At the halfway point of 2023, here are the highlights of my reading year so far, including a Saudi Arabian novel, a history of Algeria and an Australian masterpiece.
An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire is an Australian crime novel that throws the crime-writing conventions out of the window. It's more about male violence and sexual aggression than about solving the murder with which it starts.
I love the writing of Jorge Luis Borges. Back in the early days of this blog, I was so deeply affected by reading his collection of ‘fictions’ that I broke my optimistic vow of reviewing every book I read. It…
I learnt about Of Ashes and Rivers That Run to the Sea from Emma’s excellent review on Book Around the Corner. It’s a very moving memoir by a woman, Marie Munkara, who was taken from her Aboriginal family in northern Australia…
Andrew Blackman Literary fiction writer Welcome to my blog. You’ll find 15+ years of posts about books, reading, politics and travel. You can also find out more about my two published novels and hundreds of published articles, essays, book reviews…
Belated news that I had a short story published earlier this year by a small Australian publisher, In Short Publishing. The story is called Boy, Dog, Accordion, and it's published as a pocket-size book.
The first thing to say about this book is that the prose is just stunning. It had me hooked from the first lines: Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her…