ANZ LitLovers Lit
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Welcome to the ANZ LitLovers blog. It started out as a blog for an online reading group, and while it still retains its role as a portal to the group, its primary function now is as Lisa Hill's ANZ LitLovers LitBlog where you can find reviews and commentary about literary fiction, classics and non-fiction from Australia and New Zealand. There are also regular blog posts about contemporary..
ANZ LitLovers Lit
2d ago
Fiona Farrell ONZM is a New Zealand novelist, poet and playwright, and she writes non-fiction too, notably about the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. I discovered her writing last year when I read (and reviewed) The Deck (2023), and promptly ordered Decline and Fall on Savage Street and (mistakenly thinking it was a novel) its companion NF title ..read more
ANZ LitLovers Lit
2d ago
Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month, but that’s the day for #6Degrees, so here we are, a week later instead. Thanks to a heads-up from Jennifer at Tasmanian Bibliophile at Large, I know that this month the theme is Poisson d’Avril ..read more
ANZ LitLovers Lit
5d ago
Elon Musk. Hmmm. I like long form essays about current issues, and having discovered interesting things to read in the Jewish Quarterly lent to me by a friend, I succumbed to subscribing to this journal when they made the decision to change to long form essays. The first one to arrive in my letter box ..read more
ANZ LitLovers Lit
1w ago
Even if you’ve never read a word of Frank Moorhouse’s fiction (a deficiency you might want to rectify) Matthew Lamb’s new biography is very good reading indeed. Strange Paths is Volume 1 of a planned 2-volume biography of this legendary author, and it covers the period up to 1974 , with the publication of The ..read more
ANZ LitLovers Lit
1w ago
If anything in this review raises issues for you, help is available at Beyond Blue. Thom Conroy’s The Salted Air was one of the books that prompted me to initiate #AYearofNZLit, co-hosted with Theresa from Theresa Smith Writes. I have a shelf dedicated to my NZ Lit TBR and having enjoyed Conroy’s historical novel The Naturalist (2014 ..read more
ANZ LitLovers Lit
1w ago
This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books are my Favourite and Best starts with our own bookshelves. We start with a travel book. Travel books are ubiquitous now, but most of them are anonymous in the Lonely Planet/DK sense because we don’t know who the author is. Of those that are authored, few have ..read more
ANZ LitLovers Lit
1w ago
I have had a mixed experience with the novels of Gail Jones, one of our most prominent authors. I read her early work somewhat unenthusiastically with a book group, but liking her more recent novels has prompted me to explore her backlist, along with her latest releases. Black Mirror (2002, now on the TBR) Sixty ..read more
ANZ LitLovers Lit
2w ago
Stephen Orr (b.1967) is a national treasure IMO. Over the course of his prolific career he has written novels, novellas, YA, short stories, non-fiction and plays which are quintessentially Australian and yet universal in their preoccupations. His latest title Shining Like the Sun is not just a novel about an old man in a declining ..read more
The People Immortal (1942), by Vasily Grossman, translated by Elizabeth Chandler and Robert Chandler
ANZ LitLovers Lit
2w ago
I’ve had The People Immortal on the TBR since it was first published in translation in 2022, but I only got round to reading it now because, thinking it was a new title by Grossman, I borrowed the library copy that was on display… before realising that I had borrowed a book that I’ve already ..read more
ANZ LitLovers Lit
3w ago
Reading this novel gave me a lesson in reading between the lines of a review. At the Asian Review of Books, where I encountered an enticing review by Susan Blumberg-Kason of Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s Dust Child (see my review), there was also a review of a book on a similar theme of bi-racial children fathered by ..read more