Author: Diane

Jag heter inte Miriam (My Name is not Miriam), Majgull Axelsson, Sweden, 2015

Jag heter inte Miriam (My Name is not Miriam), Majgull Axelsson, Sweden, 2015

On her 85th birthday, Miriam receives a beautiful bracelet from her family. It is handcrafted by gypsies and her name, Miriam, has been carefully engraved into the silver. However, she both amazes and disturbs her family when she announces that her name is not Miriam. Miriam’s thoughts revert to the 1940s, and we learn that …

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Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë, UK, 1847

Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë, UK, 1847

Agnes Grey, though fictional, is actually based on many of Anne Brontë’s own experiences as a governess in the 1840s, and if you consider children of today (i.e. twenty-first century) to be rude and undisciplined then this is definitely a book you should read. While Agnes Grey’s small charges are nothing short of horrendous, Brontë …

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Dead Right: How Neoliberalism Ate Itself and What Comes Next by Richard Denniss, Australia, 2018/2019

Dead Right: How Neoliberalism Ate Itself and What Comes Next by Richard Denniss, Australia, 2018/2019

As Denniss says in the beginning of his book: ‘The key question we must face is: what kind of country do we want to build? Do we want more coalmines, or more wind turbines? Better education and aged care, or lower taxes for high-income earners? Over to you.’ This book about neoliberalism (defined by the …

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Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton, Australia, 2018

Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton, Australia, 2018

This is an amazing, refreshing, perplexing, wonderful book where a thirteen-year-old boy, Eli, and his one-year-older brother, Gus (who has chosen not to speak), live in an outer-Brisbane suburb with a mother who is a drug addict, a step-father who is a drug dealer, a baby sitter who is a convicted murderer, and a father …

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Magician by Raymond E. Feist, USA, 1983

Magician by Raymond E. Feist, USA, 1983

Covering an overwhelming 841 pages, Magician – a fantasy – is a feat of imagination, planning, and realization. Feist’s management of the story, on many different levels and with a host of characters, is to be admired. Moreover, as Feist would have written it prior to the advent of the basic PC he would not …

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Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, UK, 2017

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, UK, 2017

On the cover, John Boyne writes ‘A masterful combination of humour and sadness’ – a statement that beautifully sums up the entire book. Eleanor Oliphant, thirty, lives alone. She has very little to do with the other people in the office where she works in accounts. She eats the same food every day, follows the …

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The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith, Australia, 2016

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith, Australia, 2016

Beautifully written, this book about a painting and a forgery is definitely worth reading. It moves seamlessly between three time periods: the seventeenth century, the late 1950s, and the present time, creating and retaining the suspense that holds the story together. While sketching the life of the fictional Dutch artist Sara de Vos and describing …

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Last Rituals by Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Iceland, 2005

Last Rituals by Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Iceland, 2005

A murder mystery set in Iceland and threaded through with stories of witchcraft and sorcery, Last Rituals is an easy-to-read page turner that is likely to have wide popular appeal. That said, the writing itself is nothing out of the ordinary, but whether this is due to Sigurdardottir’s writing style or to her translator is …

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Addition by Toni Jordan, Australia, 2008

Addition by Toni Jordan, Australia, 2008

Grace Lisa Vandenburg gets through her day by obsessively compulsively counting everything around her – the number of minutes it takes her to clean her teeth, the number of strokes to brush her hair, the number of steps between any two places, the number of sprouts on her sandwich. . . Everything must be divisible …

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