Reviews/Essays

The Pulling by Adele Dumont Scribe ISBN 9781922585912 Reviewed by AZ COSGROVE   Ostensibly, Adele Dumont’s collection The Pulling (2024) is about the author’s experience of trichotillomania, or compulsive hair pulling. Importantly, I myself have never experienced trichotillomania, and I refuse to participate in the historical silencing that has too often been directed towards those […]

Vessel by Dani Netherclift Upswell Publishing Reviewed by ADELE DUMONT       On its opening page, with very little in the way of preamble, Vessel establishes its central incident: 1993. A Saturday. Thirty-eight degrees Celsius. I don’t know what time it is when I witness my father and brother drown, minutes – perhaps only […]

Empathy By Hoa Pham MIT Press ISBN 9781913380618 Reviewed by JUDITHH HUANG In Empathy, a speculative fiction novel that blends some of the most potent concerns in our post-pandemic world, Hoa Pham has created a dystopia in which unethical medical experiments involving human cloning and mass pharmaceutical control are not just practiced but accepted as […]

Me, Her, Us by Yen Rong Wong UQP ISBN 9780702266201 Reviewed by ZHI YI SAW Me, Her, Us, by award-winning non-fiction writer and art critic Yen-Rong Wong, is her debut collection of memoir-essays that centres around her investigation and views of various relationships: Her own with sex (Me), her relationship with her mother (Her), and […]

The World With Its Mouth Open Zahid Rafiq Tin House ISBN 9781959030850 Reviewed by AASHNA JAMAL The men are restrained and evasive, the women are waiting for something that never arrives. A sense of resignation pervades the eleven short stories in Zahid Rafiq’s debut short story book collection, The World With Its Mouth Open published […]

Politica                                                                                                by Yumna Kassab Ultimo Press ISBN: 9781761152009 […]

Stamatia X by Effie Carr ISBN: 9780648170716 Primer Fiction Reviewed by ANGELA COSTI   Stamatia X is a novel fuelled by Greek philosophy, grammar, poetry and history to tell the riveting story of a Greek-Australian, migrant family’s return to their “homeland”. Nostalgia has no place to dwell in this book as the family of five […]

A Brief History of Australian Terror By Bobuq Sayed ISBN     Common Room Editions Reviewed by DAVID COADY Bobuq Sayed, a non-binary member of the Afghan diaspora, has put together a brief chapbook of three essays on Islamophobia in Australia. This is a timely and insightful contribution to public debate. The subject, however, cries […]

Because I am Not Myself, You See Ariane Beeston Black Inc ISBN 978-1760644505 Reviewed by A.D. JOHN I tumbled headfirst into Ariane Beeston’s beautiful, poignant, and heart-wrenching memoir, Because I’m Not Myself You See. It affected me like no book has in recent memory. I devoured it over a weekend, engrossed in a story that […]

Thanks for Having Me By Emma Darragh Allen & Unwin Reviewed by HOLDEN WALKER     I cannot say I’ve ever had the eureka moment in which I found myself lost in a novel that felt like it had been written for me or had been written about the world I knew personally. Perhaps my […]

Refugia By Elfie Shiosaki Magabala Books ISBN 9781922777133 Reviewed by CHLOE ROBINSON Having previously reviewed Shiosaki’s writing, I picked up Refugia with high expectations, anticipating powerful language and incredible storytelling. But this went well beyond my expectations, achieving its 5-star status, not even halfway through the opening section. I read through the collection twice without […]

Flow Luoyang Chen Red River Press Available at Amplify Books Reviewed by NATALIE DAMJANOVICH-NAPOLEON Flow is both a verb and a noun, an elusive character and a slippery act of movement, in Luoyang Chen’s beguiling debut collection, Flow (Red River). While Chen tells us in his biography that he is interested in the lyric “I” […]

Witness by Louise Milligan ISBN: 9780733644634 Hachette Reviewed by Angela Costi The Trauma of Trial for Survivors of Crime Traditionally, an investigative journalist provides an in-depth analysis of a matter or issue of public concern without having experienced the problem being uncovered. This is not the case in Witness. In Louise Milligan’s book there is […]

The Great Undoing by Sharlene Allsopp Ultimo Press ISBN: 9781761151668 Reviewed by DEBORAH PIKE     Sharlene Allsopp’s debut novel, The Great Undoing, has a great cover that undoes history with a red crayon. Ernest Scott’s A Short History of Australia (1916) is struck out and bold typeface declares an angry and urgent call for […]

The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat Sara M Saleh UQP 2023 Reviewed by KATIE HANSORD   How to begin to do justice to reviewing a book of poetry this important, this powerful, and in this moment? If I were to recommend one book to people this year, it would be this. And it has […]

Dirt Poor Islanders by Winnie Dunn Hachette ISBN 978-0733649264 Reviewed by ISABEL HOWARD Intercultural struggle is the main question at hand in Winnie Dunn’s Dirt Poor Islanders: how do you define yourself between two different cultures that shape every aspect of your life? Dunn’s novel is written from the perspective of Meadow, a young, mixed-race […]

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck translated by Michael Hofmann ISBN 9781783786121 Granta Reviewed by GAN AINM   It’s hard to avoid the idea of allegory when approaching Jenny Erpenbeck’s International Booker Prize-winner, Kairos. Right from the cover, we are told by Neel Mukherjee that ‘Erpenbeck has written an allegory for her nation, a country that has […]

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar Pan Macmillan ISBN: 9781035026074 Reviewed by JAMES GOBBEY   If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among those that survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe […]

Moon Wrasse by Willo Drummond Puncher and Wattmann ISBN 1922571679 Review by MISBAH WOLF When I first picked up Willo Drummond’s debut poetry collection, Moon Wrasse, I was torn between a deep panic of knowing I wanted to become mixed up in the muck, blood, and bloom of the work and wanting to also turn away […]