Published in 2019, The Trespassers is eerily prescient. The UK is in the grip of a deadly pandemic; its economy has collapsed. Migrant workers travelling to Australia by ship become increasingly wary of one another when an infectious disease breaks out on board, killing some of the passengers. Some recover, but the vessel is branded […]
Australian Novels
The Wife and The Widow by Christian White
Better than his last book. The Wife and The Widow still has White’s signature element of creepiness (taxidermy, anyone?) but is solidly written with a fiendishly clever twist. 3.5 stars.
The Lost Girls by Jennifer Spence
This beautiful Australian novel is about choices and the inevitability of loss. The protagonist, Stella, finds herself in the past and tries to change her daughter’s fate, but can she? Is it possible to save people from exercising their own free will? I’m not usually a fan of novels involving time travel but here it’s dealt with […]
The Mother-In-Law by Sally Hepworth
Diana is not the kind of mother who wants her children to be happy. She would rather they faced real hardship and became wise and resilient. It’s an admirable philosophy, but maybe not so easy to admire if you happen to be one of her children, or their partners. Though financially well off, Diana refuses to […]
The Children’s House by Alice Nelson
This beautifully written novel by Australian author Alice Nelson shows what good can come when damaged people take care of one another. Constance, a Rwandan refugee, disappears one Christmas, abandoning her two year old son with Marina, knowing she feels more love for him than Constance ever can. Marina lives in a large brownstone in Harlem, […]
Cedar Valley by Holly Throsby
Apparently Holly Throsby is a songwriter. It shows. Her sentences are peeled back, distilled to what is utterly necessary. Simple words say a lot. When the wife of local police detective is stomping around the kitchen, irritated and making lunches, “Simmons didn’t ask what was wrong. He didn’t offer to help her. He didn’t interact with […]
After the Darkness by Honey Brown
Wow, this is pretty darn awesome. A middle aged couple, Trudy and Bruce (such uniquely Australian names), happen upon a secluded mansion containing a gallery on The Great Ocean Road. They go inside and what happens inside effectively poisons the rest of their lives. Brown’s writing is mercifully free of cliche and conveys the horror […]
The Bus on Thursday by Shirley Barrett
The first two thirds of this truly interesting Australian novel are solid gold. Eleanor is a breast cancer survivor who’s not afraid to tell it like it is, and mostly it’s utterly crap. She is a woman after my own heart, combining a tendency to look on the darker side of life with an abililty […]