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Phil Brown

While I was reading this compelling but occasionally problematic novel, I started thinking about Oscar Wilde. Pretentious? Moi? The thing is, when I’m torn between opposing views of the same thing, I tend to think of Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol … ‘two men looked out from prison bars, one saw mud, the other stars’. So I found myself in two minds about this book, mainly because, two thirds of the way through, I began to lose sympathy for the main character, Esther Chatwin, wife of a contemporary Australian prime minister (no one we know), a woman none too keen on her role.

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Belomor by Nicolas Rothwell

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March 2013, no. 349

I am surprised this book doesn’t come in plain packaging. Its title was inspired, after all, by a cigarette – Belomorkanal, also known as Belomor, a Russian brand the author describes as ‘strong, mood-altering cigarettes’. This cigarette motif suggests the lost world of Europe, when the Iron Curtain still hung.

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Balancing the big picture with the intimate details that engage us when reading a novel is not easy. This latest book from veteran Australian author Tom Keneally is epic in scope, but takes us into the intimate worlds of particular people. This is the way to tell a story about an event as mammoth as World War I. Keneally, the author of Schindler’s Ark (1982) and many other fine works of fiction and non-fiction, knows this well and has done it many times before. This time around, though, the story is overwhelmed by the attention to detail on which he obviously prides himself.

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Small towns, as anyone who has lived in one can attest, abound in colourful characters. Or is it just that people’s peccadilloes are magnified without the distractions of the madding crowd? Rod Usher knows a thing or two about small towns; he happens to live in one: the village of Barcarrota in Extremadura, Spain. After a long career in journalism – including stints as literary editor of The Age, chief subeditor of The Sunday Times in London, and as a senior writer for TIME magazine in Europe – he opted for the quiet life to concentrate on his literary career. He has published two books of poetry, Above Water (1985) and Smiling Treason (1992), two previous novels, A Man of Marbles (1989) and Florid States (1990), and some non-fiction. Echoes of that work resound in the new book … but more of that later.

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A Month of Sundays by James O'Loghlin

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May 2005, no. 271

A good travel book is usually more than the mere chronicle of a journey, and a journey is often, but not always, a metaphor for something else altogether. Meanwhile, the act of departure can be read as an affirmation of life, an act of faith or, as is the case with James O’Loghlin, one of utter desperation.

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