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…
Craig Russell is intent on exploring the idea of split personalities, or what might make otherwise good people do bad things. In his last novel, The Devil Aspect, set in a European asylum on the eve of World War II, the question was whether it was the devil, or some other malevolent spirit that possessed…
Damon Galgut’s ninth novel The Promise won the 2021 Booker Prize. Not having read all of the shortlisted novels it is hard to determine whether it was the best of the five. But there is no doubt that The Promise is a towering yet often intimate novel combining family drama and incisive character observation set…
Maggie Shipstead’s third novel Great Circle was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. And for good reason. This is a shaggy, great American novel spanning the last century but focussing on the golden age of aviation, stunningly written, full of rich characters and complex themes, fascinating situations, and plenty of resonance. Great Circle is built…
Australian author Hannah Kent burst on to the scene with her multi-award winning debut Burial Rites, a historical novel set in Iceland. She followed that up with a very different historical piece – The Good People, set in Ireland. In her third novel, Devotion, Kent comes closer to home, basing her story on the immigration…
Hot off his Ned Kelly Award win for the twisty crime novel The Wife and the Widow, Christian White dives deep into late 1980s suburbia for his third novel Wild Place. While his first novel The Nowhere Child travelled to America and The Wife and the Widow journeyed to an island off the coast of…
