Tag: book-reviews

The Bedside Bookstack – November 2025

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery, 4th Estate, 2022

Whoa, this one has so much going on. From a content perspective, there’s so much I’m still thinking about. Trelawney’s family migrate to the States from Jamaica at the end of the 70s. They settle in Miami but it isn’t easy. His brother was born in Jamaica and has an easy association with his identity but Trelawney is born in the states and doesn’t yet have an answer when people inevitably ask him, “What are you?’

From a craft perspective, it’s a really successful use of the 2nd person narration – so hard to do and so well done here. It’s also right up my alley with the semi-novel semi- story-cycle structure. I love the multiple voices you get from it and have no problem that it isn’t all nicely balanced out between the characters.

Sea Change by Gina Chung, Picador, 2023

This book took me weeks to read. I liked it but could only read a few pages at a time. I think it says a lot more about the time of year and the kind of year it’s been for me than the book itself which was an interesting read.

Aurora works at the aquarium her dad used to work at with a giant octopus called Dolores. This is a near future where Aurora’s boyfriend has broken up with her and become one of the first people to go on a one-way trip to Mars. Dolores is a mutant from a part of the Ocean called the Bering Vortex, a toxic rubbish area which Aurora’s dad was also studying. He’s been missing for decades now, last seen heading out to the Bering Vortex. So it’s all there, with a great premise and the requisite need to move on, grow up and address the rift between her mother and her.

Through the Rubble by Alan Playford, Big Sky Publishing, 2025

Alan Playford was my November Books at the Bowlo guest and he has, as they say, lived a life. He was instrumental in the creation of helicopter paramedicine and the Westpac Rescue chopper which we have today in the Hunter. He was part of the Newcastle Earthquake rescue and also spent time in Rwanda, Timor-Leste and the Solomon Islands.

It’s a sobering read about events which were headlines that you almost forget over the years. He’s very honest about the personal toll those experiences had on his life in relation to his own mental health and family life and is an advocate for better care for frontline workers.

We Need Your Art by Amie McNee, Penguin, 2025

I seem to need regular creative kickstarts. I get started with a routine and then life intervenes and it all goes off course and getting back on track feels that much harder. This book came along at the right time for me. McNee’s premise is that you need to have a coronation, crown yourself and simply give yourself permission to create and be an artist. She also believes that a creative habit is short amount of times continued regularly. Her reasoning is that there’s less pressure to create something amazing and more practice and actual creating.

I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s resonating as pretty realistic for modern life.

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The bedside bookstack –October 2025

Speak to me of Home by Jeanine Cummins, Tinder Press, 2025

I loved this multigenerational narrative of three Puerto Rican women from the same family who migrate to America. Their personal stories and experiences project the bigger cultural and political influences of their ages regarding gender, identity and race. Each of them – Rafaela, Ruth and Daisy have unique circumstances that both bind and distance them from each other. And running through it all is that ongoing question of what and where makes a place ‘home’?

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym, Virago, 1952

This novel about an unmarried woman in post-war London is rich with that arch wit which the British do so well. Mildred Lathbury is open about how society views women like her in such an honest way that it doesn’t feel self-deprecating. She’s ‘such a help’ yet completely forgettable. When the Helena and Rockingham Napier move into the flat below, they bring equal measures of glamour and drama with them.

I loved reading this book. I spent half of it wanting to highlight phrases and fold pages (but couldn’t cos it was a library book) because she just got it so right, feelings of jealousy and hope and disappointment. The other half I was just furious about these ridiculous men who don’t do anything and make sure to have ’excellent women’ around them so they can continue to be cooked and cleaned for. So infuriating. I was dying for Mildred to just say ‘No!’.

Air by John Boyne, Doubleday, 2025

This is the final book in John Boyne’s The Elements series. I loved Water and was absolutely destroyed by Earth and Fire but felt that I’d come this far and may as well brave Air.  And I’m so glad that I did. Whereas the earlier books may have had one or two characters or events overlapping, Air brings together threads from each of the previous books and turns them into something more hopeful. There is damage and consequence but also the promise of resolution and healing. Once again, he is the master of character voice. His first-person narrators come so fully formed and complete. If you have survived the horror of Earth and Fire, then at least allow yourself the balm of Air.

