reviewed by Wendy Tucker
by Ben Aaronovitch
How to describe this novel, the first in a series of nine?
It’s a crime novel, a police procedural novel, a fantasy/magical realism novel,
a love letter to London and a commentary on race. And it’s rollicking good fun and totally addictive. I am a fan of good crime writing but not usually of fantasy.
Rivers of London is a cross … Read more »
Reviewed by Wendy Tucker
Sebastian Barry
Old gods’ time is ‘an expression indicating a period beyond memory’ and also applies to a memory from so long ago that it belongs in the time of the old gods, such as those of the Greeks. It is the perfect title for this novel that is all about the struggle with memory, what is real, what is imagined and what is too traumatic, too damaging to be allowed to surface.
by Robbie Arnott
Text Publishing
Reviewed by Wendy Tucker
This is the third novel from the Tasmanian Wunderkind, Robbie Arnott. Some readers may have been disappointed as Limberlost seems to be a departure from the previous highly imaginative, magic realism novel Flames, where people burst into flame. Also, a departure from the prize-winning The Rain Heron where a bird made of rain may save a dystopian world. I loved both these amazing novels – although they are far … Read more »
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 »
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
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 »
