Sunjeev Sahota’s 2021 Booker-longlisted China Room begins in the rural Punjab with a harrowing portrait of three very young Indian women confined in a tiny, dark living space called the &#821…

People from Oetimu came my way via a review from Stu at Winston’s Dad. Felix Nesi (b. 1988) is an author from Indonesian West Timor, and the novel is set there, on the western part of the isl…

This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books are my Favourite and Best, starts with I Want Everything by Dominic Amerena.  I’ve chosen the UK cover, different to the US one on Kate&#8217…

Longlisted for the ARA Historical Fiction Prize and the UK Walter Scott Historical Novel Prize, The First Friend by journalist, author and SMH columnist Malcolm Knox, is a black comedy starring Sta…

Aiming to complete one more post before #ShortStorySeptember ends, I was plodding through Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories when the Asian Review of Books popped into my inbox and with its very fi…

It might seem like excess, but I have three collections of stories by Isaac Babel (1894-1940): Collected Stories, translated by Walter Morison and with an introduction by Lionel Trilling.  Publishe…

Review for the second two Short Stories in “The Mysterious Mr. Quin” by Agatha Christie. Goodreads Summary: "A conjurer of skill with an instinct for detection, Mr. Harley Quin has an almost magical flair for appearing at the scene of the most remarkable crimes. But is it just a trick of light that haunts his shadow with a ghostly apparition?

Andrew Roff’s first novel Here Are My Demands is left-wing political fiction at its most forceful.  It’s speculative fiction set in a near-future Australia where there is government rul…

Joanne Fedler’s The Whale’s Last Song (2024) is a gentle fable that is perfect reading for our troubled days. I’m not sentimental about whales.  You won’t catch me hanging a…

Winner of the 2024 Penguin Literary Prize, Chloe Adam’s first novel The Occupation is historical fiction set in the aftermath of WW2 during the Occupation of Japan.  My response to reading it…

This collection of Southern African stories is an old one, and I have no doubt that any such collection published today would be very different.  Stephen Gray (1941-2020) edited the collection duri…

It’s been hugely stressful few weeks, which meant my reading has fallen off a cliff. I didn’t get to my final read for #WITMonth but I hope to at some point (Magda Szabo’s The Door, where the bookm…

Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016), the award-winning author of four novels including The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great Fire (2003), also published two short story collections: Cliffs of Fall and …

Although I’ve read a dozen books or more by David Malouf (b.1934), only half a dozen of them are reviewed here because I read the others before I started this blog. So it’s a pleasure t…

By coincidence, I’ve just read Colum McCann’s exploration of journalism wrestling with issues of truth and memory, and my very next novel is about the same theme. In some ways it also r…

My First Edition copy of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s 1944 short story collection Potch and Colour is a bit of a treasure.  Inscribed with ‘To Mother with love — Chris & Ben, 12-5-…