Australian writer Elizabeth Harrower published several well received novels in the late 1950’s and 1960’s. Her much anticipated fifth novel, In Certain Circles, was set to be published in 1971 when Harrower abruptly changed her mind and withheld it from publication. She essentially retired from writing shortly afterward. In 2014, Text Publishing was able to get Harrower to agree to the publication of In Certain Circles, a novel of post-war Australia that focuses on social class, trauma, and their impact on friendships and romantic relationships. […]
Where Men Are Men and Sheep Are Nervous
Fun fact: from where I live, it’s possible to drive just under a thousand kilometres and pass through eight different countries. Fun fact: this is roughly the same distance as between Sydney and Brisbane. And in Australia, those two are practically neighbours. Australia is mind-bogglingly big, is the point I’m trying to make. So is Bill Bryson in In a Sunburned Country, his report of a roundtrip through Australia in the late nineties. In fact, it is something of a recurring theme within the book: […]
Debut Harry Hole book is not bad, but contributes little to the Hole story at this late date
This is apparently the debut novel of Nesbo’s Harry Hole series, released in English only recently and after a whole raft of later Harry Hole mysteries were already long in the public domain in their English translation. While it is gratifying to learn that (1) Hole was once capable of a romantic relationship and (2) that Hole was once capable of having a whole conversation with someone, this novel doesn’t reveal a whole lot more about this morose if brilliant drunk of a detective except […]
For a while the dogs were the best characters, then things improved
This holiday season I had flights and time to kill at the airport. I loaded my nook up with easy things to read, since you never know who is going to be sitting near you and whether or not you are going to be able to concentrate on a narrative while amongst so many interesting sorts. While preparing I came across The Other Side of Us which I had downloaded, cheaply since that’s all I do with nook books, at some point in the past […]
A powerful indictment of the colonization of aboriginal Australia
An excellent novel about the seizure of aboriginal lands by pardoned convicts from the British penal colony in New South Wales in the early 1800s, The Secret River could just as easily be the story of the extermination of Native Americans in early 19th century United States, or of the Spanish conquests in South America, or of the European colonization of India and Africa. Grenville is an Australian, but her story is a universal one. She begins with a truly Dickensian tale of Londoner William Thornhill, […]
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