In Brief
Boat, pub, boat, pub, boat, pub: in the fictitious Western Australian fishing town of Stark, residents divide their days between these two brutally masculine locales, and ...
... (read more)Resolution is the loosely fictionalised story of Captain Cook’s second voyage, begun in 1772, in search of the mythological Great Southern Continent. Told through the eyes of ...
... (read more)Kate Ryan reviews 'Freeing Peter: How an ordinary family fought an extraordinary battle' by Juris Greste et al.
It seems appropriate in an account of justice thwarted that the name of journalist Peter Greste’s father is Juris. In 2013, Greste, an Al Jazeera journalist, was accused with colleagues ...
... (read more)Dina Ross reviews 'The Love of a Bad Man' by Laura Elizabeth Woollett
Throughout history, women have been seduced by men who are mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Many of the world’s most notorious murderers and con artists have attracted ...
... (read more)Sara Savage reviews 'The Near and the Far: New stories from the Asia-Pacific region' edited by David Carlin and Francesca Rendle-Short
At the 2016 Melbourne Writers Festival, Maxine Beneba Clarke received a standing ovation for her opening address in which she pushed for greater diversity in literature. ‘Something ...
... (read more)All thirty-three short stories in Michelle Wright's Fine echo the powdery residue and hairline fractures printed on the cover. Silt and grit and cinders: Wright writes of people navigating ...
... (read more)Christopher Menz reviews 'Australia: A German traveller in the age of gold' by Friedrich Gerstäcker
Formerly only known to historians and specialists, either in the original German or the author's abridged translation, Friedrich Gerstäcker's Australian travelogue (1854), based on ...
... (read more)Max Sipowicz reviews 'Mr Unpronounceable and the Infinity of Nightmares' by Tim Molloy
Mr Unpronounceable and the Infinity of Nightmares is the third volume of Tim Molloy's stories featuring Mr Unpronounceable, a modern-day shaman ...
... (read more)Barnaby Smith reviews 'The Bricks That Built Houses' by Kate Tempest
Kate Tempest's début is the expansion of a story she threaded through her 2014 album of protest hip-hop, Everybody Down. In its transformation to novel form ...
... (read more)The Sound begins with the memory of loss, of shorelines marked with blood, and the acrid stench of charred flesh – a massacre wrought by colonial men with guns ...
... (read more)