Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine. Jeffrey Eugenides had a tough task ahead of him with The Marriage Plot. After the brilliant success of the chilling, dream-like The Virgin Suicides and the Pulitzer Prize-winning epic Middlesex, his long-anticipated follow-up was always either going to be received in one of two ways: rapturously praised as yet another work …
<Dark, unsettling but told through brilliantly lyrical language, One Foot Wrong is a story of coming of age in a nightmarish domestic world. This is the first adult novel from Melbourne children’s writer Sofie Laguna, and with its deftly crafted balance between macabre detail and beautifully constructed prose, it certainly earned its place on the …
Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine. As an animal person, it’s hard to really understand those who are not animal people. Stephen, who is most decidedly not an animal person, has the opposite dilemma. “He was not an animal person in the same way he was not a musical person, or an intellectual person,” Charlotte Wood writes. …
Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine. Dark clouds, harsh winds and the threat of hurricanes blow throughout Janette Turner Hospital’s exquisitely crafted collection of short stories, saturating the slim volume with an unsettling sense of dread. Forecast: Turbulence brings together a compelling cast of characters, each somehow floundering in an uncertain world. Some stories are gentle and …
Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine. The dazzling beauty of Paris provides a sensual background for this story of seduction, frustration and the failure to live up to expectations. You Deserve Nothing is Alexander Maksik’s debut novel, and takes what threatens to be a tired storyline – a teacher everyone reveres becoming romantically involved with a student …
Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine. 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 …
Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine. The image of a drowned woman – beautiful and pale, her hair splayed around her like a waterlily – is at the centre of Therese Bohman’s debut novel, quietly haunting its pages with a persistent feeling of dread. Drowned is an exquisitely crafted, deceptively simple short novel about desire, betrayal and …
Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine. Le Cirque des Rêves, the spellbinding centre of Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel The Night Circus, is a strange kind of circus. Travelling the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it arrives in town with no warning or fanfare, and seems to disappear without a trace. The imposing gates …
Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine. The Memory of Salt, the debut novel from Melbourne author Alice Melike Ülgezer, is a raw and authentic story of love, loss and the tensions of reconciling a multicultural identity. Shifting between decades and traversing from Kabul to Istanbul to London to Melbourne, Ülgezer patchworks together the familiar and unfamiliar, creating …
Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine. 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 …