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Jane Sullivan

Half Moon Lake by Kirsten Alexander

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January-February 2019, no. 408
Jane Sullivan reviews 'Half Moon Lake' by Kirsten Alexander

What is it that so fascinates us about lost children? Whether fact or fiction, their stories keep surfacing: Azaria Chamberlain, Jaidyn Leskie, the Beaumont children, or the schoolgirls Joan Lindsay dreamed up for her 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock. Indeed, those girls have wafted through so many subsequent incarnations ...

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Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko

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October 2018, no. 405
Jane Sullivan reviews 'Too Much Lip' by Melissa Lucashenko

A stranger rides into a one-horse town on a shiny new motorbike. Cue Ennio Morricone music. Except it’s not a stranger, it’s that skinny dark girl Kerry Salter, back to say goodbye to her Pop before he falls off the perch. The first conversation she has is in the Bundjalung language ...

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2017 Books of the Year

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December 2017, no. 397

To celebrate the best books of 2017 Australian Book Review invited nearly forty contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors include Michelle de Kretser, Susan Wyndham, James Ley, Geordie Williamson, Jane Sullivan, Tom Griffiths, Mark Edele, and Brenda Niall.

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The Dark Flood Rises by Margaret Drabble

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December 2016, no. 387
Jane Sullivan reviews 'The Dark Flood Rises' by Margaret Drabble

I’ve been reading Margaret Drabble’s novels with great pleasure for most of my life, and we’ve all been getting on a bit: Drabble, me, her readers, her characters. So I suppose ...

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Books of the Year 2016

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December 2016, no. 387

Originally published in German, Albrecht Dümling’s The Vanished Musicians: Jewish refugees in Australia (Peter Lang), a fascinating compendium of Jewish musicians who found refuge in Australia in the 1930s and 1940s, is now available in Australian Diana K. Weekes’s excellent translation ...

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Napoleon’s Roads by David Brooks

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March 2016, no. 379
Jane Sullivan reviews 'Napoleon’s Roads' by David Brooks

'Why do we write?' asks David Brooks at the start of this exhilarating collection of short stories. 'What are we groping for?' The entire collection seems like an attempt to answer a question that the author acknowledges is unanswerable. Yet there is no futility here. His groping, as he calls it, charms and disturbs and conjures up images of extraordinary, if fleeti ...

Books of the Year 2015

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December 2015, no. 377

Jennifer Maiden's The Fox Petition: New Poems (Giramondo) conjures foxes 'whose eyes were ghosts with pity' and foxes of language that transform the world's headlines

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Two years eight months and twenty-eight nights: a novel by Salman Rushdie

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November 2015, no. 376
Jane Sullivan reviews 'Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights' by Salman Rushdie

Kazuo Ishiguro recently sparked off a literary row about whether 'serious' writers should dabble in fantasy when he insisted rather too strongly that he was not writing fantasy in his latest novel The Buried Giant (2015). All those giants and pixies, knights and d ...

The Other Side of the World by Stephanie Bishop

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September 2015, no. 374
Jane Sullivan reviews 'The Other Side of the World' by Stephanie Bishop

One of the most potent stories we can tell is a story of migration. With the exception of indigenous people, every Australian originally came from somewhere else. Take just one source: the emigrants from England. Kate Grenville writes about her convict and settler ancestry in her

Oddfellows by Nicholas Shakespeare

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March 2015, no. 369
Jane Sullivan reviews 'Oddfellows' by Nicholas Shakespeare

Two aggrieved Islamic men follow a foreign cause and wage jihad on their fellow Australians. Shouting Allahu akbar, they stage an ambush, raise a home-made flag and open fire on hundreds of men, women and children. They escape and die in a final shoot-out. They leave four dead and seven wounded.

It could be ripped from today’s headlines – except it happened a hundred years ago. On New Year’s Day in 1915, Gul Mehmet and Molla Abdullah, denizens of Ghantown, the despised Afghan settlement on the outskirts of Broken Hill, took up arms against the town’s citizens as they rode the train to the annual Oddfellows picnic. They did so in the name of the Turkish Sultan, who was calling for resistance to the Anzac invaders in their home territory.

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