Reviewed by Wendy Tucker
Heart the Lover
Lily King
Canongate
RRP$32.99
Heart the Lover has been shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and Lily King will be a guest at the Sydney Writers Festival. King is the bestselling author of six novels and the winner of several literary prizes. She is well known in the US but was, until now, not as established in Australia. I came to this novel with some … Read more »
Flesh
by David Szalay
Reviewed by Wendy Tucker
This novel of restrained, realist fiction is the winner of the prestigious and lucrative Booker Prize for 2025. Not unusually, it caused controversy with its extremely pared-back prose that follows the life of one man from adolescence to late middle age.
David Szalay was born in Canada to a Canadian mother and Hungarian father, grew up in London, lived in Hungary and is now based in Vienna. He … Read more »
Garnet
by Jennifer Severn
Vine Leaves Press
Reviewed by Wendy Tucker
Garnet is a new novel by local author Jennifer Severn. It follows her successful memoir, Long Road to Dry River which was shortlisted for the Finch Prize for memoir. An earlier manuscript of Garnet was shortlisted for the Viva la Novella prize and, now that it has been published, Garnet is a finalist for the Wishing Shelf … Read more »
Departure(s)
by Julian Barnes,
Jonathan Cape 2026
Reviewed by Sandra Renew
Julian Barnes’s latest book adds to his list of more than 20 well-regarded novels and non-fiction, including The Sense of an Ending which won the 2011 Booker Prize. He was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime contribution to literature in 2011 and the Légion d’honneur in 2017.
In Departure(s) Barnes employs an interesting narrative structure. There is detail of the changing relationships … Read more »
Fly, Wild Swans
Jung Chang
Reviewed by Wendy Tucker
This is the long-awaited sequel to Wild Swans, published in 1991 to worldwide acclaim. Wild Swans told the story of three generations of Chinese women, Chang’s grandmother, her mother and herself and interwove the modern history of China into these very personal memoirs. This was the first insight that most of the West had into the cruelty, terror and insanity of … Read more »
Local writer, Jen Severn, has a new book out in March – a novel called Garnet about a small country town peopled with eccentric, lovable, difficult, ordinary and extraordinary characters – and a few evil developers for good measure. This short novel (an early manuscript was shortlisted in the Viva La Novella Prize in 2022) packs the emotional punch of a much larger book. It is quiet but … Read more »