Reviews

Jennifer Down’s second novel, Bodies of Light, is about Maggie, a child who is not told the truth, and so spends her life attempting to attach herself to things and people that seem true.

Christopher Raja’s memoir, Into the Suburbs: A Migrant’s Story, takes readers on several kinds of journeys: from India to Australia (and later, back again); from the city into the suburbs; from childhood through adolescence to adulthood; and from ignorance and naivety to understanding and acceptance.

Change Machine is an ambitious collection which has two standout accomplishments. One is its formal eclecticism and dexterity; the other is its contribution to Australian poetics in drawing on local vernacular and literary influence, and subjecting these to international currents.

At the Edge of the Solid World is a deliberately frustrating novel, as in challenging the assumptions of fiction, it withholds many of its expected pleasures – dramatized action, satisfying narrative closure, the revelation of meaning – and in so doing tears away its common, but illusionary, assurances.

Institutions perpetuate themselves and, being geared towards their own reproduction, they make it so that the incentives to complain are few, especially for those of us who want a future in the academy.

The First Time I Thought I Was Dying is at its most engaging when Walker lets her specific experiences raise larger, ethically knotty questions and resists the urge to answer them too neatly.

I closed the pages of Briohny Doyle’s Echolalia with a sigh of satisfaction at its beautiful construction and timeliness. The…

The vague terms ‘experimental’ and ‘avant garde’, which are routinely applied to Quin, convey something of her striking originality, but not the depth and perspicacity of her work.

Haydar links her personal tragedy to the myriad ways in which misogyny, patriarchy and racism hurt and harm, creating power dynamics within families that allow abuse to flourish.

Her vision and writing of the female experience is curious and expansive, conveyed as it is through these short fictions that take in the messiness of life and arbitrariness of death.