Little World by Josephine Rowe, Black Inc., 2025

Josephine Rowe pops up every few years with another collection of stories. She’s partway Australia’s version of Claire Keegan in that there’s a quiet space around her stories and a stillness to the narrative. They’re always moving forward but in such measured increments. This is more a story cycle than standard collection as they all brush up against each other linked by their proximity to the ‘incorruptible’ and non-decomposing body of a girl-saint who joins the narrative with her own thoughts.

Desolation by Hossein Asgari, Ultimo Press, 2025

This is a story about 1980s Iran. It follows Amin, his love and his family and how life continues after he loses his brother when Flight 655 was shot down. I’ve only just started this one and already it’s an insight into a time and country I know very little about, outside of headlines.

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The bedside bookstack – September 2025

Too soon by Betty Shamieh, Avid Reader Press, 2025

This book tells the story of three generations of Palestinian/American women. In 2012 Arabella wants to be known more for her art than her cultural heritage, almost at any cost. In 1975, her mother Naya, never wanted to marry and struggled with the motherhood that came with it and in 1963 her mother Zoya had to leave her homeland and an old love story behind. These women, fallible and flawed, and their lives tell the personal cost and inheritance of dispossession more than any historical or political commentary could and that was even before the current occupation of Gaza.

Labour of Love by Oceane Campbell, Pantera Press, 2025

Oceane was my guest for the September Books at the Bowlo and it was such a pleasure to complement the book with even more background and detail from our chat. This is a memoir of both her midwife and motherhood journey. We follow her as a student midwife through to the experienced practitioner she is today, concurrent with her IVF experiences.

She is a passionate advocate for respect and consent in the birthing space and shares stories of love and loss from her time in the birthing suite. I loved hearing about hospitals and the system from the inside. Lot’s of tears from me reading this one – happy and sad.

Frog – the Secret Diary of a Paramedic by Sally Gould, Simon & Schuster, 2025

Another health system memoir – completely by chance. This book also charts the journey from student paramedic through to experienced professional. Sally Gould’s father was a paramedic, so she grew up with all his stories. For her, being a paramedic is a calling but not everyone welcomes a young female who has come through the university system. She loves what she does but there’s a balance that needs to be struck between what she witnesses on-the-job and how to process it.

This was also compulsive reading for me. I just swallowed up the insider insight of her stories and it was interesting to reflect on my ambo interactions, having more detailed knowledge and context of the system.

Thanks for Having Me by Emma Darragh, Joan, 2024

I’m always up for short stories that can stand alone or work as a connected narrative. I also spend so much time reading British, Irish and American authors that it’s such a pleasure to read an Australian story which also has such a specific and detailed sense of place – in this case suburban Wollongong. Then you’ve got mothers, daughters and sisters. Yes, yes and yes. Coming of age, the darker corners of motherhood and the quotidian – all right in my sweet spot.

Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan, Hutchinson, 2024

Anyone who’s read the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy will be familiar with Kevin Kwan’s work – established money, new money and humble money try to get the balance right amidst the generational and cultural pull of those around them.

Rufus Leung Gresham is set to be the next Earl of Greshamsbury but the estate is bankrupt. His mother, a former Hong Kong model, wants him to make it right by marrying money but Rufus has just realised he’s in love with his best friend and neighbour, Eden Tong.

This looks big at 435 pages but was great fun and completely compulsive reading. I also have no interest or knowledge in fashion/designers, so just skipped all the bits where he lists what everyone is wearing.

The Matchmaker by Saman Shad, Viking, 2023

Saima is a Matchmaker. It’s her job. Despite being young and single, business has been good but some in the Desi community think her methods are too modern. Her cash flow is low when Kal’s wealthy parents offer her a slightly different job. She needs to convince him to use her services without knowing it’s his parents who set it up.

