Indiscretion is a sensuous novel about desire, folly and love in all its permutations. Set against the alluring backdrops of the Hamptons, Manhattan, Rome and Paris, debut novelist Charles Dubow tells the story of the splintering of a seemingly perfect marriage. Though not exactly a literary masterpiece, this is an engaging beach read that blends the dramatic and the familiar, providing a bit of escapist fun.

To dispense with the negative comments up front: as a first novel, Indiscretion has its fair share of flaws. The dialogue often feels like it’s from a bad soap opera, unnatural and laden with eye-rollingly profound statements. The characters motivations are not always believable, and much of the action borders on the clichéd. And yet, if you can put all that aside and allow yourself to just be taken into this world, you’ll find it’s quite an enjoyable one. (more…)

In the small French village of Clèves – a sleepy place, where the main attractions are a seedy nightclub and a yearly carnival, and where “the whole school is obsessed by sex” – teenage Solange is navigating the anxieties of her ever-growing sexual desire.

All the Way is the latest work from award-winning French author Marie Darrieussecq, best known for her 1996 debut Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation, a beguiling story of a young woman who is slowly transformed into pig. Here, she continues her exploration of the female body in a darkly humorous coming of age story that is both familiar and surprising.  Naïve and awkward, Solange is coming into an awareness of her body and discovering the pleasures and pains it is capable of. She is desperate to be touched, to experience, to have the reassurance that comes with being desired. But as much as she is obsessed with the idea of having sex, she is consumed by a feeling that she’s not pretty, not sophisticated, not quite the same as all the other girls. (more…)

Sufficient Grace has been longlisted for the very first Stella Prize, a major new literary award for Australian women’s writing.

Deep in the heart of rural Wisconsin, 13-year old Ruth and her cousin Naomi are grappling with sin, penance and the dark tensions of adulthood. Living in a small community tightly bound by their Pentecostal faith, the two girls are like sisters, wrapped up in an unconditional devotion to one another – “she is mine,” Ruth often reflects. They are also bound together by a horrifying secret, and as they seek help through prayer, their faith becomes as suffocating as it is a comfort.

Sufficient Grace is the debut novel from Melbourne-based American writer Amy Espeseth, and won the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. Narrated through the perspective of Ruth, the story stretches slowly over five months in a harsh winter, brought to life with an enchanting, almost folksy resonance. It comes as no surprise that Espeseth herself grew up in a Wisconsin fundamentalist community much like Ruth’s. This is an authentic rendering of a world created through intimate knowledge and a penchant for rich, earthy detail.   (more…)

Like a House on Fire has been longlisted for the very first Stella Prize, a major new literary award for Australian women’s writing.

A man takes a trip with his overbearing, difficult mother to scatter his father’s ashes. A new mother returns to work from maternity leave, feeling dislocated and empty in a suddenly uncomfortable environment. A young girl writes in her journal about her unstable family, longing desperately for a beautiful set of 72 Derwent pencils.

Intimate and familiar, Like a House on Fire takes a close look at domestic life and the quiet frustrations that simmer beneath the ordinary. This is Cate Kennedy’s second collection of short stories, returning to the form of her highly acclaimed Dark Roots, which earned her a reputation as one of Australia’s most masterful writers of contemporary short fiction. With her characteristic lightness of touch, Kennedy guides us quietly in and out if fifteen carefully distilled worlds, letting unexpressed aches and pains reveal themselves through simple actions. (more…)

Looking for something to read? I can help! Here are some great books I reviewed over the past year…

Blood by Tony Birch

An absorbing and affecting story about the bond between siblings and the strength of children in a world where the adults are unreliable, Blood was an impressive contender for the 2012 Miles Franklin Award. This is the first novel from Tony Birch, author of the short story collections Shadowboxing and Father’s Day and longstanding creative writing lecturer at the University of Melbourne. Through his sparse, unadorned prose, Birch vividly evokes the harshness of the Australian landscape, and his mastery of pacing creates a sense of immediacy and tension that makes this book almost impossible to put down. Read my full review here. (more…)

Death at Intervals by Jose Saramago

Breaking Away by Anna Gavalda

Animal People by Charlotte Wood

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Much Ado About Loving by Jack Murnighan and Maura Kelly

My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin

The Marriage Plot by Jeffery Eugenides

The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner

Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton (more…)

Part murder mystery, part coming of age story, part portrait of the bored housewives of 1950s New England, Liza Klaussmann’s debut novel is a compelling and richly evoked story about the fracture lines that run through relationships.

