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The Valley of Masks by Tarun J Tejpal
Sometimes, literary prizes serve a very useful role in publicising books that have escaped attention, and it’s probably true that I would never have come across this remarkable book, The Valley of...
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The Anatomy of Wings by Karen Foxlee
My copy of this lovely book is the edition published by UQP and the cover (at left) is so much better than the overseas editions such as the Alfred Knopf (at right) or the Atlantic one (below) with...
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Please look after Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin, translated by Chi-Young Kim
Hmm, perhaps I should have guessed that an ‘international best-seller’ with a million sales in Korea alone would be a disappointment… I was about a quarter of the way through Please Look After Mom...
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The Lake, by Banana Yoshimoto
Oh no! I thought, as I turned the first page of Banana Yoshimoto’s novel, The Lake, not another dead Mom! I nearly put it aside there and then, but fortunately this book turned out to have a different...
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Loose, by Ouyang Yu
Having read a couple of somewhat shallow books, I wanted to be sure that my next venture would challenge me. Loose by Ouyang Yu had been on my TBR since the day I bought it at the Melbourne launch at...
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Memoirs of a Suburban Girl, by Deb Kandelaars
Memoirs of a Suburban Girl is not a memoir, it’s a novel, but the author has based this remarkable story on her own life experience and it is compellingly authentic. Wakefield Press released it in...
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Images of the Interior: Seven Central Australian Photographers by Philip Jones
I hope I’m not going to sound as if I’m spruiking for Wakefield Press, (because they do send me quite a few books for review), but really, if you’re interested in Australian history, you probably can’t...
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The Mish: Childhood Memories of Framlingham Aboriginal Station, by Robert Lowe
This is a very small book, only 80 pages long, but it packs a punch from the very first page. The first thing that I noticed was that although this is a book by an indigenous author, the family tree...
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War and Peace and Sonya, by Judith Armstrong
I’ve never seen a biography of Tolstoy in the bookshops, but now that I’ve read Judith Armstrong’s War and Peace and Sonya, I think I’d probably leave it on the shelf – I feel that I know quite enough...
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1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel
Of all the books longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize that I’ve read so far, 1Q84 is the most problematic for me. Unlike the rest of the Known World, I’ve never read Murakami before, so I can’t...
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