It was Reading Matter’s post about Lisa Ellery’s second book, Hot Ground, that took me to her first book. This was a fast-paced murder mystery set in Perth. The central character is Andrew, a young attorney who works in the prosecutor’s office, called the DPP in Australia. He works closely with police, but despite that, when the murder of Lily, a young woman, is discovered, he...
I was drawn to this Australian book by Kim’s review that describes it as caught between a crime story and a romance. Although she made it perfectly clear that it focused on medical matters, I was nevertheless surprised by the intensity of the focus. The story is told by a woman with cystic fibrosis about her doctor and secret lover who was found dead near the hospital where she was at the...
This is another short book, an essay, really, in the Australian series Writers on Writers that took me back to books I loved. While there’s much in it about Carey’s life and all his novels, the focus is on his book True History of the Kelly Gang, the fictional account of the 1870s outlaw who is a heroic figure in Australia. The oppression of the Irish, which the British carried with...
When I read that Helen Garner, one of my favorite writers, had written a book describing the season of Australian Rules Football for under 16s that her grandson was playing, I knew I had a treat in store. One day she saw her youngest grandson with a football and realized he was almost six feet tall. She asked Ambrose (called Amby) if she could come to his practices. She explained to Amby she had...
Although I have long been a fan of the Australian Charlotte Wood, I hesitated to begin this one until I read Ron Charles’ enthusiastic review. I wasn’t sure I would appreciate a book with little plot and lots of musings, but I agree with Ron Charles, it is extraordinary. The narrator begins by describing a visit to a monastery she makes seeking solitude. We learn little about her life...
I came across this Australian book on Reading Matters, one of my favorite sources for Australian literature. The author lives in Western Australia, in Perth, and is a journalist who has written two non-fiction books, as well as two novels. Nessa tells us her story: she spends lots of time and money covering the scars on her face each morning but we don’t learn what happened until well into...
This is the second in the Australian series “Writers on Writers” that I have read. The first was about Tim Winton; this one is about Kim Scott, another favorite of mine. I did not recognize the name Tony Birch, though it turns out I read an essay of his in Anita Heiss’s collection Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia. In 2018 Kim Scott’s book That Deadman Dance was one of my...
The Australian Kate Grenville is one of my favorite authors; I especially love her books The Lieutenant, The Idea of Perfection, and One Life: My Mother’s Story. This one is a fictionalized account of her grandmother, Dolly Maunder Russell. In 1881, the year Dolly was born, a new law required that children remain in school until they were 14 years old. That is how it came to be that her...
Reading this book made me feel as though I were experiencing the fog of war, or perhaps the fog of an aging brain. That was especially the case when the focus was on the character who barely survived malaria, so I like to think that feeling was the result of skillful writing. This is my fifth Gail Jones book. Though the setting of the book was Salonika (now Thessaloniki) during World War I in a...
It was Kim’s recommendation in Reading Matters that took me to this book set in the mid-1980s in the Wheatbelt of Western Australia north of Perth. The town of Geraldton that is mentioned in Tim Winton’s great work Cloudstreet is nearby. The narrator is Rowen, the younger son of wheat farmer Bryce and his wife Justine. Rowen left the farm as soon as he could and as the story begins...