AustLit

'... Toni Jordan, an elegant and informed writer who might also have shone as a stand-up comedian, is just the writer to catch the merriment of farce as it flies and flick it back between the book covers. This is a tale of three marriages. Those middle-aged, middle class marriages that the lazy god of lust and discontent can liquidise without getting up from the sofa. ...'

'Expatriate Alan Moorehead was Australia's most famous writer of the 1950s and '60s. An international celebrity, his books spilling into millions, the subject of several biographies (my own among them) he has, unlike that exuberant trio Clive James, Germaine Greer and Barry Humphries, who fixed their names in Britain some three decades later, dropped from view among younger readers in his own country. ...'

'Inga Simpson's excellent third novel, Where the Trees Were, cuts back and forth between the childhood of her protagonist, Jayne, and her adult working life as a curator at the National Museum in Canberra. The novel begins in the Lachlan Valley of New South Wales in 1987; begins again in 2004 after the bushfires that ravaged the national capital. ...'