Crusader Hillis
The 2019 federal election result confirmed that housing prices, upward mobility, tax cuts, and limited immigration are powerful motivators for Australian voters. Peter Polites’s second novel, The Pillars, with its themes of social and material advancement in Sydney’s western suburbs, captures this spirit of the time perfectly ...
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‘Coming out’ stories remain one of the most potent sources for young people to understand their own relationship to sex, gender, and sexuality. Living in a largely heteronormative society, many young people find a place in these stories to validate and challenge their thoughts and experiences. Nevo Zisin’s memoir, written at the age of twenty, covers these areas but also speaks to those l ...
Peter Polites’s first novel is remarkable in its power to evoke growing up caught between conflicting cultural and sexual identities. It tells the story of Bux, a gay man haunted by his addiction to painkillers, his abusive relationship with his drug-dealing bodybuilder boyfriend, his violent alcoholic Greek father, and a childhood where his sexuality and his trad ...
Kings Rising is the final in C.S. Pacat's Captive Prince trilogy. Set in an invented world that evokes medieval France and Ancient Greece ...
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Mattheüs (Mattie) Duiker is a thirty-something gay man with a chequered past and an addiction to porn. His Afrikaans father, Bennie, is a self-made man, a larger-than-life uber-masculine traditionalist who has forever cast a shadow over his family. Bennie is dying from terminal cancer, and Mattie is his primary carer. Mattie, desperate to make something of his life ...
John Burbidge’s The Boatman was first published last year in India, by Yoda Press. Its moving afterword describes Burbidge’s return to India last year for the book launch and his attendance at an LGBT pride march there. Burbidge was struck by how strongly the cause of sexual rights had been embraced by other elements of Indian society who also face discri ...
Crusader Hillis reviews 'Lesbian for a Year' by Brooke Hemphill
Brooke Hemphill knows hers was not meant to be an ordinary existence, yet by her early twenties she is engaged and planning the perfect wedding – with the wrong guy. She breaks it off and moves in with a married man. He, too, is wrong for her. She works on an island resort and falls for another, but he takes off for Europe. She travels to the United States and works on a cruise ship. Life is a continual bender of booze and drugs, until she falls pregnant and returns to Melbourne.
... (read more)Crusader Hillis on 'The Boy’s Own Manual to Being a Proper Jew' by Eli Glasman
Eli Glasman’s début novel is aimed at a Young Adult audience, but should also enjoy a long life on adult fiction shelves. Seemingly based on Glasman’s own upbringing as an Orthodox Jew in Caulfield, a Melbourne suburb, the book is fascinating in its candid observations of the rituals, strictures, and arcane customs of Orthodox Judaism, particularly those of the Lubavitch sect, with its emphasis on outreach to non-observant Jews and its belief in the imminence of the Messiah.
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David Levithan’s latest book has proved extremely popular with adolescent and adult readers alike, particularly gay men who lived through the first wave of HIV/Aids. The main storyline, which takes place over a couple of days, centres on two gay teenagers, former boyfriends Harry and Craig, who set out to break the Guinness Record for a continuous kiss (more than thirty-two hours).
... (read more)Crusader Hillis reviews 'The Swan Song of Doctor Malloy' by Robert Power
The Swan Song of Doctor Malloy, a novel about addiction, compulsion, and recovery, is set within a fast-moving thriller. Traversing the worlds of health research, drug cartels, world politics, and corporations, it is a conspiracy novel that manages to stay just within the realms of credibility due to the specialist knowledge the author brings to the tale.
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