Archive for category: Books

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 from what … 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 »