Open with: two men crushed to death in a campervan. Well ok, two men, potentially crushed to death in a campervan. Fate unconfirmed. And besides, it’s more like a caravan really, if we’re being pernickety. Which we are. So two men potentially crushed to death in a caravan. But perhaps we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Let’s back
I. Even now, Zoë can remember all the prices in the Melbourne milk bar that her parents owned. Paddle Pops were seven cents. Sunny Boys were three. Violet Crumbles and Smith’s Crinkle Cut chips both sold for five, the same price as the bus fare to her high school. In those days, two dollars a
What a book… I did help format this book but my review is based on the fabulous writing that is held within the pages and not my involvement in the project (just for transparency I wanted to mention that small fact). Girl on Fire wastes no time and throwing the reader headlong into the story,
Hofmann transports us to the surreal setting of East Berlin in her humorous and emotive novel, The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures. The disastrous results of living under a spy state are carefully examined through the eyes of Bernd Zeiger, whose glimpses into paranoia demonstrate this brutal and unforgiving regime. It’s absurd yet completely plausible, and
Whispers in the Dark by Laurel Hightower is pretty damn good, actually it’s pretty stunning – and to think this was her debut, bloody hell! Fierce storytelling, prose to die for, and a story that is achingly brutal; whilst also populated by characters that are really relatable, even the secondary cast of characters – all
Animalistic, thrilling, and intense, Tim Binding’s Beneath the Trees of Eden contains a plethora of beautiful and complicated relationships, set against the real and raw portrayal of death. Our characters skirt the fringes of society and live on their own terms – but at what cost? Binding challenges us to reconsider what ‘Eden’ really is,
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Zero Saints, in my humble opinion, is just that little bit better than Coyote Songs. I bloody loved Coyote Songs, but this one is just off the chain, crazy good! Please don’t hit me in the face (I know Coyote Songs holds a
‘Some people were born just so they could be buried.’ The Devil All The Time is a sprawling, gritty, powerhouse of a book that follows the lives of a handful of characters as they fight to survive in the town of Knockemstiff and the surrounding towns of Ohio and West Virginia. The opening of this
Penelope Greensmith, a divorced, cardigan-wearing, lonely bio-librarian, is responsible for a vast seed bank made possible by the mysterious Vice she inherited from her father. One day she receives an unexpected visitor: the charming Horticulturalist, who wants to see her collection. He thinks it could hold the key to stopping a terrible plague, which turns
The first time I read Burnt Tongues was back in April 2014 – at the time I had only really started dipping my feet into the world of transgressive fiction and I have to admit that I came away from that encounter a little scarred and a little let down, I found the stories shocking