You don’t see Sydney much in novels and I loved seeing it on the page here from Bexley to Harris Park, along the Parramatta trainline, then dropping in to Ultimo or Gordon. Kal and Saima had great chemistry and this was a great insight into to the cultural complexity of being a third culture kid with home simultaneously in many places and none.

Signs of Damage by Diana Reid, Ultimo Press, 2025

When Cass is 13, she joins the Kelly family for a holiday in the south of France. In a dual narrative of that time and the present, we work towards an incident which some think shaped events in the present while others have a more complete picture. 

I heard an interview with Diana Reid when she’d just started writing this and she talked about wanting to examine the over-use of the trauma trope in fiction. If I hadn’t heard that, I would’ve thought maybe it was more just using trauma rather than examining it as part of the narrative.

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The bedside bookstack –August 2025

For Life by Ailsa Piper, Allen & Unwin, 2024

This is a memoir of grief and loss. Ailsa Piper loses both her husband and father and you’ll be left to wonder how so much loss and the life which follows, can read so beautifully.

After recently losing my mum, I’m not sure why I picked this up, if it was pressing a bruise or permission to feel and find common ground with others who are mourning. Reading it, there was the realisation again that life and loss co-exist, neither one of them stopping to respectfully give way to the other.

The Spare Room by Helen Garner, Text Publishing, 2008

Another memoir about dying. I wasn’t deliberately picking them up, I promise, but just like the parent-dying movies which came my way, I didn’t avoid them either. This is Helen Garner’s account of her terminally ill friend coming to live with her to do a series of dubious Vitamin C treatments which promise to heal her.

It’s Garner, so we know that no one will be spared from the truth of ungenerous feelings, how slow death can be, how caring for the sick can be maddening and how even in the face of mortality we can bicker and be our own human selves.

Fine just the Way It Is by Annie Proulx, 4th Estate, 2008

Apart from two satires about the devil which didn’t really land with me, this is typical Annie Proulx short story territory – the landscape is always there, never a bit player, constantly bending characters into and out of their own shape, the lives are small and often short and the writing is of course, sublime.

An Academic Affair by Jodi McAlister, Allen & Unwin, 2025

Sadie and Jonah have been at uni together for 15 years. There’s always been a rivalry between them intensified by his little rich boy status and her battler background. This amps up as their academic careers progress and they compete for the same few positions. Then a partner-hire position comes up in Tasmania and they could both have it if they can make people believe that they’re a couple.

This was as much about the current precarious state of universities as it was an academic romance. It was also a break from everything being so big and hard and assured like in the Ali Hazelwood STEM romances I’ve been reading – nothing wrong with that. It’s just nice to know that enemies can find their way to lovers even when they’re not an Alpha male with Adam Driver proportions.

Butter by Asako Yuzuki, 4th Estate, 2024

Rika is a journalist for a men’s magazine. She works hard and is determined to get an interview with Manako Kajii, the infamous murderer who is accused of seducing three men with her cooking and killing them. The pair initially start writing letters, discussing food and recipes. Then Rika starts to visit and have a gastronomic awakening.

As with a few of the other Japanese books I’ve read over the past few years, there is the constant and suffocating expectations and lack of opportunity around what kind of woman you can be. I wanted to love this. I wanted to support its critique of societal expectations for women and of course I wanted to join all the millions of international readers who turned it into a best seller but I kept falling asleep when I picked it up and never finished.

Her Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, Serpent’s Tail, 2017

A collection of short stories, some almost from a dreamscape. The back cover bestows a lot of adjectives – unique, original, genre-demolishing, sensual and wild. There was a particularly prescient story of a modern plague society which would’ve been written and published before we’d even heard of COVID 19.

I didn’t read them all. There was a bleakness and darkness that was too much for me right now. It seems I can do memoirs about death but not general societal sadness.

