Kylie Stevenson

If you found the film Candy (2006) hard to swallow, with its junkie protagonists emerging from years of heroin addiction still looking like Hollywood film stars, then The Crimes of Billy Fish may be just what you need. Sarah Hopkins’s first novel has more in common with Luke Davies’ gritty novel Candy (1997), on which the film was based, than with the film’s improbable charms.

The Australian soap Neighbours maintains its popularity overseas. Busloads of UK tourists bound for Vermont South attest to this. The soap’s popularity lies in its reflection of the domestic and the mundane. It provides a safe means for overseas viewers to explore the exotic: the trials of the Ramsay Street clan are not so different from their own. Soon, thanks to author Célestine Hitiura Vaite, Tahiti may have its own busloads of tourists, searching for the petrol station in Faa´a PK55, location and setting for the domestic, everyday dramas of Breadfruit, Frangipani and Tiare.