Jo Baker’s A Country Road, A Tree is an emotive novel that spans the World War Two experiences of Nobel Prize–winning author and playwright Samuel Beckett. On the heels of Baker’s bestselling work Longbourn, an homage to Pride and Prejudice, her second novel shines under critical spotlight. Samuel Beckett is introduced to the reader first…
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Ira Trivedi is the bestselling author of What Would You Do to Save the World?, The Great Indian Love Story and There Is No Love on Wall Street. Her latest book and first work of non-fiction is India in Love: Marriage and Sexuality in the 21st century, a landmark book on India’s new social revolution…
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Alison Whittaker’s debut collection, Lemons in the Chicken Wire, is a refreshingly authentic and accessible new addition to the Australian poetry landscape. The collection is grounded in simplicity yet explores complex issues such as sexuality, racism and family negligence. Whittaker, who received the State Library of Queensland’s black&write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship, also explores the history…
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This is a review of a session held at the 2016 Sydney Writers’ Festival. * It’s not often that you’re able to sit in a room filled with proudly self-proclaimed feminists, listening to a panel of admirable and notable female authors, thinkers and activists describe exactly why you should have the right to rule the…
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This is a review of a session held at the 2016 Sydney Writers’ Festival. * What is it that we find so fascinating about a reclusive novelist? There are plenty of writers who have attempted anonymity, with varying degrees of success: Harper Lee and Thomas Pynchon both spring to mind. These authors have chosen…
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This is a review of a session held at the 2016 Sydney Writers’ Festival. * When I first entered the room and upon seeing so many older women, I was unsure if I would feel comfortable as a member of the new generation of feminism. I wondered whether Gloria Steinem, a prominent 82-year-old American…
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Burnt Rotis, With Love is a bold collection of 54 poems by Prerna Bakshi. The collection deals with powerful themes of poverty, patriarchy, and oppression. Many of the poems focus on issues particular to India—Partition, the caste system, and the specific environment of Indian domestic life—but even these poems have roots in universally recognisable struggles…
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In 2000, Helen Garner was working on the story of Joe Cinque, a young civil engineer who was murdered by his girlfriend. She felt stuck—she had compiled long interviews with Cinque’s parents but had been refused any access to the two women charged with his murder. ‘I had no idea how to write the book,’…
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Australian writer Josephine Rowe’s debut novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal paints the portrait of the Burroughs family living in Melbourne during the 1990s. Written from multiple perspectives and presented in fragmented, often brutally descriptive prose, this book was applauded by writers Chris Womersley and Wayne Macauley respectively as ‘a novel of startling imagery and power’, and…
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As a lifelong book nerd, I like to think I consume a balanced diet of fiction novels. I grew up reading books by Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl. I went through periods of reading books set in India (Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy), America as seen by immigrants (Amy Lee) and the American south (Harper Lee,…
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W.H. Auden once said of Sigmund Freud that he was no longer just a person, but had become a ‘climate of opinion’. These days, it is challenging to think of many others in the public eye that merit this description, even with the effusive presence of reality television stars and the ever-growing relevance of pop…
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Since its first incarnation at Melbourne’s Trades Hall in 2010, Women of Letters has toured the world to sold-out audiences. Curated by Marieke Hardy and Michaela McGuire, its original purpose was to encourage women to read aloud letters set to a specific theme, directed at a live audience. It has evolved to include a Men of Letters variant and has several accompanying book anthologies, but the underlying principle remains the same: allowing a gathering of people to speak intimately without reservation. In From the Heart, the latest Women of Letters,…
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Sometimes, as a reader you’re lucky enough to chance upon a book that draws you in until you are so fully immersed in its world that it haunts you for days. Anna North’s The Life and Death of Sophie Stark is one such book. Indeed, the word ‘haunt’ is apt, as Sophie herself haunts the…
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There are two types of people in the world, according to Nicole Trilivas’s protagonist Kika Shores: those who travel, and those who don’t. Kika belongs to the former category: she enjoys the thrill of walking through a city whose name she can’t pronounce, and finding herself an alien culture with nothing but a well-worn backpack….
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