Edward Ashton has fun with a bunch of well explored science fiction tropes and throws in a little philosophy in his latest book Mickey7. The main character of the book is an Expendable, the one member of the expedition party who does all of the dangerous jobs as they are more versatile and it is…
Emily Brugman’s debut novel is based on the true story of her family – Finnish migrants who worked in the crayfishing industry off the coast of Western Australia from the late 1950s. It is, for the most part set on the wild Abrolhos Islands, famous for being the site of the wreck of the Batavia…
One of the pieces of advice often given to those looking to write their first novel is “write what you know”. Surgeon, public servant and art lover Michael Levitt has taken this advice to heart in his first novel The Gallerist. The Gallerist features a former doctor turned art gallery owner and a sometimes dangerous…
Lisa Ellery takes a risk in her debut crime novel Private Prosecution. That is to have a main character who, while his heart is sometimes in the right place, is not particularly likeable. Another is that the story that he is dropped into the middle of can be a little far-fetched. But as long as…
Paul Howarth’s debut Only Killers and Thieves was a confronting Australian-western that had at its centre the massacre of an Aboriginal community in late 19th Century Queensland. The book focussed on two teenagers, Tommy and Billy McBride, brought into this violent world following the deaths of their parents and sister and realising too late that…
Nobel Prize winning Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa has long been interested in Latin American politics and history. His 1969 novel Conversations in the Cathedral explored the dictatorship in Peru in the 1950s and his 2000 novel The Feast of the Goat is about the assassination of Dominican strongman Rafael Trujillo. Which brings us all…
Everything Korean seems to be raging right now – from Squid Game to K-Pop to Korean fried chicken and beer. But these things did not just appear overnight, And much like all of those examples, Korean crime fiction has been bubbling along in the background just waiting for the West to discover it. And there…
The rush to write apocalyptic narratives doesn’t seem to be slowing. Inga Simpson channels her experiences in the recent Australian bushfires and a dash of pandemic and wraps them up into something worse in her latest book The Last Woman in the World. Just the title is enough of a tip off that things are…
Back in 2007, Adrian Hyland won the Ned Kelly Award for best debut crime novel for his Northern Territory set novel Diamond Dove (since renamed Moonlight Downs) followed a couple of years later by its sequel Gunshot Road. Hyland achieved further recognition for his non-fiction account of the 2009 Victorian bushfires with his 2011 book…
The top 5 Honourable Mentions Robert Goodman For more of Robert’s reviews, visit his blog Pile By the Bed Robert GoodmanRobert Goodman is a book reviewer, former Ned Kelly Awards judge and institutionalised public servant based in Sydney. This and over 450 more book reviews can be found on his website…
