Burial Rites made me really glad I wasn’t a woman in northern Iceland in 1892. Unfortunately for Agnes Mognusdottir, she is. It is perpetually freezing and miserable in northern Iceland in 1892 and Agnes is condemned to be executed for her part in the murder of two men. The book details her final days, unwanted, living amongst […]
Australian Novels
Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty
Moriarty really gets women: “you never changed your appearance for men, you changed it for other women, because they were the ones carefully tracking each other’s weight and skin tone along with their own; they were the ones trapped with you on the ridiculous appearance obsession merry-go-round that they couldn’t or wouldn’t get off.” The […]
The Good Parents by Joan London
London can make poetry out the simplest things: “They say very still as darkness filled the room.” It’s such a pleasure to read her prose that it hardly matters what the story is about. The Good Parents does, however, contain a compelling mystery: the disappearance of eighteen year old country girl Maya, whose parents find her gone when […]
The Book Thief by Markus Zusack
This is one of those books everybody else seems to love more than me. Sure it’s interesting to have a book narrated by Death and there’s a lot of interesting parts in it, but somehow it just doesn’t move me.
The Hypnotist’s Love Story by Liane Moriarty
Hypnotist Ellen O’Farrell’s new love interest has a stalker. She finds it wildly interesting at first, but as times goes on it is less so, until she comes to fully understand the shocking damage stalking can do. At some point when reading this novel you will be shouting at Ellen’s new boyfriend to call the […]
The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty
Wow, what a can of worms. This is number five of Moriarty’s stand alone novels, and she’s just so humane and so good. She splays open the minds of women with such a gentle, delicious touch. No one is totally evil and no one entirely good; they’re just doing the best they can. Well worth […]
What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty
This is my favourite of Moriarty’s, along with Big Little Lies. Alice gets a bump on the head during gym class; when she comes to she has lost ten years of her life. Her brain has reset to when she was 29, in love with her husband, about to have their first child. In reality she is […]
The Light Between Oceans by ML Steadman
This one is a book club favourite for a reason. The what would you do storyline is deeply manipulative, but makes for a good discussion if you find it believable. It’s all a bit overwrought for my liking.