SCOTT EYMAN Charlie Chaplin vs America. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck
Newtown Review of Books | Sydney's original online review of books
by NRB
19h ago
Cancel culture is nothing new: Scott Eyman’s biography shows how Charlie Chaplin’s fame was no protection when the tide turned against him. I flip-flopped into success from being a frightened, lonely person … Success brought life into focus and showed me the hollowness of men who run the world and of their solemn pronouncements. – Charlie Chaplin Scott Eyman says that it took him slightly less than 60 years to write this book on Charlie Chaplin. When he was 12 he bought a print of Chaplin’s two-reeler Easy Street (1917)  – the Tramp reforms himself, becomes a policeman and saves a beaut ..read more
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SULARI GENTILL The Mystery Writer. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
Newtown Review of Books | Sydney's original online review of books
by NRB
19h ago
In Sulari Gentill’s new novel, aspiring writer Theo and her brother Gus become embroiled in increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories. The Mystery Writer is the latest book by the prolific and always intriguing Australian author Sulari Gentill. Set in the USA, as her recent novels mostly have been, this one puts another twist on a concept she’s been experimenting with: the idea of the crime writer, and the story they are developing, being part of the larger story the novel tells. This time, though, it’s less metafiction and more the story of a writer who gets caught up in a mystery. Theodosia ..read more
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LIAM MURPHY The Roadmap of Loss. Reviewed by Paul Anderson
Newtown Review of Books | Sydney's original online review of books
by NRB
1w ago
Liam Murphy’s debut novel is both a road trip across the US and a journey into the past. It’s tempting to invoke the first stanza of Philip Larkin’s famous poem ‘This Be The Verse’ here. That’s because The Roadmap of Loss is about unresolved childhood psychological trauma, and it’s on you, Mum and Dad. The narrator, Mark Ward, is a recently orphaned 25 year old, and this compassionate novel is about how he finally goes about (‘decides’ would be wrong) treating both his lifelong neurosis and his grief over the sudden loss of his mother. It’s also a worthy redux of the classic American road tri ..read more
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ROBYN BISHOP The Rust Red Land. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Newtown Review of Books | Sydney's original online review of books
by NRB
1w ago
Through the story of Matilda, Robyn Bishop’s novel reveals the constrained lives of women in rural New South Wales in the late 1800s. It is July 1892 and Matilda is just old enough to help Clara out of her cot, change her nappy and dress her, but not old enough to understand why the baby, Lily, has died. Mama had said that the angels had come and taken Lily with them. Matilda’s tasks are to feed Lily porridge and gravy, to sponge her at bath time after Mama pours heated water in the big enamel dish, and ferry her around the yard while Mama hangs out the washing. No more. Heaven means gone, n ..read more
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MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM Day. Reviewed by CJ Pardey
Newtown Review of Books | Sydney's original online review of books
by NRB
1w ago
In this new novel, New Yorker Michael Cunningham takes inspiration from lockdowns and their impact on relationships. In his most recent novel, Day, Michael Cunningham takes on the difficult business of fictionalising the Covid experience. In his Pulitzer-winning novel The Hours, he cleverly wove together the vastly different experiences of three characters, all of whom are associated with Virginia Woolf’s modernist novel Mrs Dalloway. In Day Cunningham again works in threes, focussing on three characters and setting his novel over three days. The first day, 5 April 2019, is before Covid; the ..read more
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CHRISTOPHER POLLON Pitfall: The race to mine the world’s most vulnerable places. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck
Newtown Review of Books | Sydney's original online review of books
by NRB
2w ago
Renewable energy requires significant quantities of minerals. Can mining companies be trusted to supply them responsibly? Christopher Pollon is a Canadian journalist who has spent the past two decades ‘writing about natural resources, including the environmental and political conflicts that surround the extraction of metals’. He begins Pitfall with an account of a tailings dam at Mount Polley in Canada’s British Columbia bursting its banks and releasing over 6.5 billion gallons of mining waste ‘into one of the world’s great salmon rivers during the summer sockeye migration. It would become in ..read more
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TRACY RYAN The Queen’s Apprenticeship. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Newtown Review of Books | Sydney's original online review of books
by NRB
2w ago
Tracy Ryan’s latest novel evokes the social divisions of sixteenth-century France and the stories of two independent-minded women. In The Queen’s Apprenticeship, Tracy Ryan tells the stories of two women. One, Jehane/Josse, the daughter of a journeyman printer who died in a fire when she was 13, is fictional. The other, Marguerite of Angoulême, is a noblewoman who, after her second marriage in 1527, became Queen of Navarre, and was one of the most powerful and admired women in the history of France. Jehane/Josse tells her own story, from the time of her birth in Lyon ‘in the same year the new ..read more
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IAIN RYAN The Strip. Reviewed by Ben Ford Smith
Newtown Review of Books | Sydney's original online review of books
by NRB
2w ago
The new novel from the author of The Spiral and The Student delivers a noir excursion into the underbelly of the Gold Coast in the 1980s. Steeped in corruption, incompetence, and alcohol, 1980s Queensland seems like the perfect setting for a distinctly Australian noir. Matthew Condon explored the era in great detail over several non-fiction books, but few crime novelists have exploited its riches (Andrew McGahan and Chris Nyst being two notable exceptions). Submerged in vice and vomit, Iain Ryan’s third novel The Strip attempts just this. A gritty police procedural that dives into the depravi ..read more
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SUSAN McCREERY All the Unloved. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Newtown Review of Books | Sydney's original online review of books
by NRB
3w ago
Susan McCreery’s novel recounts the lives of the residents of a block of flats in 1990s Bondi and the complexities of love. A few short sentences and a scene is set, a mood caught, a character revealed: all this is beautifully done. Then short passages are linked together like beads on a thread and a story is created. Seaview Terrace. Bondi, 1994. Two vacancies. The mother’s in books. He’s a teacher, says Salvia. Respectable. The daughter had a skateboard, says June. She’d better not ride it up and down the side path. Salvia and June, sisters, landladies. The girl with the skateboard, Jade ..read more
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MELISSA LUCASHENKO Edenglassie. Reviewed by Michael Jongen
Newtown Review of Books | Sydney's original online review of books
by NRB
3w ago
The new novel from the award-winning author of Too Much Lip entwines Brisbane’s past and present to reveal the impact of colonisation. As I was reading it, Edenglassie received the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction. It is an ambitious novel and as I read I was already certain that Melissa Lucashenko had written a remarkable story of colonialism, displacement and modern Indigenous life. It is both brutal and uplifting, with two love stories, set two centuries apart, at its heart. Edenglassie opens with Eddie Blanket falling over in front of the Maritime Museum in Brisbane. She end ..read more
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