When I told Julian that I would write this book, the first intention was that it should be about my grandparents, but we agreed that it should also be an exploration of Dominic's immediate forebears to discover what influences had made him what he was, and above all to discover what in fact he was. … Continue reading A Difficult Young Man | Martin Boyd #AUSfiction
Dream: I am at my mother's house, though it is also a mansion, and she is also a mother I never had but always wanted, the kind who knows and sees. I should be writing reading responses to several other books that I finished a couple of weeks ago, but I'm starting with the most … Continue reading Little Plum | Laura McPhee-Browne #AWWfiction
We drove home along the forest road, the trees like exposed bones in the headlights, trunks bending in over the gravel track. From the first story in the collection, 'River' Everything Feels Like the End of the World is a speculative fiction short story collection 'exploring possible futures in an Australia not so different from … Continue reading Everything Feels Like the End of the World | Else Fitzgerald #AWWshortstories
As I've been reading so many chunksters this year, novellas have proven to be the perfect inbetween palate cleansers. The current ones are both from 2022 and both new releases. One is from Australia and one is from Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid (on his website he says that he now spends his time between Lahore, … Continue reading #MiniReviews – the Novella edition
In her Preface, Louise Crisp describes her collection of poetry, Yuiquimbiang as an 'ecopoetic form that integrates political essay and environmental poetics: a project that evolved out of my double life as a poet and environmental activist'. The regions she writes about the East Gippsland and the Monaro. Crisp's poems and texts evolve from her … Continue reading Yuiquimbiang | Louise Crisp #PoetryMonth
And reports from Bairnsdale, in the Gippsland district, indicate that Mr Nils Desperandum, of Sarsfield, will have the largest crop of apples, this year, for miles around. - INTERSTATE WEEKLY. On a hot Australian morning I read the above advertisement out to June as we sat in the low-roofed kitchen of our old home in … Continue reading The Pea-Pickers | Eve Langley Part 2 #AWWfiction
Mr Books and I recently enjoyed a roadtrip through rural Victoria and NSW to visit relatives we hadn't seen for over a year. The journey between Echuca and Rutherglen allowed us to see two of the silo art installations popping up in various country towns across the two states in recent years. Jimmy Dvate has … Continue reading Parrots | Rex Ingamells #1936Club
One of the many pleasures of being a bookseller, is the insight I have gleaned into books no longer in print or hard to get. The pleasure part comes when enquiries by customers about said books, allows me to engage in some bookish research on their behalf. It is disheartening when I have to inform … Continue reading Book Stop #4
The performance at the heart of The Performance is a Samuel Beckett play, Happy Days. It was Beckett’s sixth play, written in response to his wife requesting something less depressing. I'm not sure he knew how to do that though. The play revolves around a central character, Winnie, a woman in her fifties. In Act … Continue reading The Performance | Claire Thomas #AWWfiction
Book Stop is an occasional meme that allows me to travel and indulge in a good bookshop or library browse, during these strange, strange times when it's difficult to travel outside our home state, let alone the country. I plan to combine my bookish instincts with my itchy feet and explore the world via bookshops … Continue reading Book Stop #3
My first illness was that one most common to the children of the poor...a bad education and, like the bite of a goanna, it was incurable and ran for years. Ethel Jane (Eve) Langley was born in Forbes on the 1st September 1904. After her father, Arthur died in 1915, her mother, Myra moved her … Continue reading The Pea-Pickers | Eve Langley #AWW
Oh, the existential angst! Remember when you were 22 and you had no idea what you wanted to do or how you fitted into the big, wide world and it all seemed overwhelming, sometimes exciting, but mostly this big, huge, void of trying to be an adult, that you had no idea how to fill. … Continue reading Loner | Georgina Young #AWWfiction
I find reading Helen Garner a curious affair. There's a real push me/pull me effect, that intrigues me and wow's me, then repels me all in the same sentence. I'm intrigued and wowed by her writing, the turn of phrase that captures a moment brilliantly. There's a candour and earthiness that seems grounded in her … Continue reading The Spare Room | Helen Garner #AWWfiction
This remarkable novel, first published to a chorus of acclaim in 1952, is one of the lost classics of Australian literature. Martin Boyd is a deeply humane novelist, a writer of family sagas without peer. Set in Australia and England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, The Cardboard Crown presents an unforgettable portrait … Continue reading The Cardboard Crown | Martin Boyd #CCspin
Text Publishing back cover blurb: Tom Hope doesn’t think he’s much of a farmer, but he’s doing his best. He can’t have been much of a husband to Trudy, either, judging by her sudden departure. It’s only when she returns, pregnant to someone else, that he discovers his surprising talent as a father. So when … Continue reading The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted | Robert Hillman #AUSfiction
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