The Fragments
Toni Jordan
Text Publishing, 2018
ISBN: 9781925773132
$29.99
336 pp

Many authors turn out
variations of the same book with each new offering, or a continuation of a
well-practised style and flavour. Toni Jordan is not one of these. The Fragments is fresh and very different from all her previous novels in its structure, style and story. (more…)

 A Superior Spectre
Angela Meyer
ISBN: 9781925183917
$29.99
370 pp
Ventura/Simon & Schuster 2018

A sensitive and susceptible reader could turn a ghostly shade when reading this book. It is otherworldly in more ways than it initially appears.

Angela Meyer has produced a work that on superficial reading is entertaining and intriguing but allows for contemplation of and rumination on deeper issues. (more…)

Lifel1k3
Jay Kristoff
ISBN: 9781760295691
$19.99
398 pp
Allen & Unwin 2018

This is a modern novel set, like so many others, in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world. It is inhabited by a large cast, both human and non-human. However, Lifel1k3 is not about analysing the causes of wars and other violence or even about how people survive these. This novel is about questions of identity, memory, being/not being; and relationship (more…)

He Is Mine and I Have No Other
Rebecca O’Connor
ISBN: 9781786892591
$25
230 pp
Canongate 2018

A teenage girl (fifteen years old) in rural Ireland at the close of the twentieth century, Lani struggles to make sense of the people and the world around her and how it all relates to her. Fairly standard fare for a novel about – and for – young adults.

Rebecca O’Connor has crafted a fine work with rounded, believable characters. Lani tells her story in her own words and describes vicissitudes of dealing with parents, girls at school, rules, expectations and the boy she decides is hers, even before she has properly met him.

“He used to walk by our house every day at the same time, up past Molly’s house to the cemetery.” (more…)

Bonesland
Brendan Lawley
ISBN: 9781925603583
$19.99
309 pp
Text Publishing 2018

To an older, white male living in a ‘genteel’ suburb of Melbourne (Australia), some other suburbs and some rural towns can look and sound like a foreign country. Bonesland unfolds in such a ‘foreign’ setting.

Most of the characters are teenagers, in themselves members of a foreign group to this reader. The narrator, a sixteen-year-old white boy, ‘suffers’ from a form of OCD and may be somewhere on the autism spectrum or have mild Asperger’s. He has an older brother and a collection of disparate friends. One of these, Jimmy, mostly talks like an American rapper. Throw into this an older boy who relentlessly bullies Bones and an African-American female exchange student, and Brendan Lawley creates a potent first novel. (more…)

28
Christopher Lappas
Ilura Press 2017
ISBN: 9781921325304
$28.00
336 pp

One of the highest praises I can offer for a debut novel is, when I have finished reading it, to immediately hope that the author writes another one.

28 is the central character of this complex work and she is an enigma – to herself, to the narrator, Scribe, and to the reader. However, Christopher Lappas treats us to three other important and strong characters: Scribe himself, Scribe’s young son Andre and Scribe’s X. (more…)

Ida
Alison Evans
Echo Publishing, 2017
ISBN: 9781760404383
$19.99
244 pp

There have been many novels about people with multiple personalities or split ones. This book is very different from any I’ve read – one character, one personality, multiple existences.

Alison Evans breaks new ground: as an author and in the creation of the characters who inhabit this gripping book. Alison identifies as genderqueer – she doesn’t identify as male or female and eschews the female and male third person personal pronouns, using ‘they’ instead. One of the characters in Ida’s world, Daisy, reflects this. (more…)

The Dry
Jane Harper
ISBN: 9781925481372
$17
342 pp
Pan Macmillan 2016

A novel needs strong characters. These are usually human, sometimes animal. They are rarely the condition of the weather or a whole town.

In The Dry, Jane Harper manages to make of both the relentlessly hot drought and the oppressive rural Australian town two palpable characters that potently influence the thoughts and behaviours of the other, human, characters. The weather and the town are both portrayed as malevolent organisms. (more…)

Good Me Bad Me
Ali Land
ISBN: 9781405923910
$20
340 pp
Penguin 2017

What makes someone a bad person in the eyes of others? Annie has become who she is largely through her mother’s habit of killing children in her home in the west of England and making Annie watch.

In her mid-teens Annie finally ‘escapes’ and goes to the police with her blood-chilling story. She feels that this makes her a good person, though she is conflicted about standing up to her mother. Her mother is arrested and held in custody pending trial, and much of this thriller is set in the time between the arrest and the trial. Annie is to be the main prosecution witness and is sent to live, incognito, with a family in London for her own safety – only a few people know what and where she has come from. (more…)

Captive Prince Trilogy – Prince’s Gambit, Kings Rising
C S Pacat
Penguin Viking 2013-16
ISBN: 9780143799597 / 9780143799603 / 9780143799610
$19.99 each
262/376/341 pp

This trilogy is, at heart, a complex love story. We see it develop through the three books, heartrendingly and carnally. It is no ordinary romance, but one beset by intrigue, power, false starts and danger. (more…)