Book

The Briny CafeBy Susan Duncan, Bantam Australia, $32.95. They say the best fiction writers draw from experience. So when high-flying magazine editor Susan Duncan left the hustle of Sydney to live in a house on Pittwater — accessible only by boat and built for Dorothea Mackellar in 1925 – it’s not much of a stretch […]

Tasting India By Christine Manfield, Lantern, $89.95. Sydney chef and restaurateur Christine Manfield has a special place in her heart for India. “On each and every visit, I surrender myself to the procession of life before me, as India begins to pulsate through my veins,” she says. This exceptional, lavish book is a visual and […]

Cain by José Saramago, Harvill Secker, $29.95. You know that Woody Allen film Zelig, about a man who inexplicably bobs up in the background at key moments of history? Well, that’s what Cain — the murderous brother of Abel in the Bible — does in this last satirical novel by Nobel laureate Jose Saramago. And […]

The Quarry by Johan Theorin, Doubleday, $32.95. The Swedish crime wave rolls on. The interesting thing is how good these books are; turns out there was a talented crowd banked up behind Stieg Larsson. And within the genre is emerging a sub-genre centred on remote islands; the winter locks them off, bad things happen there. […]

This is Di Morrissey’s 20th book, arriving 20 years after she published her first — though she’ll be selling a lot more copies, having spent those years building a strong and supportive base of readers. As the title suggests, The Opal Desert is set in and around Australia’s remote opal fields, in a small imaginary […]

Snowdrops by A.D. Miller, Atlantic, $19.99. In Moscow, a snowdrop is not a flower but a slang term for a corpse which “blooms” during spring when the snow melts and exposes the body beneath. A useful way to conceal a murder … This literary thriller starts as thirtysomething expatriate lawyer Nick Platt discovers his own […]

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles, Sceptre, $29.99. Take The Great Gatsby, throw in a little Breakfast At Tiffany’s, and mix it up with a whole lot of attitude in a cocktail shaker and you’ve got Rules of Civility, a sophisticated coming of age story set in 1938 Manhattan. Katey Kontent is a typist in […]

I Am Half Sick of Shadows by Alan Bradley, Orion, $32.99. Flavia de Luce may be a delightful innocent, but she’s well acquainted with murder and easy in its company. In her well-stocked chemistry laboratory in a wing of her crumbling family estate, neglected Flavia explores the fascinating world of poisons, while her older sisters […]

The Year After by Martin Davies, Hodder &Stoughton, $32.99. It’s 1919 and, still grimy with Flanders dust, Captain Tom Abbott returns to a strangely muted London. Before the war, he’d vowed never to return to Devon and rose-scented Hannesford Court, the home of the charming Stansbury family. Yet a yearning for music, noise and bustle […]

The Affair by Lee Child, Bantam Press, $32.95. Jack Reacher fans are wildly possessive of him and there’s a guerrilla reader movement against casting Tom Cruise in the upcoming Reacher film. Their passion prompted me to read my first Reacher novel, the 16th in the best-selling series. I got lucky with the chronology. The Affair […]