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The Bedside Bookstack – July 2025

Time of the Child by Niall Williams, Bloomsbury, 2024

Initially I got Niall Williams and Alistair MacLeod mixed up. I ordered this book on the back of my love for McLeod’s No Great Mischief. What a beautiful mistake. The writing in this is so rich you could lick it off the page.

This is 1960s rural Ireland where a lot is noticed but unsaid and the sudden appearance of an abandoned baby isn’t going to be a secret which is easy keep. The child of the title only appears at the midpoint of the book but it doesn’t matter, because you’re with these characters, the stoic Doctor Troy, his daughter Ronnie with a rich inner world and young Jude Quinlan who has had to grow up too fast in the shadow of a drunk father. Any journey with them is a joy to take. 

Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido, Bloomsbury, 1982

I only got a recent tip about Barbara Trapido but everyone else got the memo way-back. This edition had an introduction by Rachel Cusk who said it’s been in her mind since reading it at uni. I can see why. It’s sharp and witty and British in a Nancy Mitford or Brideshead Revisited outsider-falling-in-love-with-a-sprawling-and-vivid-family way.

It also spans the intense social and political change from the late 60s to 80s with a female protagonist who hasn’t quite realised the power she could now demand. The generations show how time has changed (or not) with the evolution of gender roles.

Here is the matriarch talking to the narrator, “I know all about these clever chaps like yours and mine you see. I know all about their nice impressive commitments to the rights of women and the division of labour, because they’re very good at articulating these things and it costs them nothing to say it all as nicely as they do…..Jonathan must mind that babe for you, either every morning or for four whole working days a week. Not as a favour mind, but as a necessity. Along with the shopping and the cooking and cleaning and laundry. Just as women do it. Make him earn the right to sit at his typewriter.”

Passing by Nella Larsen, Penguin 1929

This book charts Irene Redfield’s conflicted friendship with Clare Kendry. The two grew up together in Harlem but fell out of touch when Clare moved away. Years later they meet by chance in a hotel. Clare has ‘passed’. She is married to a white man who thinks she’s also white. This puts Irene in a difficult situation where she isn’t sure whether she owes her loyalty to her race, gender or friendship. Things becomes even more intense when Irene’s husband and Clare start to get along too well.

The internal psychological reflections in this feel so modern and the themes or race and identity land with as much relevance now as back when it was written in the late twenties.

The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood, Sphere, 2021

This. Was. Fun. (Lots). And exactly what I needed. It’s a grumpy meets sunshine STEM romance set in the Stanford Biology Department and anyone who’s spent time in academia will recognise the intense landscape of being a higher degree research student.

Olive Smith kisses a random guy in an attempt to convince her best friend Anh that she’s over the last guy she dated (and that Anh can now go out with him). The guy she kisses is Adam Carlsen, young wunderkind Professor who is great at what he does but notoriously difficult to work with. Cue a fake-dating agreement leading to real feelings.

How to be an Artist by Jerry Saltz, Hachette, 2020

Jerry Saltz was the chief art-critic for New York magazine. This book is his advice about how art can be for anyone. He uses ‘art’ to mean creative expression across disciplines and mediums. From his own artistic work to his years watching others, he shares what he thinks it takes to be an artist. This is a collection of rules, recollections, tips and exercises to keep going. I’m dipping in and out of this one, so can’t deliver a verdict yet about if this will make it into my go-to creative motivation books but it was on someone else’s, so we’ll see.

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The bedside bookstack –June 2025

Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane, Allen & Unwin, 2024

I avoided this for a while because the name and premise made it sound a bit true-crimesque, which isn’t really my thing. But its’ a story cycle, which is definitely my thing and it’s Fiona McFarlane who has a solid track record, so no surprises then, that it was great. The connection linking these stories is a fictionalised version of the Ivan Milat backpacker murders. Especially with the current popularity of true crime, I liked how these stories took the crime off the front page and exploded it into all of the lives, of real ordinary people, who were affected.

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout, Penguin Viking, 2024

Anyone who has read Elizbeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge or Lucy Barton books, can just pick this right up and start reading. You know what you’re in for. If you haven’t, you should still pick it up because Elizabeth Strout is the master of small town and big lives. They are big in the sense of being rich and complex like we all are as humans.

