Almost a Mirror by Kirsten Krauth
Jimmy started making a mix tape for Mona for her 15th birthday, a blend of the pretty boy pop she liked and his edgier preferences. The song titles of that slice of the 80s head the short chapters of this arty debut novel that jump Mona back and forward in time from the starstruck girl she was to the woman she has become. There’s a Spotify list if you want to listen along as you read. But I didn’t need to. The musical cues dragged […]
The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
January is a tide-locked planet, one side permanently cold dark night, one blinding searing day, with human colonists clinging to precarious life on the narrow boundary. Outside of the human cities the monsters will kill you if the planet doesn’t get you first. Xiosphant is a socially rigid city state, forcing the endless twilight into an intricate regime of well-ordered citizens. “Everyone in Xiosphant was weirdly polite, just so long as you pretended all their made-up stuff was real.” Sophie is a student from the […]
Top End Girl by Miranda Tapsell
Miranda Tapsell is a proud Larrakia and Tiwi woman from Australia’s Northern Territory, growing up in Darwin and the small town of Jabiru in the Kakadu National Park. Her memoir is fairly light and breezy, but doesn’t shy away from the complexities of being a biracial Indigenous woman in a country and industry with a lot to learn about treating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and cultures with the respect they deserve. Miranda always loved to perform, but it wasn’t until Arrerente and Arabana […]
The MIrror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
“This is what Henry does. He uses people up. He takes all they give him and more. When he is finished with them he is noisier and fatter and they are husks or corpses.” Thomas Cromwell has given a lot to King Henry. The Mirror and the Light starts with the husk of Anne Boleyn being turned into a corpse so that the King is free to move on to sweet Jane Seymour. Cromwell has gotten rid of the wife he got for his […]
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
“People – and I’m no exception – seem capable of forgetting almost anything, much as if our island were unable to float in anything but an expanse of totally empty sea.” The Memory Police enforce the forgetting of the things that are disappeared from an unnamed island inhabited by an unnamed author. From time to time, the people of the island wake up with the restless knowledge that something else is gone and banish any contrary evidence from their homes, towns and minds. Things disappear, […]
The Fix by Nick Earls
The Fix is very much a Nick Earls novel. Set in Brisbane, with a side trip to the Gold Coast, and rich in textural detail of the inner city and West End. More up the serious end of his comedy-drama range, but plenty of humour for those who like their Earls funny. This time the misfit everyman protaganist is Josh Lang, driven home to Brisbane from London by the Global Financial Crisis. He still holds hopes of making it as a journalist, backed by a […]
