Showing all posts tagged: fiction
Common People, by Tony Birch
13 September 2021
Common People (published by University of Queensland Press, July 2017), is a collection of short stories by award winning Australian author Tony Birch. Other of his works, including Blood was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2012, while The White Girl, was named winner of the 2020 NSW Premier’s Award for Indigenous Writing.
Through this collection of short stories, Birch casts a light on facets of day to day life most of us don’t see, or prefer to ignore. Birch’s characters are mainly Indigenous Australians who may find themselves on society’s fringes because of health, race, unemployment, or addition issues. But their lot is not hopeless, as they strive to persevere and overcome.
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Australian writing, fiction, short stories, TBR list, Tony Birch
Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney
9 September 2021
Beautiful World, Where Are You (published by Faber/Allen & Unwin) is the third novel by Irish author Sally Rooney. Alice and Eileen are old friends who are young, but not that young. They often exchange long emails as they attempt to put the world to rights, and make sense of their love lives. Alice, a famous novelist, asks Felix, a warehouse worker, to accompany her on a holiday to Rome.
Eileen, a literary assistant, who lives in Dublin, has recently ended a relationship and has begun flirting with Simon, an old childhood friend. The two women haven’t seen each other in many years, so when they eventually meet face to face, they find their perceptions of each other – impressions generated by way of their email correspondences – are in sharp contrast to reality.
Oh to be a fly on the wall witnessing that meeting. Beautiful World, Where Are You has been published in two editions. The regular edition sports a blur cover, while the yellow cover book is a special edition hardback with a bonus short story. Another addition to the to-be-read list I think.
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books, fiction, literature, novels, Sally Rooney, TBR list
After Story, by Larissa Behrendt
8 September 2021
In After Story (published by University of Queensland Press, July 2021), the latest novel by Sydney based Australian author Larissa Behrendt, Jasmine, an Indigenous lawyer, is feeling rundown after an intense case. Della, her mother, meanwhile is struggling following the death of her aunt, and a former partner.
Jasmine believes it would do Della – who’s barely ventured beyond the small rural town where she lives – the world of good to go on an overseas holiday. An avid reader, Jasmine has always wanted to see the places where writers such as Jane Austen, and Virginia Woolf lived and worked, so they set off for England.
Jasmine has hopes the holiday will restore the somewhat neglected mother-daughter relationship. However the disappearance of a child in London’s Hampstead Heath, forces Jasmine and Della to relive the trauma the family suffered when Jasmine’s older sister vanished twenty-five years earlier.
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Australian writing, books, fiction, Larissa Behrendt, literature, novels, TBR list
Stories about ghosts that nurses have seen
29 October 2014
Image courtesy of Maximiliano Estevez.
I once spent a month staying at a hotel when I was somewhere or other, and every evening when I came in there’d be a young woman with straight blonde hair, sitting on the stairs. She’d always be engaged in a FaceTime conversation, speaking in Spanish, with, I came to notice, the same male.
I never saw her at any other time. Curious as to who she was, I asked the manager about her one morning. He looked blankly at me. He knew of no such guest, especially one who had been staying there as long as I had. Predictably, I never saw her again.
That’s not quite how things unfolded, and that’s not quite meant to be a ghost story, but I thought I’d tell the tale nonetheless.
Anyway to bookmark for later tonight… ghosts may well contravene the second law of thermodynamics, but these ghost stories, as told by nurses, may have you doubting the axiom that nothing unreal exists, for a spine chilling couple of minutes at least.
Originally published Wednesday 29 October 2014.
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