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Jo Case
Jo Case is senior writer/editor for the Wheeler Centre. Her previous roles have included editor of Readings Monthly, the newsletter for Readings Books & Music, books editor of The Big Issue, co-editor of their annual fiction edition, and associate editor of Kill Your Darlings. Her reviews, essays and opinion pieces have been published in The Age, The Australian, and The Sydney Morning Herald, and her short stories have been published in the Sleepers Almanac and Best Australian Stories. Her first book, Boomer and Me: A memoir of motherhood, and Asperger’s, was published by Hardie Grant in Australia (April 2013).
Knitting, the first novel from ghostwriter and former professional knitter Anne Bartlett, tells the story of a newly widowed academic and her unexpected friendship with a gifted knitter that enables her to move on with her life. Bartlett’s rich (and uncredited) experience of writing other people’s stories puts this intimate exploration of women’s friendships in a different category from your ... (read more)
Phil Sparrow lived and worked as a UN aid worker in pre-9/11 Afghanistan for nearly three years. Evacuated when the country was attacked by the US, he returned to Australia and worked as an interpreter for Afghan refugees in Australia. In this book, Sparrow writes about his experiences in Afghanistan and Australia, and his reading of the Australian government’s response to refugees, particularly ... (read more)
Desperate Housewives, eat your heart out. This warm slice of smalltown gothic simmers with barely disguised marital discord, traumatic childhoods, eating disorders, bed-hopping and maternal angst – all centred around a playgroup in the South Australian town of Port Lincoln. Bitchy Madelaine, insecure Danica, sniffy Pauline, downtrodden Jo and earth-mother Nell have little in common but their chi ... (read more)
Addition is a trojan horse of a novel. It has a cutesy cover (featuring amorous toothbrushes), a kooky love story and a ‘hot’, wisecracking blonde heroine. There is a ‘hunky’ Irish love interest, Seamus O’Reilly, and a push-pull attraction of opposites between the romantic leads – whose first meeting, of course, is a witty war of words. But the heroine, Grace Vandenberg, is no ditsy Br ... (read more)
The world conjured by first-time novelist and veteran journalist Kate Legge in The Unexpected Elements of Love is disturbingly familiar. It is peopled by frantic working mothers, lonely single women battling the biological clock, ageing couples ‘rowing against the tide’ of dementia and ill health, and sensitive small children swallowing pill-packed marshmallows for ADHD, all set against the ba ... (read more)
Dissection was recently launched by Helen Garner, who described it as a novel like no other she had read. This impressive first novel is indeed astonishingly polished. Like Garner’s The Spare Room (2008), it dissects morally complex issues of life and death with a deceptively simple touch, using telling domestic detail to bring its characters and settings vividly to life on the page. The prose i ... (read more)
Cate Kennedy’s début collection, Dark Roots (2006), marked a change in publishers’ thinking about the commercial potential of short stories, and helped create the atmosphere in which Nam Le was signed up for his bestselling collection, The Boat (2008).
Kennedy was well known in literary circles before her book was published; she has won several of Australia’s leading short story competitio ... (read more)
In an intriguing coincidence, three recent novels by notable male writers feature central characters who, former members of world-famous rock bands, ruminate on the mess they made of the past. The notion of faded rock stars clearly provides much scope for exploring issues of male ego, sexuality and mid-life crisis. Unlike Nick Hornby (Juliet Naked) and Nick Earls (The Story of Butterfish), Steven ... (read more)
In the May issue of ABR, a new Australian novel was praised as being ‘a respite from the anodyne family dramas that seem to plague contemporary commercial publishing’. Of course, there are plenty of uninspiring domestic novels on bookshop shelves – just as there are uninspiring examples of every kind of novel – but when done well, contemporary family drama can be the opposite of anodyne, s ... (read more)