Russell Banks leaves no quarter for comfort in The Darling, yet so controlled is his construction that it is not until the end that the reader allows the full awfulness…
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Young Willie Dunne is an innocent abroad when he goes to Belgium with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers to play his part in World War I. Like his compatriots, he is…
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Queensland Magistrate Cathy McLennan’s Saltwater is a fast-paced, thoughtful, riveting memoir of her early working life in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service in Townsville. McLennan grew up…
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How convenient it would be for many men who have wooed beautiful young girls to bed if they could dispose of them when their existence became awkward. In Charlotte Wood’s…
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Some of Sebastian Barry’s characters appear in more than one book and so it is with Roseanne, one of the two first-person narrators in The Secret Scripture. We have previously…
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A tantalising absence manifests in Miriam Estensen’s The Letters of George and Elizabeth Bass – not the disappearance of George, which is an enduring, tragic mystery, but the lack of…
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In his 1969 essay, Notes on an Unfinished Novel, the writer John Fowles proposed that Alain Robbe-Grillet’s polemical essay “Pour un nouveau roman” (1963) was “indispensable reading” for writers, “even…
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Religion, psychology, law and politics are all concerned with guilt. Literature, too, because guilt is often a by-product of conflict or betrayal or action and they are the staples of…
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He’s been called the critic’s critic, brilliant and sometimes great, the most-read critic, but the superlatives and exaggerations that have dogged James Wood since he began writing for The Guardian…
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The “tall man” appears as an agent of malevolence in Aboriginal stories all over Australia, Chloe Hooper reports in her account of the circumstances surrounding the death of Cameron Doomadgee…
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