Anthony Marra takes on Hollywood during the Second World War and much more in his latest novel Mercury Pictures Presents. The book delivers a broad cast of characters, each given a chance to shine, and visits some of the lesser known stories to come out of the War. The book opens in 1941, Mercury Studios…
Australian lawyer, journalist and comedian James O’Loghlin draws on his time as a legal aid lawyer in the 1990s as the basis of his new novel Criminals. The book revolves around three characters, connected by an armed robbery, an event which causes each of them to reconsider their lives and move in new directions. Dean…
Greg Woodland’s debut novel The Night Whistler was one of the many new voices in the last few years producing Australian rural crime that sets itself a little apart by also having a historical edge (see also: Matt Nable’s Still, Maryrose Cuskelly’s The Cane and Hayley Scrivenor’s Dirt Town). Set in Moorabool, a New England…
Australian journalist Paul Daley takes on his country’s past in his new novel Jesustown. Set mainly in a remote Aboriginal community in Australia’s far north, Jesustown attempts to tackle not only Australia’s history but the way in which we remember and record history. Patrick Renmark is in disgrace. The reasons for this become slowly apparent…
Australian crime and thriller author Megan Goldin never does the same thing twice. She started with a story of manipulation and gaslighting in The Girl in Kellers Way, moved to a more high concept thriller in The Escape Room and then tackled some serious issues in the slightly more procedural The Night Swim. While there…
Canadian author J.M. Miro’s Ordinary Monsters, a gaslamp fantasy with powered children at a secret school, an implacable enemy and an inimical other-world has plenty of obvious antecedents. But Miro has managed to spin these familiar elements into an enjoyable, tense and sometimes surprising narrative. A glowing blue baby is rescued from a train carriage…
There cannot be a better metaphor for the Cold War than the game of chess. But more than the metaphor, of course, was the very real rivalry between the West and Russia across the chess board. Both of these aspects are used to great effect by Patrick Worrall in his Cold War debut The Partisan….
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia seems determined to write a book in every sub-genre of science fiction, fantasy and horror. She has taken on vampires in Certain Dark Things, powers in The Beautiful Ones and the gothic tradition in Mexican Gothic. Now Moreno-Garcia takes on and reinvents The Island of Doctor Moreau, one of the slightly less famous…
Australian crime author Sulari Gentill is probably best known for her historical Roland Sinclair series. But as her 2018 Ned Kelly Award winning novel Crossing the Lines (also known as When She Wrote Him) showed, she is not above a little meta-textual playing around. In Crossing the Lines, a woman writes a crime novel in…
Up until now, award winning Australian author Chris Womersley’s novels have been stand-alones. And the same could be said about his latest novel The Diplomat. But it is a sequel of sorts – to his 2013 novel Cairo. Or if not a sequel then at least a companion piece or spiritual successor. And given it…
