Tag: fiction

Book review: Ghost Cities by Siang Lu

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Miles Franklin Literary Award winner Ghost Cities by Siang Lu is a unique and wacky novel inspired by China’s uninhabited megacities. The story spans dual timelines – Imperial China and Modern day China and Sydney.

where no matter what I try I can’t remember the details – only it was important and now I have lost it maybe forever – then I am dismembered. I have lost a part of myself. Violently so. That is actually how I feel. A dismemberment. Is that strange?

Xiang Lu, a Chinese Australian is fired from his job at the Chinese consulate in Sydney when it’s discovered he’s been using Google Translate for his work as he doesn’t speak Chinese. #BadChinese goes viral on social media and Chinese film director Baby Boa engages Xiang Lu to attract attention for his latest film. Boa has turned one of China’s ghost cities into a 24/7 film set, where all the population are actors. 

In the ancient timeline an Imperial Emperor who rules with an iron fist at a time of concubines, Royal decrees and official tasters, has 1000 doubles because he is afraid of being assassinated. They all start making Royal decisions.

Word travelled fast. By the time of His coronation, rumour was already circulating the courts that young Lu Huang Du had conspired to usurp His father’s throne. Well, he certainly had not planned it that way, but He was nothing if not an opportunist. When whispers of patricide and regicide spread through the Imperial Court, He uttered not denials.

Ghost Cities is a wild ride – part historical and part contemporary fiction, urban fantasy and satire all rolled into one. An imaginative tale about power, superstition, corruption, and how illusion and reality intersect. There is even a love story in there amongst all the chaos. 

Book review: The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

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I met an old friend from high school once who had experienced a traumatic head injury – we rode horses at the same place. She had almost photographic recall of long term memories from high school, but almost no short memory. Every time we encountered each other it was as if we were meeting for the first time after many years, and we would often cover the same territory in discussion – remembering our highs school days. The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa reminded me of that time. The story is a sweet domestic drama set in Japan.

A problem isn’t finished just because you’ve found the right answer.

A housekeeper who is single mother to a young boy is placed by an employment agency with a new client. He is an old man who lives in a two room apartment at the back of his sister-in-laws house. The professor is a brilliant mathematician who’s short term memory only lasts 80 minutes after a traumatic head injury in a car accident. Pinned all over his suit are reminder notes he has written to himself to try and remember things that matter. The disability has not interfered with his ability to solve complex mathematical problems. 

Solving a problem for which you know there’s an answer is like climbing a mountain with a guide, along a trail someone else has laid. In mathematics, the truth is somewhere out there in a place no one knows, beyond all the beaten paths. And it’s not always at the top of the mountain. It might be in a crack on the smoothest cliff or somewhere deep in the valley.

The professor asks the housekeeper for her phone number and shoe size and explains the significant of those numbers, then draws a picture of her and pins it to his jacket.

Soon after I began working for the Professor, I realized that he talked about numbers whenever he was unsure of what to say or do. Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world. They were safe, a source of comfort.

One day the housekeeper has to take her son to work with her and he and the professor become friends. He calls the boy Root, after the square root sign, because the top of his head is flat. They bond over baseball and maths homework.

He treated Root exactly as he treated prime numbers. For him, primes were the base on which all other natural numbers relied; and children were the foundation of everything worthwhile in the adult world

The Housekeeper and the Professor is an study of number theory – prime numbers, triangular numbers, amicable numbers – and a gentle exploration of relationships without memory.

Book review: All Fours by Miranda July

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All Fours by Miranda July is a novel about what happens when creativity, peri-menopause, lingering trauma from a premature birth, and an emotionally and sexually distant marriage collide in an existential crisis. 

All of the hormones that made me want to seem approachable so I could breed are gone and replaced by hormones that are fiercely protective of my autonomy and freedom

The 45 year old narrator (unnamed) is an artist who became mildly famous at a young age and works in several mediums. She lives in California with her husband Harris and their non-binary child Sam. After getting an unexpected windfall from a piece of work she completed, and dealing with a creative block, she decides to take a solo road trip across the country to New York. Her best friend Jordi encourages her to spent the windfall on beauty. The trip will give her time to think and reevaluate life and a stay in the Carlye will be luxurious. Much of the story is relayed via phone calls between our narrator and Jordi with whom she shares everything.

