I was attracted to this novel because I had loved The Evening Chorus, Helen Humphreys's 2015 novel about a prisoner of war who maintains his sanity by observing a family of redstarts, a…

Is this it? Is this all there is? The men and women who populate Sue Mell's vital and exciting collection of stories, A New Day, are looking for the right experience and are always coming…

Leaving by Roxana Robinson is a novel about a marriage and the habituated assumptions made by its long term, well-off partners, Warren and Janet. When Warren falls in love with a woman…

I've now read two of Helen Garner's novels, The Spare Room, from 2008, her most recent, which I wrote about in my blog on 4/21/2024 and The Children's Bach, a 1984 novel republished…

How do you write about love? Anne Michaels, in her startlingly original and evocative novel, Held, does it by zooming in to a moment of intense and heightened awareness in the lives of six…

A friend, whose opinion I trust, raved about a novel she had just read called, The Children's Bach, by Helen Garner. My bookstore didn't have a copy available, so while I waited, I read Garner's…

It's hard to put down Margot Livesey's riveting new novel, The Road from Belhaven, because the troubles of the protagonist, Lizzie Craig, which are the enduring troubles of young women, are…

Reading Dominic Smith's new novel, Return to Valetto, is to be transported to Italy. My senses are filled with the pleasures of a foreign place and my mind is absorbed with a mystery that develops…

Witness, Jamel Brinkley's new volume of short stories, is as awe-inspiring and accomplished a collection as his first, A Lucky Man. Brinkley shares my shelf with the greats: Stuart…

I have long been a fan of Anne Enright's fiction and in her latest novel, The Wren, The Wren, the Booker prize winning Irish writer is her reliably intimate, earthy, sensual self. Told through…