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 …
Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine. 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 …
Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine. 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 …
Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine. 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 …
Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine. Simmering darkly with unspoken traumas and longings, Steeplechase is a compelling novel about the tremulous bond between sisters. The first non-erotic work from Brisbane writer Krissy Kneen, following on from the memoir Affection and short story collection Triptych, this is a stirring Australian Gothic where the tangled threads of art, desire …
Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine. For decades, Alice Munro has been publishing collection after collection of beautiful, utterly masterful short stories. Often revolving around the lives of women in rural Canada, her fiction takes a close look at ordinary people dealing with beginnings, endings, confusions, frustrations and betrayals. Now, the 82-year-old writer has been recognised for …
Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine. My Brilliant Friend is the alluring first part of a quartet following the lives two young women growing up in a poor village in 1950s Naples. This is the fourth novel of Italian author Elena Ferrante to be translated into English, and presents a compelling portrait of a friendship that is …
Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine. Brave and beautiful at times, In One Person is a tragicomic story of desire, longing and sexual identity. It both delights in and agonises over sexual differences and gender-bending, with a diverse cast of characters and a conflicted narrator who comes to understand that “we are formed by what we desire.” …