Book Reviews – where are all the women? Stella Count paints a depressing picture.
For five years the nice people at the Stella Prize have been counting who receives (and writes) book reviews in Australia. No prize, even a stellar one, for guessing who does: men. Despite men writing only 28% of all Australian books published in 2015, books by men received well over half the published reviews. Men’s…
Georgiana Molloy: the mind that shines by Bernice Barry – Book Review
Georgiana Molloy is every biographer’s delight: an interesting woman who kept a diary. And yet, as is typical for many women who deserve a more prominent role in Australian history, her story is not well known. In Glasgow in 1829 Georgiana Kennedy (aged twenty-four) married army officer Captain John Molloy (aged forty-nine). Six weeks later…
An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire – Book Review
Australian writer Emily Maguire has turned the crime-thriller genre inside out in this compelling and insightful novel. It begins in the usual way: a beautiful, innocent young woman has been brutally raped and murdered in a small town just off the Hume Highway. But rather than the standard police procedural we might expect, Maguire tells…
Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske – Book Review
Q: When is a biography not a biography? A: When it is an exquisite memoir about researching and writing a biography. Englishman John Craske was a fisherman who became a fishmonger who became an invalid. He was born in 1881 and in 1917, when he had just turned thirty-six, he fell seriously ill. For the…