Category Archives: Reviews

Thirteen Ways of Looking is a book of three short stories plus a novella.

The book was in the process of being written when the author, Colum McCann, was assaulted and hospitalised after he went to the aid of a woman who was being attacked by her husband. At the end of the book McCann invites readers to go to his website colummccann.com to read his Victim Impact Statement.

McCann’s stories of varying degrees of human suffering are never mawkish or laboured in their execution, but finely written and strangely uplifting. He has not, like some other authors, gone to the extremes of the human condition as an easy source of drama but, I think because he has the insight and skill to shine a light on it. The book is an attempt to connect us more with our fellow human beings rather than an exploitative romp through misery. Continue reading

Nextinction is one of those tricky books to pin down in a review. This mixed up, vibrant and colourful tome is part art book, part coffee table extravaganza, part humour, part social commentary and part call to environmental action. It is an ambitious follow-up act to the successful, similarly veined collaboration Extinct Boids.

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Matt Haig’s Christmas tale for children explains how a Finnish boy named Nikolas became Father Christmas. You know the one, the fat bloke in the red suit who delivers presents to all the children of the world on Christmas night using only a sled and flying reindeer.

The story begins with Nikolas and his father, a nine and a half-fingered woodchopper, eking out a meagre living in the forest. One day Joel the hunter calls at their isolated cottage with a job offer for his father—to join an expedition to go north in search of Elfhelm, the mythical home of the elves.

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Tess is leaving. ‘It’s around three a.m. I can’t be sure exactly, because I’m hiding under a house, ten minutes’ drive out of Byron Bay, off the old Bangalow Road… I’m not cold. It’s still summer – just.’

Tess was seventeen when she travelled to Byron Bay for schoolies with a couple of friends. It was a break from the troubled years following the death of her father and desertion by her mother, events that had left her older sister, Beth, to lead a household of siblings. When Tess is offered a job in a Byron cafe and encounters the handsome, older Jay, she decides to stay. Four years on, Tess is trapped on a farm with Jay and their daughter, Nellie, with no job, money or friends.

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