Hot on the heels of his high fantasy meets urban fantasy meets noir detective debut The Last Smile in Sunder City, Luke Arnold has delivered its sequel Dead Man in a Ditch. Arnold returns to his post-magical-apocalypse world and in particular Man for Hire Fetch Phillips. Once again Arnold manages to deliver a pitch perfect…
The British crime fiction industry is a little obsessed with the elderly solving crimes. Going back to the seemingly doddering but sharp Miss Marple, through to more modern efforts like The TV series New Tricks. Fixed firmly in that tradition is Richard Osman’s debut novel The Thursday Murder Club, which features a group of retirees…
Australian author Hugh Mackay is very clear about his intentions in his latest book The Question of Love. The book’s subtitle is “Variations on a Theme” and even before the book opens, Mackay lets the reader know that the musical form of “variations on a theme” is his favourite and that this novel is his…
Kate Grenville continues her exploration of the early days of the colonisation of Australia in her latest book A Room Made of Leaves. This book purports to be the previously unseen memoirs of Elizabeth Macarthur. Macarthur has long been overshadowed in popular Australian history by her husband John, who is widely reputed to be the…
The publicity blurb for Kyle Perry’s thriller debut The Bluffs describes it as a cross between Picnic at Hanging Rock and Mean Girls. The hook is four teenage girls missing in the inhospitable landscape of Tasmania’s Great Western Tiers and the aftermath of their disappearance, coupled with a bit of horror-inspired local folklore. Whatever Perry’s…
Veronica Roth is best known for her popular YA Divergent series. Much like fellow YA writer Leigh Bardugo (Ninth House), with Chosen Ones Roth mas moved away from YA concerns into more adult territory. In doing so, she takes readers past the good-defeats-evil narrative of much YA fare into something more complex and with a…
Australian science fiction author Jeremy Szal’s debut novel takes a range of science fiction tropes, blends them together and comes out with something new. Stormblood is part military science fiction, part low-down cyberpunk adventure, part murder mystery, part space opera and part first person shooter. All of this in a rattling plot punctuated with plenty…
Australian science fiction and thriller author Max Barry goes the full Heinlein in his latest book Providence. Providence is military science fiction with a take no prisoners attitude. It takes readers into an ongoing war with an alien race but also questions whether humanity is really up to the task. The book opens with humanity’s…
There have been plenty of books and movies about pandemics. Given the current reality, if you want to read about a pandemic, it may be more satisfying to read about the more idiosyncratic, literary ones. For example, in Ling Ma’s Severance, people who succumbed to the virus found themselves endlessly repeating common tasks. But there…
Booker Prize winning author Aravind Adiga takes on the issue of refugees and asylum seekers, focusing on Australia in his latest novel Amnesty. Set in Sydney, on a day sometime in the recent past, the book concentrates on Dhananjaya Rajaratnam, aka Danny the Cleaner, as he grapples with his duty to society and his…
