Frances and her partner Charlie have left their old lives to start over in Sydney. Coming from Melbourne, with its grid-mapped streets and dark, sensible fashions, Frances feels like an outsider in a city that yields to the natural landscape. On lonely spring days she takes her rescue dog, Rod, for long walks…
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New Zealand author Lloyd Jones seems fascinated by art’s capacity to bring men and women together. It’s a theme which drives his 2008 novel Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance in which the tango becomes a way to survive WWI. The idea also surfaced as the focus of his novel…
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In 1990, British heavy metal band Judas Priest were taken to court. Two young men from Nevada, James Vance and Raymond Belknap, shot themselves, and the parents believed the ‘reckless misconduct’ of the band members drove them to suicide. It was alleged Judas Priests’ album Stained Class contained the subliminal message to ‘do it’, which prompted the…
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Detective-Inspector Debra Hawkins is a steely, no-nonsense cop in Gabrielle Lord’s sixteenth crime novel. Debra is the head of new taskforce, RED-V, which targets domestic violence in middle-eastern communities. ‘Over the last few years,’ she informs her team, ‘We’ve discovered around one thousand incidents of forced marriages and attempted forced marriages here in Australia.’ As well…
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Lena Dunham: media darling, outspoken feminist, director of and actress in HBO’s Girls, and now, author. Not That Kind of Girl is a memoir, a compilation of twenty-eight personal essays that has set fire to a media storm. This is mostly due to the sexual content—at one point Dunham describes her seven-year-old self discovering sexuality via an…
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Death comes to us all; only the fortunate are allowed to grieve. Half the World in Winter is Maggie Joel’s second novel, which centres around the domestic life of a middle-class family in Victorian London. The patriarch of the family is Lucas Jarmyn, the only son and heir of a railway entrepreneur. When we meet…
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This collection is the ultimate in feminist poetry. Its breadth is mind-boggling, its vision grand. ‘Lupa’ means wolf, so Lupa and Lamb is the hunter and the hunted, the dichotomy of woman as dangerous seductress she-devil, and innocent bleating victim. These tired archetypes cross cultures and centuries. she is the lamb in the sheepfold…
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As Agent Dana Scully says in The X-Files: ‘It’s a good story, Mulder, and very well told, but I don’t believe it.’ Gillian Anderson’s debut novel A Vision of Fire, co-written with prolific author Jeff Rovin, spins a rocketing tale of political crisis, Norse mythology and the search for a lost civilisation. Child psychologist Dr…
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Tara Moss’ first venture into non-fiction, The Fictional Woman, opens with the day she chose to undergo a polygraph test to prove that she does, in fact, write her own crime novels. The writer has been marred for years by rumours that as a former model she couldn’t possibly write her own books, so when…
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Meg Wolitzer’s young adult novel Belzhar is the story of teenagers who have experienced traumatic events. Jam is sixteen and heart-broken. She can’t move on from the death of her boyfriend of forty-one days, English exchange student, Reeve. In an attempt to get her functioning again, her parents send her to boarding school The Wooden…
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Rural writer Maggie MacKellar has been through a lot. In her second memoir, How to Get There, she writes about the challenges she’s faced, and how she’s made her life anew. A historian, McKellar was pregnant with her second child when her husband committed suicide. Her mother passed away a short time later due to aggressive cancer, and McKellar…
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Bad Feminist is, like feminism itself, not just about one thing, one experience, or one kind of woman. Roxane Gay’s new collection of essays is difficult to condense into a single sentence. There are essays on the topics you’d expect: she deals swiftly and cuttingly with the ever-pervasive subject of rape culture; she writes lucidly…
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Close your eyes. Go on. Do it. Now what can you see? Nothing? Really? Look again. Can you see the computer in front of you? Yes – you can feel it there with your fingertips. Can you see your cup of coffee steaming beside your elbow? Of course – you can smell its bitter aroma…
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When I heard that there was another magazine on the market for women, I was sceptical. Why add to the celebrity-driven nonsense already being circulated on newsagents’ shelves? Womankind, however, doesn’t compare. Simone de Beauvoir’s face graces the front cover, painted by thousands of butterflies. Flicking through the pages, I was caught by an article…
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