, or an anonymous baby hatch in a hospital. The presumption is that a mother (fathers are usually spared this judgement) abandons her child bec ... (read more)

Milly Main reviews 'Harmless' by Julienne van Loon

May 2013, no. 351 28 April 2013
A drunken woman stumbles into a party where people are gathered around a bonfire, determined to give the baby girl under her jacket to its father. When he refuses, she seizes the baby by the foot and throws it into the air above the fire. The child is Amanda and this is her start to a life that will be informed by criminals, harmed people – the crushed, flawed, abused. The image of Amanda as a b ... (read more)

Milly Main reviews 'Fault Lines' by Pierz Newton-John

September 2012, no. 344 28 August 2012
In this collection of short stories from Pierz Newton-John, the author calls upon the suburban familiarity of a garden weed: couch grass, the fast-spreading pest whose rhizomes grow rapidly in a suffocating network, until the area it covers is ‘strangled’ and the custodian must ‘pull up the entire intractable tangle and start again’. This network of affliction that spreads throughout Newto ... (read more)

Milly Main reviews 'The Bedroom Philosopher Diaries' by Justin Heazlewood

July–August 2012, no. 343 09 July 2012
This volume from musician, writer, and satirist Justin Heazlewood (‘The Bedroom Philosopher’) collects seven years of touring diaries from a performer well known for maintaining an ironic distance in singles such as ‘I’m So Post Modern’ and ‘Northcote (So Hungover)’. These diaries aren’t so derisive, and greater meaningfulness counterpoints his characteristic satire. When he isn’ ... (read more)

Australian Book Review Online Edition

From the Editor’s Desk 26 April 2012
While the magazine (due tomorrow) is being printed, the May issue is now available to Australian Book Review Online Edition subscribers. After spending the past few days uploading this month’s ABR (with highlights including David Marr on Patrick White in Adelaide, and a review of Susan Swingler’s sensational family memoir on the Jolleys), I will be grateful to swap the pixels for ink and get b ... (read more)