She likes to have a central character/s moving things forward while stepping into all of these other lives along the way, reading sometimes more like a story cycle than novel – which is fine by me as you probably know by now.

Bob Burgess and Lucy Barton are good friends. They regularly take long walks together and talk for hours. Often they tell each other stories they’ve been told about people they know or knew. It sounds gossipy but it’s more philosophical.  

Fire by John Boyne, Doubleday, 2024

I can’t recommend this book. John Boyne is a master writer. His female characters are impeccable. I loved Water to bits and pieces and it was actually my doggedness to see the ever-so-slight way the books in this series (Water, Fire, Air, Earth) refer to each other that kept me reading. Otherwise, I’d have to say it was too dark for me. The trauma and revenge and cruelty was just too much, despite being so well-written.

Earth by John Boyne, Doubleday, 2024

Unbelievable. I read this thinking it was going to be lighter than Fire but it’s about a rape trial and broken people and power. There is so little love or hope to be found that once again, I should’ve just stopped and left it. And now that I’m three books in, I’m too stubborn not to read Air.

Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg, Bantam Books, 1991

You may have heard me go on about Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and how it gets me fired up and back on track when me and the words have split ways. Or maybe it was the Writing Down the Bones Deck, where you pull a card every day and follow the prompt to get back into writing practice through low-stakes words on the page?

Wild Mind was written after Writing Down the Bones. It’s along the same lines but with an extra five years’ experience behind her. It’s full of practical exercises and suggestions. She’s a Zen Buddhist as well and her belief in cutting out the critic to get to the core of what we’re trying to write resonates with me, so this one is going to join my select collection of writing-book bibles, joining A Swim in Pond in the Rain by George Saunders, The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maas and Writing down the Bones.

Thunder and Lightning by Natalie Goldberg, Bantam Books, 2000

I’ve been in bed with a cold for a few days. Usually, I can’t read when I’m sick and tired but Wild Mind was so compulsive for me that I went straight to another Natalie Goldberg book. I read it but this one has left me a bit deflated and adrift.

Reading Wild Mind, I did think, ‘well all this writing practice and getting to the source of things is great but how do you then turn that into something more than 20-minute timed writing?’ What’s the secret to accessing that judgement-free flow zone when writing and editing a novel or collection of short stories or essays? I was hoping she’d have the answers. She did have some but she also had questions and seems a bit lost herself and I wasn’t ready for this person I’d decided would be my mentor to suddenly have clay-feet and the same doubts as the rest of us. She’s been writing for years, she’s a Zen Buddhist, if she’s still unsure that makes things mighty wobbly for the rest of us.

If you want to keep her a hero/mentor then leave this one and stick to Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind.

Pictures of You by Emma Grey, Penguin, 2024

Evie Hudson has just lost her husband in a car crash. When she wakes up in hospital, she thinks she’s 16 and can’t remember that she was even married. The people who once mattered to her aren’t even in her phone anymore.

She bumps into her old best friend Drew at her husband’s funeral, not knowing who he is, she asks for a lift out of there and then for help in trying to find her parents. We find out what happened over the past 14 years between Evie and everyone, including Drew who’s torn between not saying anything or saying way too much.

I’ve been sick in bed for a couple of days and this was one of the books I was curled up with. It was the right read but could’ve been closer to a 300-page read than the 400 it was.

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The Bedside Bookstack – May 2025

The Burrow by Melanie Cheng, Text, 2024

Amy, Jin and their daughter Lucy have been a family caught on a loop ever since the death of baby Ruby. But then they get a rabbit and Amy’s mother comes to stay and the rub of company be it welcome or not forces them out of their stasis.

Set during the pandemic, lockdown feels like the perfect backdrop for a grieving family. Life already feels like it has no future just more of the same on repeat. This beautiful book is subtle and understated and the right read for me at the right time.

