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 the life … 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 »
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 »
reviewed by Wendy Tucker
The Good Wife of Bath: A (Mostly) True Story
Karen Brooks
This is Karen Brooks’s fourteenth novel of historical fiction with a focus on women’s work, ranging from chocolate makers to brewers and bawds. Her novels have often been assigned to the romance genre and this does both the author and the novels a disservice and has excluded the wider readership they deserve.
But not so with The Good Wife of Bath that has been … Read more »
Emily St. John Mandel
Reviewed by Wendy Tucker
Emily St. John Mandel is a Canadian novelist and essayist now living in New York. She has written six novels and came to fame in 2014 with her post-pandemic, prize-winning novel Station 11, published and widely acclaimed well before the real COVID-19 pandemic hit the world. It has now been translated into thirty-three languages and made into a mini-series by HBO (available on Stan in Australia). Both … Read more »
review by Wendy Tucker
Black Cake
Charmaine Wilkerson
Black Cake is a delicious debut novel that shows how history and chance can change a family.
The actual black cake has a complicated history, as does Eleanor Bennett the main protagonist. The cake is dense with fruit soaked in rum for many weeks and finished with burnt sugar and is a Caribbean tradition for all celebrations. For many immigrants from the Caribbean, it is a continual reminder of home and … Read more »
