Editorial reviews

A hybrid of nature journal and motherhood memoir sounds cynically on-trend, but Salt never feels anything less than wholly authentic.

What The Little Snake is about more than anything, though, is the acceptance of death as an ineluctable part of life. It’s not a new message, but Kennedy conveys it here in a manner that is subtle and hugely moving.

Ghost Wall is a burnished gem of a book, brief and brilliant, and with it Moss’s star is firmly in the ascendant.

In “The Little Snake,” the swift emotional slippages click along, one after another, sentence after sentence, like an intricate concatenation of rainbow-bright dominoes.

By overlooking questions of social justice and the politics of language, Teicher offers us a portrait of these poets that, however well rendered, is nevertheless incomplete.

Truthful narratives demand complexity. Stephen L. Carter has revived his grandmother’s voice when we most need it, and with utmost urgency.

His novel is weirdly somnolent given how portentously it primes us for danger, for the burning of mosques and blood in the streets.

The world would be poorer without Ghoul’s voice, without her warmth, her fury and her laughter.

It is mind-boggling enough just to contemplate the vastness of the challenge. To have written it all down so lucidly, engagingly and succinctly is a formidable achievement.

In Ghost Trees Gilbert rails gently against global warming and globalisation, and laments the decline of natural diversity and the loss of community that, he says, comes with it.

her book is a lucid guide to a story that became far more consequential than the titillation supplied by its salacious bits.

Evening in Paradise proves that Berlin's generous, beautiful spirit will endure in the literary world for decades to come.

His prose becomes lyrical as he transmits the shot-by-shot drama of the match. It’s what makes “The Circuit” such a joy to read: a poet’s love song to the game of tennis.

I adored it and absolutely everything about it and I hope beyond all hope that we're able to return to this world somewhere down the line!

Sadie is an attempt to open up the dialogue about why girls run away. I know all this in my mind and admire what Ms. Summers achieves with her story.

Gardam’s ability to bring people so fully to life, in such vivid detail, never fails to delight. Such vivid people and dialogue — more than many of her books, I could imagine this as a film.

The Penalty Area is charming, and it’s easy to imagine it being a film. If you need a bookish boost, you can’t go wrong with this story.

Overall, a smart, sharp-eyed, entertaining, engrossing story.

It’s the work of a writer at the top of his game – limber and lovely, delivering deep insights with delicacy and grace – and it poignantly makes the only case for climate action that has any chance of succeeding: that there is so much worth living for.

What does calm Berlin’s mind is nature, which creates a sustained pause in her work. Whenever her women feel despair, they find comfort in poplars, bougainvillea, hibiscus and gardenias. They plant seeds, but then they’re on the move again and rarely get to see them flourish.