'Alice Chipkin and Jessica Tavassoli’s graphic memoir takes an insightful look at big issues such as clinical depression and sexuality – but at its heart it’s also just an intimate portrait of long-time friends.'
'Housebound with an infant, the author watches the street life unfold. '
'This is the third novel in Steven Carroll’s T. S. Eliot collection, inspired by the poet’s famous Four Quartets series. Here, he interrogates the perspective of Eliot’s secret platonic mistress, the somewhat doomed Emily Hale, who we meet as a lonely eccentric self-described spinster in her late 70s, reflecting on the love that never was. The novel moves between the present-day Hale in 1965, having just learnt of Eliot’s death, to the beginnings of their celibate affair in 1913, and meanders off momentarily into a benign subplot involving two younger characters named Grace and Ted that does very little to enlighten or enhance an otherwise compelling narrative.' (Introduction)
'Miles Franklin-winner Sofie Laguna has developed such a characteristic literary style that it’s easy to forget that The Choke is only her third novel for adults. Here, her child narrator is Justine Lee, who is 10 in the early ’70s when the story starts. Justine has severe dyslexia, a crippling shyness and lives with her pop in poverty and neglect on a bush block, called Pop’s Three, on the banks of the Murray where it narrows (the choke of the title). She’s surrounded by misogyny and peril: from her Pop, an unpredictable former prisoner of the Japanese; from her two older half-brothers, who live close; from her violent, criminal father, Ray, who visits occasionally; and from a nearby estranged branch of the family, who have good reason to hate Justine’s.' (Introduction)
