Gilgamesh by Joan London, Random House, $23.95. This is an oldie-but-goody, recommended with such enthusiasm by a fellow reader I felt I had to give it a go — and so enjoyed the experience I am now passing it on. Drawing on the epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s oldest known poem, it is both a […]

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Corsair, $24.95. “Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” As if anyone can stop the clock. This exciting novel, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, takes us on a wild ride across 40 years in the lives and loves, […]

Until Thy Wrath Be Past by Asa Larsson, Quercus, $32.99 The first chapter of Until Thy Wrath Be Past is so shockingly powerful, beautiful and terrifying, I forgot to breathe. It sat on the bedside table as I took a few deep inhalations before I could continue, but once picked up again it was only […]

A Decline in Prophets by Sulari Gentill, Pantera Press, $29.99. Travel back in time to 1932 and book yourself a first-class suite on the luxurious passenger liner RMS Aquitania, but take care, for among your fellow well-heeled passengers is an elegant ruthless killer. Also travelling the seas in style is wealthy young Australian pastoralist and […]

The Girl From Baghdad by Michelle Nouri, William Heinemann Australia, $29.95. Born to a wealthy Iraqi father and a beautiful Czech mother, Michelle Nouri experienced the best and worst of Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad and Communist Eastern Europe. From her spoiled childhood as her father’s princess to her grotty Prague flat, Michelle’s true life story has […]

The Book of Lies by Mary Horlock, Text Publishing, $32.95. Like many 15-year-old girls, Catherine Rozier has a flare for the dramatic and a loose association with the truth, so did she really, as she claims, kill her best friend? It’s 1985 and Catherine lives on the island of Guernsey, a place that suffered terribly […]

The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst, Picador, $32.99. Seven years after British author Alan Hollinghurst won the Booker Prize, his follow-up novel displays much of that playful quality of writing and engrossing acuteness of characterisation, but in a new world which spans several decades. This well-made tale starts just before the World War I and […]

Pictures Of You by Caroline Leavitt, Allen & Unwin, $27.99. There’s something rather satisfying about a book you can’t instantly classify, that can’t be neatly filed away as a romance, a mystery or an emotional drama. That is the very joy you’ll find in Pictures Of You, which magically combines all three. The tipping point […]

A Field Full of Butterflies: Memories of a Romany Childhood by Rosemary Penfold, Orion, $22.99. When Rosemary Penfold’s mother left her “gadje” (non-roaming) life to marry a Romany, who could not read or write, she never looked back. “We were her life,” writes UK-born gypsy Rosemary, now 73, who along with her three brothers, was […]

Boat People: Personal Stories From The Vietnamese Exodus 1975-1996 edited By Carina Hoang, Freemantle Press, $45. In 1979, Carina Hoang, then 16, fled her Vietnamese homeland with her younger brother and sister in a 25-metre wooden boat crammed with 373 others. They were part of the greatest mass exodus in human history as 1.5 million […]