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Judith Armstrong

Judith Armstrong

Judith Armstrong’s most recent book, War & Peace and Sonya, has just been republished in London by the Unicorn Press.

Judith Armstrong reviews 'The Fern Tattoo' by David Brooks

November 2007, no. 296 • 01 December 2007
In these litigious days, should I declare a tenuous bias in favour of David Brooks (whom I know not at all)? According to an extensive list of previous publications, which includes poetry, short fiction, essays and one earlier novel, he has devoted several editorial enterprises to the poet A.D. Hope. I too admired Hope, for his passionate admiration for Russian literature, which he sometimes lectu ... (read more)

Judith Armstrong reviews 'Ransacking Paris' by Patti Miller

June-July 2015, no. 372 • 29 May 2015
Patti Miller has written four books of or about memoir, one of which, The Mind of a Thief (UQP, 2012) won the New South Wales Premier’s History Award, and she has taught life writing for more than twenty years. Yet her most recent publication, Ransacking Paris, while enjoyable at one level, is disappointing at another. There is a serious mismatch between form and content, the jarring discrepancy ... (read more)

Judith Armstrong reviews 'Goodbye Sweetheart' by Marion Halligan

April 2015, no. 370 • 26 March 2015
Marion Halligan is a prolific writer, and this is not the first time I have reviewed one of her books. Once, when she branched out into the genre of lightweight crime – The Apricot Colonel (2006) and Murder on the Apricot Coast (2008) – I commented on the problem faced by Cassandra, the novel’s narrator. An editor-turned-author, she turns out books less highbrow than those she is used to edi ... (read more)

Judith Armstrong reviews 'Who We Were' by Lucy Neave

June 2013, no. 352 • 26 May 2013
The nub of this first novel is a good one. Even those who weren’t alive in the early 1950s will have heard of Joseph McCarthy. Fired by the tensions of the Cold War but with scant regard for hard evidence, the US Republican senator made his reputation by accusing numerous individuals of communist sympathies, possible disloyalty, and/or treason. Intellectuals of every kind were a particular targe ... (read more)

Judith Armstrong reviews 'Chasing the Light: A Novel of Antarctica' by Jesse Blackadder

April 2013, no. 350 • 26 March 2013
The 2012 centenary of the dramatic Scott–Amundsen race to reach the South Pole prompted several new non-fiction books on Antarctica. No fewer than five of them were reviewed in the December–January edition of London’s Literary Review, a welcome reminder of the superb Ferocious Summer (Profile Books, 2007) by Australian author Meredith Hooper, which won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Non ... (read more)

Judith Armstrong reviews 'Shooting the Fox' by Marion Halligan

June 2011, no. 332 • 24 May 2011
This is a book of rather brief short stories, few of which exceed a dozen pages. This leaves room for nineteen stories in a fairly short collection. Most of them read easily, each one effortlessly displacing its predecessor. There are, of course, standouts, to which I shall return, but the most striking overall characteristic is the distinctively personalised tone. The wide variety of personae not ... (read more)