The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose, Allen & Unwin, 2016

You need to sit a moment with this one if you want to capture and contemplate the questions it raises about art and love, loyalty and self, amongst life’s other big questions. Arky Levin is a New York composer of nearly-great heights. His wife Lydia has a blood condition which leads to deteriorating health and eventually a stroke. Before she was completely incapacitated and moved into care, she made a legal provision for Arky not to visit her.

At the same time, performance artist Marina Abramovic is sitting for 75 days in MoMA for The Artist is Present. The experience of this both collective in the gallery and individual for those who sit opposite her connects disparate characters and leaves everyone asking their own questions about art and their own lives.  

I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson, Walker Books, 2015

Reading this absolute explosion of a books feels like you’re standing in the middle of a rainbow. It’s constant ka-pow and total absorption into the lives of twins Noah and Jude. Don’t think you’re too old for it because of the YA listing – first love, artistic agony, sibling rivalry and grief are timeless!

The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton, Granta, 2008

Whoa, give me a moment. This one is so cleverly plotted and well executed that I did have one of those, ‘Why do the rest of us even bother?’ moments. As if Eleanor Catton winning the Booker Prize at 28 wasn’t enough. This is her debut novel, published when she was 23 and successfully pulling off a premise which could easily not work.

The Institute is an elite drama school and every year their First Years put on a self-devised production. This year it’s about a teacher/student scandal at a local high school. The novel concurrently covers the fall-out from the scandal as well as the rehearsal process and you are never entirely sure what’s real and what is performance.

Love, just In by Natalie Murray, Allen & Unwin, 2024

Natalie was our guest for the May Books at the Bowlo and her debut contemporary romance was so much fun to chat about. What’s not to love about a little bit-of-friends-to-lovers set in your own city? As much a love letter to Newcastle as it is the love story between school besties Zac and Josie, this one keeps you turning the pages as the will-they-won’t they sexual tension ramps up.

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The Bedside Bookstack – April 2025

Dusk by Robbie Arnott, Picador, 2024

Ah Robbie! He just gets better and better. I read and loved his 3rd book Limberlost backin Feb and was lucky to have a fast follow up with Dusk. There’s still a mythic poetry to his words and his natural landscapes are a place of beauty and treachery. His characters, especially in this, are quiet. They don’t say a lot and they think before they do. As a reader, it created space, a wonderful silence in the white noise of daily life. What a gift!

Floyd and Iris Renshaw have a reputation gifted to them by their convict parents. Life has always been a struggle but they have each other. They decide to hunt a puma with a high bounty attached to it and are changed by both the natural world and the humans in it.

The Season by Helen Garner, Text, 2024

In her own words, Helen Garner describes her intention for this book, “Really I’m trying to write about footy and my grandson and me. About boys at dusk. A little life-hymn. A poem. A record of a season we are spending together before he turns into a man and I die.”

And it’s Helen Garner, so that’s what we get, quotidian moments turned poignant in her hands. How many people can liken the photo of an AFL mark to “twisting supplicants in a Blake print”?

My mum is dying. My children only ever had her as a grandparent and soon she’ll be gone, so there was a lot about the close grandparent/grandchild relationship that was hard to read for me here.

Everyone says it’s a book about much more than AFL (Australian Rules Football) which is true but I also think you need to have at least a slight interest in the game to get you to the end.

Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey, Penguin, 2014

This is such a clever premise. A narrator with Alzhemier’s disease tries to solve two mysteries. In current time, her good friend Elizabeth has gone missing. She is also trying to uncover what happened to her sister Sukey, who disappeared more than fifty years ago.

Anyone who is already living the looping memories and repetition with a loved one may want to do a bit of skim reading. I did. But the need to find out what happened kept me there until the end.

Orchid & the Wasp by Caoilinn Hughes, Oneworld, 2018

Holy moly! Caoilinn Hughes is also a poet and this is clear in the opening pages. The rich intensity of language is a total explosion. I could hardly breathe for the first pages, pulled into the vortex of her words.

