Finding The Heart of the Nation

Reviewed by Wendy Tucker

Thomas Mayor
Hardie Grant
This is a wonderfully engaging and inspiring book. Thomas Mayor travelled for over eighteen months with precious document, Uluru Statement from the Heart, tucked safely under his arm.
Mayor starts by sharing his own journey to Uluru. As a Torres Strait Islander, he grew up in Darwin on Larrakia land where he learnt to hunt traditional foods with his father and was taught dance by the Torres … Read more »

All the Broken Places 

by John Boyne 

reviewed by Wendy Tucker 

All the Broken Places is a sequel, of sorts, to the best-selling Boy in the Striped Pyjamas that, like Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, was originally published as Young Adult Fiction but both books quickly became best-selling novels in the adult fiction category and both were made into successful films. Both are set during the Holocaust of WW2. Both authors felt that Young Adult readers should know about the Holocaust and both were criticised by survivors for a too soft approach. That … Read more »

Agatha Christie – an elusive woman

reviewed by Wendy Tucker

Lucy Worsley
Hodder and Stoughton

‘Give a Christie for Christmas’ was the publicity slogan for Christie’s publishers in the 1950s and again in 2022 many received a Christie for Christmas with this new, detailed, very readable and extremely sympathetic biography by Lucy Worsley. Worsley is a social historian and television presenter and a televised series, based on her book, is currently showing on the ABC. 

In 1961, UNESCO declared … Read more »

Lessons     

Reviewed by Wendy Tucker

Lessons by Ian McEwan

This is Ian McEwan’s seventeenth novel and has become known as his pandemic novel and also his baby boomer novel (as much as I hate that term it is accurate here). Lessons is a meandering journey of a novel where McEwan returns to his beloved subject of the contemporary middle-class Englishman. And he does this so well.

We follow … Read more »

Bodies of Light

Bodies of Light
by Jennifer Down

reviewed by Wendy Tucker

This novel won the 2022 Miles Franklin Award and was short listed for the Stella Prize. Bodies of Light was praised by reviewers and compared to A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara and Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain so I was excited to read it but aware that it may be confronting.  Maggie has escaped her … Read more »

Cecile the Seal


by Christine McKnight

Reviewed by Georgina Adamson

This month, just for a change, we are reviewing a children’s book written by local author, Christine McKnight, a resident of Wallaga Lake where this story is set. Many will know her from the Cobargo Preschool. In creating Cecile the Seal, she has fulfilled her dream of writing a children’s book and we hope many more will follow.

The story is set in and around … Read more »