Category: Issue Six Book Reviews
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Review of Eugen Bacon’s fiction
By Roanna Gonsalves Eugen Bacon writes with cheekiness and a fierce intelligence that shines through every page of her work. Right from the first sentence, the voices of each of her narrators grab the reader with their lucidity, their panache, and their uncompromising observational rigour. This rigour manifests itself in the freshness of Bacon’s prose,…
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Book Review of Katya de Becerra’s What the Woods Keep
Reviewed by Angela Wauchop “[…] my mother left our family home and walked into the fog-shrouded forest […] never to be seen again. One missing human in a crowd of many. Yet I feel her visceral tug, as if she calls on me, as if her pull defies space and time to reach me. As…
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Book review: and my heart crumples like a coke can.
By Wendy J. Dunn I just knew ‘and my heart crumples like a coke can’was a special book from almost the first moment I took it from my tall tower of TBR books on my bedside table. Oh my God, I thought, crossly and annoyed with myself, I must have left my morning coffee cup…
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Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
By Thomas Van Essen. Set primarily in the mountainside city of Odawara in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, Killing Commedatore follows the life of a nameless, recently estranged artist who moves into the former residence of a famous painter Amada Tomohiko. Upon arriving in Odawara, the protagonist discovers a mysterious painting. The painting in question, is the eponymously named…
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Book review: Vox by Christina Dalcher
By Thomas Van Essen “I wonder what other women do. How they cope. Do they still find something to enjoy? Do they love their husbands in the same way? Do they hate them, just a little bit.” VOX is a generally engaging and well plotted debut spec-fiction novel by Christina Dalcher. Set in a dystopian present,…
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His Favorites – Kate Walbert.
Reviewed by Thomas Van Essen “Thank you for listening he wrote. Dear beautiful, he wrote. I know I can trust you, he wrote. I think of you all day, he wrote I wonder how you taste, he wrote. Secret-keeper, he wrote.” With the recent inundation of high-profile sexual assault cases and the resistance spearheaded by…
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Book Review of Lindsay Simpson’s Adani, Following Its Dirty Footsteps: A Personal Story
Reviewed by Angela Wauchop “Like addicts on the world’s biggest bender, we are burning through our children’s and our children’s children’s inheritances so fast it should make our heads spin, yet nobody talks about it.” Adani, Following Its Dirty Footsteps: A Personal Story is the latest non-fiction work by Australian author and investigative journalist Lindsay…
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The Power of Hope- Or: How Community, Love & Compassion Can Change the World By Kon Karapanagiotidis
By Thomas Van Essen. Despite its flaws, ‘The Power of Hope’ is an inspired antidote for apathy, hatred and injustice. Teacher,social worker, humanitarian activist, human rights lawyer and CEO of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre; there is no doubt that Kon Karapanagiotidis is a man of prolific talents. That’s why it’s fitting that his…
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America: The Farewell Tour by Chris Hedges.
By Thomas Van Essen. One of the great progressive American voices left in journalism is back, and with arguably his most bleak and urgent call for action yet. “That the end is coming is hard now to dispute, although one would be foolish to predict when.” America: The Farewell Tour is the latest book from Chris Hedges,…