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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Although this is a German book, I read it in Swedish (hence the Swedish title in first place). Gudrun Pausewang was 17 when WWII ended in 1945, and this small collection of stories contains some of her memories of the Nazi period and its aftermath. In no way is this book a literary masterpiece, it …
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 …
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 …
If you only have time to read one book this month or even this year, consider reading A Gentleman in Moscow. This would have to be one of the most beautiful, most perfect books, I have read. The book revolves around Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the …
Bernard Cornwell’s account of what happened at Agincourt on the 25th October 1415 is overwhelming, to say the least. This is not a happy read: the descriptions of fighting, slaughter, and torture as well as the cold, the rain, the mud, and the hunger are all exceedingly graphic. Initially I felt that Cornwell was perhaps …