The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides, is a fabulously twisty thriller that sent chills running down my spine and had me muttering more than one ‘Phwoar!’. Convicted of the murder of her photographer husband, famous painter Alicia Berenson spends her days locked up in a high security psychiatric hospital. Nobody knows why she killed her […]
contemporary fiction
Review: The Girls at 17 Swann Street, by Yara Zgheib
The Girls at 17 Swann Street, by Yara Zgheib is a heart-wrenching novel about Anna Roux who has been booked into 17 Swann Street by her desperate husband. 17 Swann Street is a residential treatment facility for patients with severe eating disorders. She is quickly diagnosed with life-threatening anorexia nervosa and her dangerous and difficult […]
Review: The Truths and Triumphs of Grace Atherton, by Anstey Harris
On finishing The Truths and Triumphs of Grace Atherton I dearly wanted to stand up and shout, ‘Bravo! Bra-vooo!’, clap wildly and whistle as though I were at an orchestral concert. But I would have woken up everyone in my house. So I settled for a mental fist pump instead. Grace Atherton inhabits the edges […]
Review: The Helpline, by Katherine Collette
The Helpline, by Katherine Collette is plain good fun. Set in a local council in one of Melbourne’s bayside surbubs, Geraldine is the unwilling newest employee on the Senior Citizen’s Helpline. It irritates her that some of the local residents seem to be calling just for a chat. It’s so… inefficient. The Helpline is somewhere […]
Review: Turtles All The Way Down, by John Green
I feel like writing a ‘review’ of a John Green book shouldn’t be a thing. Really there should just be a transmitted interruption to life everywhere that says, in big, bold black letters: JOHN GREEN HAS RELEASED A NEW BOOK. GO READ IT NOW. And yet, here I am. If you’ve been hiding under a […]
Review: The Girl on the Page, by John Purcell
The Girl on the Page, by John Purcell, is a highly entertaining, brilliantly written novel about the clash between popular fiction and literary fiction; 20th century and 21st century feminism; wisdom and youth. Amy is a twenty-something publisher and co-writer of the successful Jack Cade blockbuster franchise. She’s made squillions of dollars and has no […]