Nicole Trope has been compared to Jodi Picoult, and it’s not an unfair comparison – both write about topical issues and from multiple perspectives, giving readers more to think – and talk – about. Here’s the blurb of her latest book, Blame: ‘I am here because they suspect me of something. I am here because…
Readers will enjoy a piece of Australian Gothic with Luke Devenish’s novel, The Secret Heiress. Here’s the blurb: A fabled house. A fabulous fortune. Beautiful, identical twins … Dark shadows fall across the golden summer of 1886. Naive country girl Ida Garfield longs to escape the farm. When Miss Matilda Gregory, the elegant mistress of Summersby House,…
Mad. In a good way. That’s how I’d describe Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All by Jonas Jonasson, author of The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden. Here’s the blurb: It’s never too late to start again. And again. It’s always awkward…
I minored in art history at university, so The Last Painting of Sara de Vos reeled me in easily. From the opening, where the fictional painting’s description is entrenched in the mind of readers, I was captivated by the fascinating story of this painting, and the impact it had on three key characters. While I’d love…
‘This is about three deaths. Actually more, if you go back far enough. I say deaths, but perhaps all of them were murders. It’s a grey area. Murder, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. So let’s just call them deaths and say I was involved. This story could be told a hundred…
Expect to suspect everyone in Running Against the Tide, the latest novel from Amanda Ortlepp (Claiming Noah). An undercurrent of malice swims through the novel, luring readers into its depths, and tossing up red herrings that promote suspicion and tension. When Erin Travers moves to the rugged Eyre Peninsula in South Australia, she’s leaving a life of…
Looking for a love story with a difference? I found that in Alex Brunkhorst’s novel, The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine. It’s described as a modern-day Gatsby with hints of Daphne Du Maurier. I wouldn’t go so far as the Du Maurier – it didn’t have that gothic gloom underpinning the mystery – but it…
The Secret Chord fleshes out the David I learned about as a child: the young boy who outmaneuvered a giant with a stone and a sling shot; the boy anointed as King, earning him the enmity of the presiding King Saul; a young shepherd who fought off lions and bears to protect his sheep. Geraldine Brooks’…
Kate Morton is one of my favourite mainstream Australian writers; the type of books she writes – gothic-style mystery with old houses and buried secrets – are my favourite. There’s something incredibly romantic about big old houses, once-beautiful but now tangled old gardens, yellowing letters, haunting secrets, ghostly apparitions … they put me in a…
The seed of the book that became The Patterson Girls, Rachael Johns’ first foray into contemporary fiction, came from a weed. As Johns tells it, the paddocks around the town where she then lived were covered in what appeared to be a beautiful purple flower. She soon discovered that the flower was an invasive weed…
