Book review

There was always a soundtrack for Humidity. I love music almost as much as I love books, and over the 20 – yes, 20 – years I spent writing my novel, I would inevitably hear songs that resonated with what I was writing.   In My Life by The Divinyls Vibrant, raw and unmistakably Australian, this song […]

Bri Lee knows how to put a sentence together. Most people get obsessed with plot and genre – they’ll only read something if it fits a certain mold. Yet good writing is about making anything compelling, which is why I can read The New Yorker from cover to cover regardless of what each feature is

The world doesn’t need yet another review of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Especially by a man. I get it. Yet I loved it so much, and so wish I’d been told how vibrant and witty it was earlier, that I was compelled to write this. Perhaps I never read it before because I’ve tended

When you hit a certain age, you can count on two things: you will be nostalgic for your youth most stories you read will feel familiar in some way. So it was a pleasant surprise to come across The Changing Room – it’s unlike any novel I’d read before and it transported me back to

When I started reading this gentle, slow-moving novel, I couldn’t understand how it could have won the 1984 Booker Prize. It is so … slow. And yet I’m stubborn, which can make me annoying, but it also means when I buy a book I’ll force myself to keep reading, even when I want to ditch