Fiction - hardcover; Allen & Unwin; 528 pages; 2013. Review copy courtesy of the publisher. If books won prizes for ambition alone, Michelle de Kretser's Questions of Travel should win every gong going. This is a "widescreen" novel that explores the interconnectedness of our lives brought about by the advent of the internet, cheap travel and globalisation. Dual narrative The book spans 40 years and follows two characters — Australian Laura Fraser and Sri Lankan Ravi Mendis — whose tales are divided into two separate narrative threads. These two characters are poles apart, not least the ways in which they travel the globe. Laura is a drifter, who has the freedom to travel across the world wherever her Australian passport might take her; Ravi is forced to flee Sri Lanka under difficult circumstances and seeks political asylum in Australia, never knowing whether he will be shipped back home against his... | Continue »

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 144 pages; 2000. It seems ironic or pre-determined (or something), because no sooner than I write a post about bleak books and ask you to submit your suggestions, than I pick up Jean Rhys' debut novel, Quartet. Ms Rhys doesn't necessarily have a monopoly on bleakness, but boy, she does an exquisite line in melancholy and hopelessness. This book, first published in 1928, brings bohemian Paris in the 1920s to life. It's set in the neighborhood of Montparnasse, where people lived in hotels and passed their time in smoke-filled cafes and ate out every night because they simply didn't have the facilities to cook at home. Women were generally seen and not heard, and relied on men to support them. Living in this dark, seedy world is Marya, who left England four years earlier to marry a Pole called Stephan. Despite the fact Stephan,... | Continue »

Fiction - hardcover; Quercus; 336 pages; 2010. In recent years I've read several short story collections masquerading as novels. For example, both Alaa As Aswany's The Yacoubian Building and Nicholas Rinaldi's Between Two Rivers told the individual and interconnected stories of residents living in the same building, the former in Cairo, the latter in Manhattan. Colum McCann did something similar in last year's prize-winning novel Let The Great World Spin, using Philippe Petit's daring high-wire act between the Twin Towers in New York City on August 7, 1974 as a kind of bridging link to tell the stories of a diverse range of characters living in the city at that time. Even Christos Tsiolkas has got in on the act: his Commonwealth Prize-winning novel, The Slap, looks at the lives and loves of various residents in the Melbourne suburbs, using a controversial slap at a family barbecue as the particular... | Continue »

Enroute to a gig at Bush Hall in Shepherd's Bush this evening, we took a detour to Jumbucks, a restaurant chain that specialises in Australian pies. Because I don't eat red meat I've never really missed the "national dish" but T tucked into one, with a side order of the most delicious chips ever: piping hot, golden and crunchy on the outside, and lovely and floury on the inside. They look pretty gorgeous in this picture, don't they? I'm feeling hungry just looking at them... | Continue »