Francesca Sasnaitis

I grew up in a New Australian household, and admit at the outset to a biased view. My Lithuanian-born parents were actual Baltic immigrants among the other nationalities referred to by the blanket designation ‘Balt’. Much of the anecdotal material of Jayne Persian’s Beautiful Balts was deeply familiar to me from childhood ...

On the Blue Train is Kristel Thornell’s reimagining of Agatha Christie’s mysterious disappearance in 1926. Thornell might have let her imagination fly, given that both Dorothy ...

Like any good storyteller, Christopher Heathcote begins by setting the scene: ‘one of those scruffy unpaved streets on the outer fringe’ of Melbourne on a wintry day in 1956 ...

Life, one of Commonwealth's minor characters remarks, is a series of losses. Teresa Cousins acknowledges that life is also other, better things, but that it is the losses that define us ...

Brian Stoddart is a scholar and expert in the history of modern India, with sixteen works of non-fiction to his credit. His first novel, A Madras Miasma, is set soon after World War I. The body of an Englishwoman is found with her head buried in the rancid mud of the Buckingham Canal, behind Chepak Palace. Superintendent Christian Jolyon Brenton Le Fanu, head of the recently formed Madras City Crime Unit, and his Muslim sidekick, Sergeant Mohammad Habibullah, must solve the case as quickly as possible. They are hampered by the teeming and uncooperative population of the riverbanks, political unrest, the disquiet of the British ruling class, and, to top things off, the truculent Commissioner of Police Arthur Jepson, who is determined to ‘take [Le Fanu] out’.