Joseph O’Connor fictionalises a true story from World War 2 in the first of a planned trilogy, My Father’s House. The tale revolves around the work of Irish priest Hugh O’Flaherty who used his position at the Vatican, a neutral territory within Rome, to help Allied prisoners of war escape. The tale involves the recollections…
Crooked Seeds by Booker-prize longlisted author Karen Jennings is a dark indictment of white South Africa and the legacy of apartheid. Centred around an irredeemably self-centred character, Jennings takes readers into a possible future South Africa while also interrogating the sins of the past. The opening of Crooked Seeds clearly draws on the recent South…
Katy Massey draws on her own family history as the basis for her downbeat and gritty debut crime novel All Us Sinners. The book is set in Leeds, in the North of England, in the late 1970s, during the reign of terror of the killer who came to be known and The Yorkshire Ripper, All…
American author Derek Miller has what can only be called an eclectic output. His The Girl in Green looked at the consequences of the invasion of Iraq while more recently, Radio Life was a post apocalyptic adventure tale. He has pivoted from this to a fascinating and moving piece of historical fiction, set in Southern…
Elizabeth Gonzalez James has crafted a fascinating historical tale out of stories from her own ancestry. The Bullet Swallower follows different generations of the Sonoro family linked across time from outlaw Antonio in the late nineteenth century to movie star Jaime in the mid-1960s. And in doing so asks the question as to whether family…
Balsam Karam’s The Singularity (translated by Saskia Vogel) is a quietly devastating book about displacement and loss, and the tribulations faced by refugees. It revolves around two stories of two very different mothers. In doing so, Karam is able to range across a range of experiences of people displaced from their homes. In what is…
In The Freedom of Emma Herwegh, author Dirk Kurbjuweit explores what for many readers will be a little-known period of German history. That is an attempted revolution led by a group of intellectuals following a failed French Revolution in 1848. Its focus is Emma Herwegh, the wife of a German poet and political agitator against…
American author TC Boyle has always been interested in the environment and its fragility those who seek to understand and protect it. From his 2000 novel A Friend of the Earth through to 2011’s When the Killing’s Done and 2016’s The Terranauts. Boyle’s latest novel Blue Skies also considers our relationship with the natural world,…
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 Pile By the Bed. pilebythebed.com/
Wolves of Winter is the second book in Dan Jones historical Essex Dogs trilogy which is following a crew of English soldiers in the early days of what was to become known as the Hundred Years War. The first volume, Essex Dogs, took the men from their landing in France to the battle of Crécy…
