Non-fiction

The longer I spent with these essays, the more I enjoyed the connections Berry creates between humans and nonhuman animals in real life, their diffusion into products for human consumption, and their symbolism.

In these three books, mothers write back, documenting their personal experience and that of others, from the scientific and the sociological to the artistic. They all beg the question: is it possible to be successful both as a mother and do other things beside childcare and housework? In the act of writing, they answer as one, yes!

In permitting the reader ample space for introspection, Kofman’s narrator is as good a listener as she is a writer. And like any good listener, her role is not to leap to the rescue with answers or advice.

These days, I gravitate to strange writing – or writing, at least, that I perceive as strange. It has become the defining criteria by which I gauge my interest in a book and judge its qualities.

Your story is one of defiance and ongoing resistance, Ronnie. Every day you drew breath as a Black woman wearing a blue uniform you were resisting. You may have been required to walk in that world, but your bare Black feet never left our world.

Only now do we have a full-length biography of Gwen Harwood. And what a work of love and scholarship it is.

The legal professionals in Witness reminded me of one of the lessons I internalised in my very first class at law school: working within the legal system ­– as a ‘professional’ – requires you to push subjectivity to the side.

Here we observe the translator as a heightened inhabitant of her own world via someone else’s language.

‘The connection of figures of speech and figures of thought is not just a matter of technique, for Murnane; rather, it is meaning itself.’

While the reader can sympathise with West’s reluctance to impose his own ideas on the prisoners, where does this leave the debate around prison abolition and reform? And what validity, one is tempted to ask, do reform and abolition movements have if their agendas are not co-opted by those most affected?