Category Archives: Literary Fiction

A cruel fate: Book review of Lisa Genova’s Still Alice

Still Alice by debut American novelist Lisa Genova peers into the downward spiral of Alice, a Harvard psychology professor at the top of her profession, in the grip of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Few diseases frighten us more, for it has no cure and the inevitable creeping decline treats victim and loved ones with equal cruelty. Sticking to [...]

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Walking forever: Book review of The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris

New Yorker Tim, a wealthy law firm partner, walks. Rather, his legs walk uncontrollably, sending Tim away from his work and his wife and daughter, walking nonstop until he collapses into narcoleptic sleep. Intelligent, proud, tough, he joins battle with his unheard-of affliction. The Unnamed, by sophomore novelist Joshua Ferris, is Tim’s weird, undulating tale. [...]

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Banking and life: Book review of Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic

Out of the last financial boom, in the wake of the GFC, come the novelists’ judgements. Often novelists can penetrate deeper than the analysts and historians. Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic is a coruscating dig into the ascendancy of a fictional American bank of that name, told through the eyes of four intersecting characters: an emotionally [...]

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Immersive tragedy: Book review of Anna Quindlen’s Every Last One

Anna Quindlen’s best novels, such as Black and Blue, burrow into violence and death. A writer who immerses her readers, she weaves a tapestry of characters into richly imagined lives and then . . . crunch, the horror of it all. So it is with Every Last One. Deftly Quindlen shoves the reader into the [...]

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Clever recasting: Book review of Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

There are two kinds of atheists. One branch obsesses over religions and their foibles, the other shuns any religiosity. I’m in the latter category and have avoided biblically slanted literature since Sunday school, so I only tackled Philip Pullman’s controversial The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ for a book club. Oddly enough, I [...]

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Hums with weight: Book review of Don DeLillo’s Point Omega

Point Omega, the fifteenth novel by Don DeLillo, one our most profound living novelists, is longer than a novella, 117 pages in a slim volume, but not longer by much. Yet the reading experience rivals that of the 900-pages plus of 2666, Roberto Bolano’s masterpiece. Every word, sentence, paragraph and page of Point Omega hums [...]

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Tabula rasa: Book review of Martin Westley Takes a Walk by Andrew Humphreys

I bet I’m not the only one drawn to the notion of a complete fresh start, some way of casting the past aside and beginning with a tabula rasa. In Martin Westley Takes a Walk by Sydney author Andrew Humphreys, a businessman wakes up in hospital after being knocked unconscious by a falling kite. He [...]

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Interesting but flawed: Book review of Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves

I missed out on Elizabeth Kostova’s bestselling debut The Historian but I heard so many readers praise it that I was looking forward to The Swan Thieves. The opening promises high entertainment: into the care of Andrew Marlowe, an institutional psychiatrist and hobby painter, is thrust uncommunicative Robert Oliver, a successful painter caught trying to [...]

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Fails to engage: Book review of Yann Martell’s Beatrice and Virgil

Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi delivered an absorbing narrative of man among animals, followed by a lengthy modernistic coda that explored broad concepts; the upshot was a surprise literary hit amplified by a Booker Prize. Martel’s apparently arduous follow-up, Beatrice and Virgil, again uses humanized animals but in the service of a much deeper [...]

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Hums with weight: Book review of Don DeLillo’s Point Omega

Point Omega, the fifteenth novel by Don DeLillo, one our most profound living novelists, is longer at 177 pages than a novella, but not by much. Yet the reading experience with Point Omega rivals that of the 900-pages plus of 2666, Roberto Bolano’s masterpiece. Every word, sentence, paragraph and page of Point Omega hums with weight. [...]

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