For me, the quote by Franz Kafka at the front of the book – “There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation” – beautifully sums up what the book is about. The Scent of a Man is the second part of Pljeijel’s autobigraphy and roughly covers a …
In the beginning we feared everything – animals, the weather, the trees, the night sky – everything except each other. Now we fear each other and almost nothing else.
Gregory David Roberts
This is definitely no literary masterpiece, but it is an important historical document. Nicola, who was born in Romania at the end of the 1940s, writes about what it was like growing up, and eventually entering the workforce, in a communist country. After tertiary studies he worked for the Romanian Intelligence Service, hoping that it …
“Patriarchy teaches us that emotions are untrustworthy. One of the reasons we’re in a global situation of violence and anger, violence largely driven by men, is because men have not been given the tools to be honest about their own emotional lives.”
Brittney Cooper
This novel is about a man called Frederick Clegg, who takes his butterfly-collecting hobby to the next level. Lonely, uneducated, and somewhat strange, Clegg becomes fascinated by a middle-class art student, Miranda, and as though she is some rare butterfly he decides he wants to collect her. A large win on the pools gives Clegg …
This is a beautifully written book by a man who has spent more than five years on Manus Island, in Australia’s offshore processing centre – a centre that has nothing to do with processing and everything to do with punishment, humiliation, and the annihilation of the spirit. Arriving on Christmas Island, only days after the …
‘What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves – the music of our being – which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over decades, if it is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.’ Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time
This novel ticks most of the boxes within the crime genre. Apart from dead bodies, there are suspects, convoluted background stories, some love interest and a detective – Cormac Reilly – around whom the story evolves. It is easy to read, with sufficient twists and turns to keep the reader interested from the beginning to …
The story is set in a dye factory in inner Sydney in the late 1950s. It is about ordinary people facing the beginning of what turned out to be a tumultuous upheaval brought about by the time-and-motion addicts – an upheaval that unfortunately propelled everyone into an age where profit is the only goal and …
‘Whenever there is a waiting room, there is always a wall and a door, or some other kind of division, separating the now from the then.”