I really enjoyed Improvement, by Joan Silber. The writing is gorgeous, the characters are simultaneously unusual and everyday, and Silber’s tracking of the way small actions impact lives around the globe and back again is intriguing and masterful. But I have a small bone to pick. Improvement is marketed as a ‘novel’. To me, it’s not a […]
contemporary fiction
Review: The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides
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 […]
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 […]