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I’ve never met Heather Mitchell, although we have quite a few friends, acquaintances and colleagues in common. I have, though, been aware of her more than 40 years, through her acting work in theatre, film and television. She’s always seemed to me to stand out, a luminous and beautiful presence in a truly impressive body […]

I haven’t read Robbie Arnott’s previous two books, Flames and The Rain Heron, magical fables that have won multiple awards. This novel, Limberlost, is very grounded and realist but no less magical for that. Ned is a teenager living in a northern Tasmanian orchard during World War II. His older brothers are away at war

It’s not often I give up on a book, but Major Labels has defeated me. The subtitle “A history of popular music in seven genres – Rock R&B Country Punk Hip-Hop Dance Pop” should give you a clear idea of what the book is about. The author covered rock and roll, hip-hop, and pop music

I don’t know about you but I grew up with quiz shows. I came to them after the heyday of radio but I’m old enough to have followed the first Australian TV shows. I can remember seeing Barry Jones make Bob Dyer roll his eyes on BP Pick A Box as he questioned yet another

I very much looked forward to reading this over Christmas, but I have to say I was a bit disappointed. Perhaps I should start by saying I wasn’t aware this is the third book in a trilogy about the Liberal National Government of Australia from 2013-2022 (although probably not planned as a trilogy). The Road

This is the companion novel to The Passenger. Where the earlier (by a matter of months) book was the story of Bobby Western: salvage diver, former race car driver, son of an atomic bomb scientist and person of interest to government agents – Stella Maris comprises 170 pages of dialogue between Bobby’s sister Alicia and

Ever since I was very young, reading has been a way for me to explore the world. As a child in suburban Claremont, Tasmania, books took me to parts of the world it never occurred to me that I could, or would, ever visit. For the Term of His Natural Life was probably the first

Well, this was different! Subtitled the beauty & the chaos, it’s an account of the time David Vee Rodden spent in Pakistan when his wife Drew “scored the job as Personal Secretary to the Ambassador of Belgium to Pakistan and Afghanistan” in 2003. This meant moving to Islamabad and becoming, for the first year at

I found this to be a bit of a mixed bag. I certainly couldn’t have picked a more different book to follow my recent reading. On the plus side, Waiting for Robert Capa is based on a set of real events that I found truly amazing. It had never occurred to me that the famous

Cormac McCarthy doesn’t have anything to prove. With 10 novels under his belt since 1965, one winning the Pulitzer Prize, another turned into a Best Picture Oscar winner, and a raft of other literary awards as well as enormous sales around the world, he already stands as one of America’s greatest living writers. Yet here