Music and Freedom

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Zoe Morrison, Music and Freedom, $32.99

Reviewed by Heather O’Connor

Zoe Morrison has a broad and interesting background in music and in issues surrounding violence against women, two themes at the heart of this award-winning first novel.

Music and Freedom is the story of a young girl from country Victoria whose life is transformed when she wins a scholarship to Oxford to study music. Her early days there are marked by loneliness and overwhelming homesickness, but she gradually becomes absorbed in the life and culture, and seems destined for a … Read more »

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The Noise of Time

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Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time, $19.99

Reviewed by Heather O’Connor

I remember trying to read Flaubert’s Parrot years ago and vowing not to try anything by Julian Barnes again. Wrong. I have completely changed my mind – might even go back to it! Early this year I read his 2011 Booker Prize winner, The Sense of an Ending, and then picked up this latest book which I liked even more. It is an account of the life of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), arguably … Read more »

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Annie Dunne

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Annie Dunne, by Sebastian Barry, $19.99

Reviewed by Heather O’Connor

One of the greatest joys of my life is reading almost anything written by almost any Irish writer – and Sebastian Barry is in my top five favourites. Over Christmas I read Days Without End, and then found Annie Dunn. Set in the 1950s in Ireland, it could have been describing the lives of 19th century rural women. So little had … Read more »

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The Dark Flood Rises

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Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises, $29.99

I haven’t read any book by Margaret Drabble for years, so this was a bit of trip down memory lane. I can’t remember her being quite so “earnest” – I’ll have to re-read some of her earlier works. One reviewer of this, her nineteenth novel, remarked that people under 60 might not get much out of this book, but … Read more »

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Nutshell

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Nutshell
Ian McEwan                     

Reviewed by Heather O’Connorbook

I think I have mentioned before how excited I get when my favourite authors bring out a new book: here we go again! Ian McEwan has surpassed himself this time: the novel is short (200 pages) and can easily be read in one sitting—which I did. The narrator is his youngest ever—in fact, a third-term foetus. He’s described as a modern day Hamlet, who lies helpless in his mother’s womb, listening to her plot to kill her husband, the … Read more »

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Incest: Shhh, Keep it in the family

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Yasmine Bonner
Incest: Shhh, Keep it in the family

Reviewed by Sarah Gardiner


IncestStories of family dysfunction are, for some, new information. For others, reading Yasmine’s story will give the feeling of not being alone. Even the cover of this book contributes to its meaning: the face of a young girl with the title printed over her mouth. Silenced. The young girl is in fact Yasmine, herself, at eighteen years of age when she started … Read more »

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