Catherine Kenneally

Here it is, nearly Christmas, and as usual, the list of Books I Have Read is running into the hundreds, and I have that end-of-year mad, fleeting illusion that also afflicts exam-fevered students … that somehow it All Adds Up. I won’t make the mistake here, though, of trying to make the following selection of books add up in any cosmic way. I’d just like, in quite a pedestrian way, to take ... (read more)

‘One day in the middle of the nineteenth century, when settlement in Queensland had advanced scarcely more than halfway up the coast …’ The opening lines of the novel seek to place it and us squarely in the discourse of history; to require that we lay aside the credulity with which the reader welcomes in romance and fantasy and become fellow-enquirers into the world of factual record, popula ... (read more)

You can’t write a review of millenarian ‘time-pieces’ without showing your hand. I hereby declare that the first thing I do on looking into such a collection is a simple calculation, to which the answer in this case is 16:25. Not bad, certainly, if you compare it to a similar notional collection prepared just before 1000 CE. Not great, either. In the spirit of these times, rather than those ... (read more)