What could be more exciting, exhilarating and adventurous than committing to working on every continent in the world before your thirtieth birthday? This is the goal New Zealander Hap Cameron set himself when he was twenty-one, after graduating from a marketing degree at university. He wanted life experiences, and to avoid the trap of falling…
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In Year 12, my English teacher set Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader as one of our texts. The Reader is set after World War II and a major part of the novel is a trial of an SS officer who is being tried for war crimes. Schlink is a crafty writer. He neither wanted to condemn…
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Barbara Demick tells the stories of those locked in to an unyielding series of bombings and sniper attacks in Besieged. I first became aware of Demick’s work through reading her award-winning Nothing to Envy. She provided an amazing and rare insight into the lives of North Koreans. I was excited to learn of her new…
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Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is a classic because it’s one of the first non-fiction novels ever written. In its essence, a non-fiction novel tells a story the same way a fictional novel would, the only difference being that the non-fiction novel is true (or at least, largely so). It’s kind of an extended piece…
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