Books

(courtesy Wakefield Press) Growing up, it’s often well nigh impossible to feel comfortable in your own skin. Things are changing fast, and figuring which way is up or down emotionally, socially and in a thousand other hugely challenging ways, becomes the stuff of exhausting everyday coming-of-age parkour-ing. It’s not as Continue Reading

(courtesy Allen & Unwin Australia) Romcom detractors, and honestly who stole your rose-eyed, happily romantic hearts and replaced with them stones, will tell you that once you’ve read one story in the story, you’ve read them all. But that dismissive assessment of an entire genre completely ignored the fact that Continue Reading

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) There’s a real joy to reading a novel by someone who wields their words not simply with artistry but with a sense of deeply affecting humanity. It’s easy enough if you’re a masterful writer, to make sentences and paragraphs and chapters that sing with the sparkling Continue Reading

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) It’s a constant feature of end-of-the-world stories that there’s a sizeable reckoning for any of the protagonists involved in the story; it makes sense – the world is about to go the way of the Dodo, life in all its forms is vapourising into nothing and, Continue Reading

(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) Imagination of varying degrees and intensity sits at the heart of all of the stories we read. Somewhere, somehow, an author has had the germ of an idea, a glimmer of a character, a snippet of a plot, and through hard work and a deft use Continue Reading

(courtesy Fremantle Press) We live in a society mortally afraid of death and so, when it someone we love dies, it’s expected that our expressions of grief will not be prolonged and will stay on socially neat lanes. Its a ridiculous expectation to have for a whole host of emotional Continue Reading

(courtesy Text Publishing) Have you ever been rolling along in life, thinking everything is okay and then woken up one day to realise you’re actually a bit player in your own life? In other words, if there were awards for your life, and why the hell shouldn’t there be, you’d Continue Reading

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) There are certain figures who are so intrinsic to a country’s modern identity that you automatically assume you know everything is about them. But as a fantastically imaginative and thoroughly clever new novel, Henry Goes Bush by Wayen Marshall, makes clear, that’s not always so. The Continue Reading

Figuring out who you are is one of the most monumental, and yes, challenging parts of growing up. It’s messy, it’s three steps back to one step forward, or at least it feels that way, and it rarely makes as much sense as we want it to; but if that’s Continue Reading