I think it would be impossible to keep up that intensity for 340 pages. I certainly wavered as a reader. Sometimes I didn’t really know what was going on and I was too tired to go back and nut it out but don’t let that put you off. Read it just for what she can do with her words.

life’s not a paragraph by Rosemary Lewis, Catchfire Press, 2023

I talked to Rosemary about this memoir for the April Books at the Bowlo. It’s about the 15 years she lived in Hobart and ran a B&B, That’s obviously a simplification. There’s love and loss, new friendships and directions. It’s a story for now, with an older woman and younger man and a total re-invention of her life at 52 but this all happened in the eighties and she’s nearly 95, so it was especially interesting to hear her take on events with even more life experience behind her. The general gist is do it all – live life and just go for it!

First Name Second Name, Steve MinOn, UQP, 2025

Stephen Bolin has just died. His last request was that his sisters take him back to where he was born in far-northern Queensland. When they don’t, he makes the journey himself as jiangshi, a type of ghost-vampire. We meet his family through the generations from a Chinese gold-panner to Scottish ten-pound-Poms.

I’m not finished this one yet but my current realist leaning has a preference for the fascinating stories from his family’s past over the current wanderings of his undead body.

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The bedside bookstack –March 2025

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich, Corsair, 2020

This book is loosely based on Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who rallied the Turtle Mountain Reservation Chippewa Council and surrounding communities to stand against the US government’s 1953 ‘Emancipation Bill’.

The story is told along parallel lines following Thomas Wazhushk, the Night Watchman and his niece Pixie Paranteau who is searching for her sister who has left for the city but hasn’t been heard from. It’s Louise Erdrich, and a good story is always safe in her hands, so it’s a rich read in both form and content.

Bunny by Mona Awad, Head of Zeus, 2019

Hmmm. This one starts off whip-smart with our narrator’s arch observations of her teachers and fellow classmates at a prestigious arts college hitting just the right notes. But as things continued it felt like one of those movies where the preview is better than the movie.

It’s dark, satirical and subversive but after 200 hundred odd pages of Stepford-wifesque sorority girls creating perfect men from fluffy rabbits, it was just too OTT. I know, probably the point.

The End and Everything Before It by Finegan Kruckemeyer, Text, 2024

This debut reads like fable with its magic realist jumps in time and its looping in on itself as we revisit the same hill and stretch of coastline again and again seeing how the people slot into place before and after each other.

There is a building on the hill which was a prison and then a hospital, an orphanage and then knocked down and reforested. We meet an occupant from each iteration and see how their heart and hope changed things a little for those who came next.

You don’t have to have a dream by Tim Minchin, Penguin 2024

This very readable little number is an illustrated collection of three speeches Tim Minchin gave at various institutions and an introduction to each. He has so much heart and it’s all out on his sleeve here. These are words to reassure and guide creatives and I’d have to say that some of them came at just the right time for me.

Following the Moon by James Norbury, Michael Joseph, 2024

This is another book for conflicted creatives. It carries the message of ‘keep going’ and ‘it’s the journey not the destination’ through the simple illustrated story of a little lost puppy and the wolf who tries to lead her back to her parents by following the moon.

James Norbury also wrote Big Panda and Tiny Dragon, which has apparently sold millions of copies. I’m glad he’s found his audience because he also has a lot of heart and in our loud world it’s nice to see that there’s still room for quiet reassurances.

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez, Granta, 2021

These short stories are a walk on the dark side – hauntings, madness, missing children, abject desires and base behaviour. From Buenos Aires to Madrid, they’re always in the shadows where motives are suspect and it’s hard to find the light. A little heavy for my head at the time though, alas.

Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer, Canongate, 1997

I ended up in a state of sheer rage that I picked this book up for 5 hours worth of train trip. Geoff Dyer wants to write a book about D.H. Laurence, not just yet, maybe he’ll write a novel first. No. He’s definitely going to start the D.H. Laurence book. But he might do some notes for the novel before that.

