Reviews

From her superbly accomplished first books Tactics and The Problem of Evil, to this, her sixteenth book of poetry, Maiden’s style has evolved from bitingly tense portraits and narratives with echoing dialogues and soliloquies, constructed in heightened, almost visionary imagery, to a more direct quasi-conversational tone.

Estrangement and the quest to overcome it are at the novel’s core. It is about communion and connection, about the longing for others and to know others – family, lovers, the divine – and the hard work of living and of making the present while toiling over the stuff of the past.

Belinda Castles Hannah and Emil is prefaced by the story of Flora, a newly-pregnant Sydneysider. Flora receives a parcel containing a bequest…

It is, of course, possible to live by one’s principles, but it takes a superhuman effort to guard them from any taint of compromise and, as Joseph Anton demonstrates in excruciating detail, it inflicts a heavy toll on those compelled to share the burden of such unbending rectitude.

In Street to Street, Brian Castro resurrects Christopher Brennan in all his defensive, creative brilliance and personal and professional failure.

The critical response to Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds and Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk – both of which deal with the Iraq war – has been notable for its constant and desperate refrain that a ‘great novel’ should emerge from this conflict.

Here are stories that Drewe has not had time to tell before, others that he has told and which now reappear in fresh versions. Involved also is a persistent retrospect on his career, a process less nostalgic than it is interested in the fashioning of his reputation.

The Burning Library begins with an incendiary question: ‘Who or what killed Australian literature?’ The book investigates various possible answers before solving the mystery with the surprise discovery that the corpse may not be dead after all.

In a recent interview, de Kretser said, ‘I like three-dimensional novels that are like walking down a corridor and you find a niche in the wall or a door might be open and you can go into a room or peer in, and sometimes the door is closed but you know there is a space in there.’ Reading her work is an experience just like that.

MTC Cronin is a restless poet. Since her debut collection Zoetrope: We see us moving (1995) was published as part of Five Islands’s now defunct ‘New Poets’ series, she has released another seventeen books, including her latest offering The World Last Night.