Reviewed by Wendy Tucker
by Tony Birch
Tony Birch is an author, activist and academic. This is his fourth novel. He is best known for his award-winning novel The White Girl and his short story collection Dark as Last Night.
Women & Children has just won the 2024 Age Book of the Year for Fiction and will probably win more awards. It is set in 1965 in a poor inner-city suburb of Melbourne. Our protagonist is Joe Cluny, ‘a wide-eyed, eleven-year … Read more »
reviewed by Wendy Tucker
by Robyn Davidson
I eagerly read this memoir that has been 25 years in the writing. The name of Robyn Davidson was first heard in 1977 when a young woman was reported to be crossing the Simpson Desert from Alice Springs to the coast of WA. The photos that appeared in the National Geographic in 1978 were of a beautiful young blonde woman travelling across the desert with four camels … Read more »
reviewed by Wendy Tucker
written by Bruce Nash
This is the third novel from local author, Bruce Nash, and it has, deservedly, found a respected commercial publisher with all the advantages of overseas publishing and audio books.
Rose, who is our unreliable narrator throughout, is in her 80s, in a nursing home and has dementia. When Rose finds that her Scrabble partner has died by apparently falling from her window, she remembers other strange deaths … Read more »
Reviewed by Wendy Tucker
by Paul Murray
This is the fourth novel by Irish writer Paul Murray. It was short listed for the Booker Prize 2023 and won The Irish Post Book of the Year 2023.
It is essentially a tragicomic family saga set in a dull town in Ireland and told in four voices. Murray slips back though time, moving from each section though the mind of each family member as much is revealed … Read more »
Reviewed by Wendy Tucker
by Christos Tsiolkas
Christos Tsiolkas is the author of eight novels, he is also a playwright, essayist and screenwriter. He is best known for the international best seller The Slap and for his historical novel Damascus.
Christos and his partner holiday at Narooma and love the area. They especially love Cobargo and Well Thumbed Books, ‘… one of his two favourite bookshops in the world’.
Well Thumbed Books … Read more »
reviewed by Wendy Tucker
by Charlotte Wood
This is the seventh novel by the Australian writer, Charlotte Wood. The first novel of Wood’s I read was the multi-award winning The Natural Way of Things, a very disturbing, harsh and political novel. But brilliant. I eagerly awaited the next – a lighter, funnier novel but with a tough ironic bite, called The Weekend with five elderly woman as main characters. I was disappointed but most readers were … Read more »