On it goes, page after page, procrastinating through European cities and Mediterranean islands. I’m too busy dealing with my own indecisiveness and anxiety to relish reading about someone else’s in such forensic detail. It drove me mad and I jumped ship. Funny how some things can be such a miss. It came recommended with such high praise from a festival interview.

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The bedside bookstack –February 2025

Limberlost by Robbie Arnott, Text, 2022

This is the coming-of-age story of Ned West recollected over a lifetime. Ned lives on Limberlost, an apple orchard in a Northern Tasmanian river valley. His mother is dead and his two brothers are away at war. One sends letters, the other they have no news from. His father is silent and sister distant.

Ned traps rabbits and reams of escape on the boat their pelts will help him to buy. It’s always part myth with Robbie Arnott (but this one is a bit of a deviation from the magic realism of Flames and The Rain Heron) and the natural world is ever-present in all its mystery and majesty. By the end of it, you’ll want to lay your hands on the smooth grain of Huon pine and smell the spice of it, which is conjured in such great detail. For me this gorgeous read is his best book so far. I can’t wait to read his newest book Dusk.

Australian Gospel by Lech Blaine, Black Inc, 2024

This memoir is a reminder that love really does conquer all. Lech Blaine’s parent’s Lenore and Tom Blaine foster 5 children over their life time. All of these children become a permanent part of their family. Three of them are biological siblings. They’re the children of Mary and Micheal Shelley, Christian zealots who have also had one other child removed from their care. The Shelley’s spend nearly two decades trying to get their children back through any means including kidnapping, coercion, harassment, and stalking.

This is the story of how the Blaine family survived the Shelley siege but not without cost.

In Memoriam by Alice Winn, Viking, 2023

You’ll need a quiet moment as you read this to grapple with the pointless loss of life that war is, for everyone, on any side. And even those that live, aren’t necessarily surviving.

This is a beautiful heartbreaking book about a handful of boys from a prestigious British boarding school. They’re clever and cocky and charming and they are so so young. Two of them, are in love. As war breaks out some can enlist and others have to wait until they’re older. The details of their days and the emotional attrition of the front is so evocative and well written. I didn’t think I needed to read another war book but this one is something special.

Long Island by Colm Toibin, Picador, 2024

This is the sequel to Brooklyn. Again, it centres on Eilis Lacey. 20 years have passed since the love story from Brooklyn. She’s Eilis Fiorello now, happily married with two teenage children. One day a man visits to tell her that his wife is having her husband’s baby and that he’ll drop it off with them when it’s born.

Eilis has made a decision about this. She won’t have that child brought up in her family and she hopes that her husband Tony will come to the same conclusion while she goes back to Ireland to visit her mother. Everyone’s lives back there have continued, including Jim Farrell who she was briefly together with in the past.

I liked but didn’t love this one which was a surprise. Usually, I’m instantly in for anything written by Colm Toibin but there was a distance between the main characters which made it difficult to emotionally connect – which comes back to the question of characters and if they have to be likeable or not, or what it is you need to give the reader as consolation if they can’t latch onto their protagonist.

i want to die but I want to eat tteokbokki by baek sehee, Bloomsbury, 2018

I picked this book up because of the ‘runaway Korean bestseller’ exclamation on the front and because I wanted to know what tteobokki is. It’s Korean street food, a hot spicy rice cake.

Baek Sehee has dysthymia which is a state of constant light depression. This is a record of conversations with her psychiatrist over 12 weeks. I think readers of this probably fall into four categories; those who feel seen and heard that someone else is articulating what they are feeling, those who are fascinated with our own internal journeys, those who are trying to stay buoyant with their own baggage and don’t need to be reading about anyone else’s and those who are bored by the granular details of another person’s thoughts.

She’s Always Hungry by Eliza Clark, faber, 2024

This collection of short stories is clever and original. It’s a dark read. Its inversions and examinations take some of the worst that the modern world has to offer especially when it comes to gender relations and violence. It’s not what my head needs at the moment, so despite the writing and ingenuity, I didn’t get very far.

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