The narrative of Tigers in Red Weather swings back and forth over two decades from 1944 to 1969, split into five sections, each narrated by a different member of the Derringer family. At the centre of the novel is the beautiful, impulsive Nick and her husband Hughes, who is handsome and charismatic, but distant towards her since the war. Nick’s quiet, insecure cousin Helena, always in her shadow,  is married to a man who is obsessively in love with another woman, and she numbs herself with pills. Between the two couples are two children, Daisy and Ed – one a lithe, sunny tennis champion, one a strange and creepy loner intent on private “research” into human behavior – who grow up spending their summers at the family’s beloved Tiger House on Martha’s Vineyard. In 1959, the summer that they are twelve, they discover a dead body – and everything starts to unravel. (more…)

Strange and disturbing but quite possibly brilliant, The Dinner by Herman Koch is a grippingly readable novel that gets under your skin and stays there.

Recently translated from the original Dutch, The Dinner has been compared to controversial bestsellers Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. Like these novels, the central premise is easily summarised: two couples are meeting in a high-end restaurant in Amsterdam to discuss the terrible thing their teenage sons have done. But the real horror of the story isn’t the sickening crime the boys have committed – it’s something much more subtle, that sneaks up on you slowly, unexpectedly. 

The story is told through the eyes of Paul Lohman, an ex-teacher with a bitter disdain for everything his bother Serge – a charismatic politician, tipped to be the next prime minister of the Netherlands, and depicted as a pompous fool – represents. For the first half of the novel, the conversation skirts around the issue they are there to discuss. Paul, Serge, and their wives Claire and Babette spend most of the evening engaging in fairly ridiculous small talk, all the while secretly trying to gauge who knows what about their sons’ crime. (more…)

A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham is one of those writers who makes me get all gushy and effusive because IT’S JUST SO BRILLIANT AND BEAUTIFUL AND DEVASTATING, and I know I use superlatives so much that they no longer have any real meaning coming from me, but really, this book is pretty brilliant and beautiful and devastating.  Written with painful intimacy, the story spreads over twenty years or so, following the intersecting lives of four characters – boyhood friends Jonathan and Bobby, Jonathan’s mother Alice, who Bobby develops a strong and somewhat confused bond with, and Clare, who the grown-up boys form an unconventional family with in New York. Each is bruised and lonely in some way, afflicted with a deep and intensely private sense of yearning that is sometimes soothed through their various relationships, but often leaves them isolated.

The setting is richly evoked, from smalltown Ohio to the allure of New York City to the beautiful, crumbling farmhouse upstate where Bobby, Jonathan and Clare eventually settle down to start a new kind of life. Details and feelings are rendered in that achingly accurate and surprising way Cunningham has, and the novel hangs in a delicate balance between overwhelming sadness and tender, nostalgic joy. (more…)

Those first daylight savings nights are pretty much the best ever. Obviously in Melbourne the start of spring is all a ruse, and winter still drips its dreariness through the days, but the air feels different somehow, fresher. There’s a lightness we’ve been missing, and it fills me with a yearning for long, bright days. I want swimming pools and milkshakes and winter-pale legs in denim shorts. Salt in the air, the sound of coffee brewing from inside a café. Nostalgia for things that never happened, and things that weren’t that great when they did. I want Bowie singing Oh! You Pretty Things, I want the scent of Malibu and diet coke, I want long ponytails and cold mornings and fluoro pink everything. I want everything through an Instagram filter.

Spring, in my head, looks like this. (more…)