It took me about 60 pages to actually start getting into this book, and even then it was a roller-coaster ride. Putting all of this to one side (for a moment) the language and the visual images are very often unforgettable. Zusak’s descriptions of the Dunbar family, places frequented, things said fill each page with …
I read this book many years ago when it was first published (2009), and really enjoyed it. At the centre of the book is Allan Karlsson – the 100-year-old man of the title – who escapes from his nursing home in May 2005, moments before the celebration planned for his hundredth birthday party. Of course, …
Beautifully and passionately written this book focuses on two completely different working-class families, brought together by tragedy and fate. Covering twenty years from the early 1940s through to the 1960s and set mainly in Perth, Cloudstreet presents an array of unique characters, revealing their weaknesses, their hopes and their fears. Winton’s use of the working-class …
English translation: Ottilie Mulzet (All quotes in this review have been taken from the Tuskar Rock Press edition, published 2019) László Krasznahorkai was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2025. and as I had never heard of him I decided to rectify the situation by borrowing one of his books from the local library. …
At the end of her book, Mary writes: ‘Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information.’ Donald is the fourth of five children – Maryanne, Freddy, Elizabeth, Donald and Robert – born …
In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the …
Sally Carson, born in 1902, worked for a publisher in England and, in her late twenties and early thirties, spent her holidays in Bavaria, staying with German friends. An intelligent and observant woman, she was able to see the situation in Germany from an ‘outsider’s’ perspective; she could see what others could not, or refused …
In 2017, Peter Greste published The First Casualty; in 2025, with the successful launch of the film The Correspondent, based on The First Casualty, he republished his book (with many updates) as The Correspondent. A dual-nationality holder – Australian and Latvian – Greste, a journalist and foreign correspondent since the early 1990s, has worked in …
There is a film based on the book, but I am dubious that a Hollywood interpretation of this novella could possibly compete with Capote’s remarkable story. Set in the 1940s the story has at its centre Holly Golightly, who is 19 years old and who is described thus: ‘the ragbag colors of her boy’s hair, …
Towards the end of The Lost Life, Carroll’s first book in his T.S. Eliot Quartet, Miss Emily Hale says to eighteen-year-old Catherine: “We must grasp our moments as they arise (…) never, never assume that they will come back. People may come back into our lives, but not the time or the moment. And, in …