Books

This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025. Once upon a time, a certain reader devoured all of Agatha Christie’s novels in one roughly year-long go at the suggestion of his book-loving dad who saw the works of the masterful English crime writer as Continue Reading

This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025. We live in an age where endless self-empowerment and improvement have become dogma, the endless mantras of a world where you don’t stand still, you don’t stop and you don’t simply make do. It’s an endless Continue Reading

This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025. Every novel you read should, in some way or another, take you to a place far away from your own. Good or bad, this world should provide an escape from the everyday sameness of the life Continue Reading

This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025. A sense of belonging, identity and purpose is what defines us but what happens when it’s rent asunder and all we have are the vestigial rags of who we once were? That’s the great dilemma facing Continue Reading

(courtesy Hachette Australia) Back cover blurbs are written with a singular purpose in mind – to entice a reader, with thousands of reading possibilities at their bookstore-packed disposal, to pick a particular book and take it home to be read (or in the case of this reviewer, to be added Continue Reading

(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) In a great many seasonally redemptive romcoms, tragedy is usually just the curtain raiser to something good and wonderful down the track. Sure, the person’s heart is torn in two and terrible changes are wrought in the fabric of their life, but by and large, the Continue Reading

(via Shutterstock) I’m not going to sugarcoat – this has been a tough year. Not because someone died or my world imploded dramatically in some way; it just felt like all the pressures of work, which was ridiculously and unrelentingly frenetic, ganged up on me, to the point where I Continue Reading