Book Club

The Drop Michael Connelly Allen & Unwin, $32.95 You know you’re in good hands with a new Michael Connelly, the Florida-based crime writer, author of a couple of dozen novels, one a year since he started in 1992. His new one, The Drop, is another Harry Bo..

Cicadas They came to us from far away their older selves left like suitcases by the door. we crunched them as we trod to school or crushed the shells to crystal when summer broke above the small backyards and ..

Browsing in one of her favourite bookshops – Book Now in Bendigo – Kaz Cooke became absorbed by descriptions in old “ladies’ encyclopedias” about the complicated treatments for various ailments. “So many of them finished with, ‘the patient will..

Who would make the perfect Heathcliff? If you were given the task of casting the role of the rough romantic in Emily Bronte’s classic 1847 novel, Wuthering Heights, could you do better than Laurence Olivier from the 1939 film? A new adaptation of Wuthering Heights, directed by Andrea Arnol..

The talk before the announcement of this year’s Man Booker Prize, was all about whether the judges were dumbing down the most prestigious literary award in the world. Even with the announcement on Wednesday that the $77,000 prize goes this year to Julian Barnes for The Sense of an End..

The Little Refugee Anh Do and Suzanne Do Allen & Unwin, $24.99 It was Anh Do’s personality, his optimism and humour, that made his autobiography, Australia’s Happiest Refugee, such a popular book. Turning it into a book for kids might seem a bit opportunistic, an..

Distinguished British writer Julian Barnes has won the English-speaking world's most talked about prize, the Man Booker. Mr Barnes was announced as the winner at the gala event in London, finally taking out the top prize after four times on the shortlist. HIs novel, The Sense of an Endin..

Kate Grenville’S Sarah Thornhill picks up the story of The Secret River family who settle on the banks of the Hawkesbury River with vision to prosper and make themselves respectable. But, as readers of The Secret River know, along the way these settlers did things they wo..

I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there's a pair of us - don't tell! They'd banish us, you know. How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name he livelong day To an admiring bog! - Emily Dickinson ..

Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, 80, has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His poems in translation are published by Bloodaxe Books, translated by Robin Fulton: 2 am: moonlight. The train has stopped out in the middle of the plain. Far away, points of light in a town, fli..

An award-winning biography has had an error of fact corrected, thanks to the alert attention of a group of Castlemaine women. Margaret Reynolds was the half-sister of Manning Clark, who wrote The History of Australia. In a new biography of Clark, An Eye on Eternity, Mark McKenna writes ..

Cool Water Dianne Warren Allen & Unwin, $27.99 Canada has brought us some of the best writers, either born there, or who have gone there to live. Michael ONdaatje, Annie Proulx, Margaret Atwood, to name a few, all have connections with that vast country. ..

Allen and Unwin has announced that Brisbane-based author Kate Morton has now sold more than 6.5 million copies of her novels. This makes her one of the most popular Australian authors of all time. The Shifting Fog was her first novel, published in 2007, followed by The Forgotten Garden, and most..

Some writers mine their own family history from the start, but John Charalambous took 30 years and several books to confront his own childhood. The son of a Greek migrant and an Anglo mother, Charalambous was brought up in the solidly lower-middle-class Melbourne suburb of Hampton, which he ..

Readers recommend.... Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson (Sue, Bendigo) The Human Stain by Philip Roth (Mary, Eaglehawk) Life of Pi by Yann Martel (Jenny, Epsom) Middlemarch by George Eliot (Lee, Strathdale) The Solid Mandala by Patrick White (Jan, ..

WHEN you slump down into one of the four red couches in the foyer to browse a book, remember to say a quick thanks to the Friends of Bendigo Library. It is through sales of donated books and magazines that the Friends collected sufficient funds for not just the couches but also a dozen armchairs t..

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman Margaret Drabble Penguin, $39.95 Margaret Drabble is as far from the populist idea of a writer – someone who writes, whatever, whenever, for whatever purpose and comes to have their 15-minutes of attention in the bookshop, on the radio and television,..

I've had it with living in the plundered landscape of the collective CEO wet-dream. I'm going to live in Patrick White's dreamtime, Where cockatoos circle and screech anarchy, white against certainties etiolated to implausibility. Where, as a common courtesy, lovers excoriate each other before..

Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending Jonathan Cape, $29.95 On September 6, the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize will be announced: it would be shocking if Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending is not on it. Barnes is the perennial bridesmaid for the Booker, possibly because he..

What’s the best book you’ve ever read? Ask people to vote and you tend to get the latest best-seller, such as J.K. Rowling or Stephenie Meyer. If you judge by books sold, you get Dan Brown or Stieg Larsson. Wikipedia lists the biggest-selling book of all time as A Tale of Two Cities..