I know a writer who turns her books face out on the shop shelves wherever and whenever she can, and this week I admit I’ve done my personal equivalent of that: sneaking a copy of my freshly published second novel out of Science Fiction and into the Crime Fiction section of various local bookshops. If […]

The Anthology of Colonial Australian Romance Fiction Edited by Ken Gelder and Rachel Weaver MUP I read this book while embodying the bush cliche – lurching between cattle stations and floodplains, rainforest and thick scrub, dipping into the stories by the light of campfires and fading torch batteries. Given these unexpectedly apt settings I suppose […]

Today I finished reading KJ Parker’s 2008 novel The Company. And, as usual when I finish one of her novels, I wondered why the hell I had. It’s not that they’re bad novels (although I felt this one was somewhat inferior to her other books), it’s that they are relentlessly depressing. I’ve never read novels […]