culture

As a frantic March rolled into an accepting April, sliding into a complacent May, the “apocalypse”, now boring, has disappeared into June. The “new normal” became old in the time it took to say the phrase; in supermarket aisles, I’m the only person...

Rodham starts with an epigraph from Hillary Clinton’s 2017 memoir, What Happened . “My marriage to Bill Clinton was the most consequential decision of my life. I said no the first two times he asked me. But the third time, I said yes. And I’d do it...

Not to be confused with Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece, John Martinkus’s book nonetheless offers its own dystopian nightmare. The opening pages credit “all the West Papuans, dead and alive, who have dedicated their lives to justice since the illegal...

It’s instructive to remember what a relatively illiberal society Australia was only a few decades ago and this account of the obscenity court cases about Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in the early 1970s – written by a young author who wrote a...

In its broad strokes, Minor Detail is a blistering allegory about state violence and the conscription of women’s bodies. In its minor details, it offers a piercing account of everyday life for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. A “dump...

Patrick Allington’s second novel, Rise & Shine , drops us headfirst into a future in the wake of an ecological catastrophe that claimed the lives of more than eight billion people. The survivors reside in the city-states of Rise and Shine, which...

Set in an unnamed country that has recently undergone a violent coup, Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron is a novel of a land suffused with wild animal magic: a heron that can create vast storms; a species of squid whose ink has miraculous properties...

For as long as Canadian writer Eva Holland can remember, she has had two major fears – the death of her mother, and heights. When her mother unexpectedly dies of a stroke and, a few months later, Holland finds herself frozen in terror while ice...

Breasts and Eggs , Mieko Kawakami’s first novel to be translated into English, explores the mundane indignity of inhabiting a woman’s body. It opens with 30-year-old Natsuko meeting her elder sister Makiko and sullen adolescent niece Midoriko at...