culture

Reviewer: LS Australian coastal Gothic coming-of-age novels are perennially popular with readers and they come with a number of conventions. Ben Hobson’s debut, To Become a Whale , taps all of them neatly. It’s set in 1961, in coastal Queensland. Our sensitive,...

Reviewer: ZC In Paris, 1980, Roland Barthes – the famous literary critic, linguist and semiologist – was fatally injured when knocked down by a delivery van just after he’d had lunch with then presidential candidate François Mitterrand. This incident,...

Reviewer: KN Murakami’s fiction is instantly recognisable. There is usually a central enigma, cats, a missing person, a strange woman, surreal or playful events, Western pop cultural references, and long dialogues between characters who share their life stories...

Reviewer: CG In the way of an amuse-bouche: the average Brit spends five hours a week watching television food programs but only four hours a week cooking; when noise exceeds 89 decibels, the brain has trouble discerning salty from sweet, but umami is unaffected...

Reviewer: DV Some time in a not-too-distant future, with an increasingly inhospitable climate, a faceless authoritarian Australian government – unable to support a sparse population – is forcing people into overcrowded “inclusion zones”. The outside world is...

Reviewer: JR The opening sentence of Eva Hornung’s seventh novel, The Last Garden , encapsulates how strange and how mesmerising in her clarity her writing can be: On a mild Nebelung’s afternoon, Matthias Orion, having lived as an exclamation mark in the...

Reviewer: CG The Etruscan god Orcus feasted on human flesh; his name inspired the French word “ogre”. The word makes its appearance very late in Maude Julien’s harrowing, heartbreaking, and against-all-odds uplifting memoir The Only Girl in the World , but the...

Reviewer: CR This second novel from David Cohen, a well-regarded short-fiction author, concerns Ken, whose narration seems deliberately bland; he’s a bit of a no-hoper but one competent enough to have opened a depressing self-storage facility in a desolate part...

Reviewer: ZC Vogel award winner Marija Peričić’s titular lost pages are a fictionalised memoir by Max Brod – a successful author in his day, but best remembered as Franz Kafka’s friend, mentor and champion. It was Brod who refused Kafka’s dying wish that his...