Each person does the amount of lying that is right for them. You have to know yourself and fulfill the amount of untruth that your constitution requires.

Twenty minutes from home she has an encounter with a young man, Davey, who cleans her windscreen and they meet again at the place she stops to eat. She books overnight in a motel in the town. Then she decides to stay there rather than drive to New York and spends twenty thousand dollars commissioning Davey’s wife Claire to redesign the motel room. Over the next three weeks she has an intense emotional liaison with Davey.

A lot of women destroy their lives in their forties and then one day they wake up with no periods and no partner and only themselves to blame

When she returns home she cannot shake her obsession with Davey, dissatisfaction with her marriage, and her changing hormones. 

The women I dated were often my age, that was fine. But the men always had to be older than me because if they were my same age then it became too obvious how much more powerful I was and this was a turnoff for both of us. Men needed a head start for it to be even.

I loved the strange idiosyncratic subversion of this novel and the naked examination of the narrators interiority and fantasies. Skilfully crafted and brimming with funny one liners All Fours is a novel about women questioning in mid-life. A must read for women of a certain age.

Book review: The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş

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At only 186 pages, The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş is a short intimate narrative about daily life. Asya and her husband Manu have lived abroad in an unnamed foreign country for a few years. Asya is a documentary filmmaker and Manu works for a not-for-profit. 

Asya, my grandmother said, don’t complicate the point. We named you after a whole continent and you’re filming a park.

They worry that they are not living a normal life trajectory, they are playing at being adults rather than committing. They made two decisions to in response to that anxiety. Asya decides to make a film about a local park, and the two decide to look into buying a house.

In a moment of panic, we decided to look for a home.

The story follows Asya as she makes her film and interviews people in the park, and we go with the couple as they look at properties to buy. While these two activities comprise the spine of the plot we also gain insights into Asya and Manus’s lives – their friends dynamics, their parents, and their elderly neighbour with declining health who they visit for tea and to read poetry to.

All the months that I had been filming, I’d thought that there were so many ways of living, of inhabiting the park. I wanted to know as many configurations as possible, all the strange and unique ways. But lately, as I went over the scenes again and again, smoothing their edges, positioning them into a fluid conversation, I’d begun to understand that there was, also, only one way to live beneath the multitude of forms, one way forward through the fleeting hours of the day.

The story is told from Asya’s point of view and reveals her reflections on her days, and ponderings on what she wants her life to be. The ordinariness and subtlety of The Anthropologists, along with the beautiful prose are what make it a delight to read. The ordinary moments of life can also be the most significant.

Where do I feel most like myself? I don’t know how to answer that question. I guess I’m still looking.

The style and feel of The Anthropologists was reminiscent to me of other tender novels like Cold Enough for Snow and Days at the Morisaki Bookshop. 

Book review: Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors

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Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors is a pre-covid New York urban fiction novel populated with flawed, and sometimes unlikeable characters – simply because they are ordinary humans. The characters are at times lacking insight, bad at arguing, codependent and avoidant.

When the darkest part of you meets the darkest part of me, it creates light.

Twenty four year old Cleo is a painter with ambition but not motivation, and her student visa is about to expire. Enter Frank – they meet after a New Year’s Eve party. Frank is a fortyish advertising agency owner. The chemistry is instant and the two marry after a very short courtship – Cleo swears it’s not just the visa, there are others she could have married for that.

Love looks through spectacles that make copper look like gold, poverty like riches, and tears like pearls.

The relationship soon begins to unravel into addiction, loneliness and betrayal, both haunted by past baggage that prevents them from functioning well together. As their relationship turns sour, they start to turn on one another.

I’m so lonely I could make a map of my loneliness….Sometimes I’m so lonely I’m not even on that map.

They are surrounded by friends, who due to their own struggles, are unable to support them. Frank’s half-sister, aspiring actress Zoe, relies on him for handouts to support her, and his best friend Anders is in love with Cleo. Cleo’s best friend Quintin struggles with his sexuality.

He wished he loved her a little more or hated her a little less, something to tip the scale. Instead, he lived in the fraught balance between the two, each increasing the intensity of the other….

Due to their inability to connect effectively with one another, Frank turns to Eleanor and Cleo turns to Anders.

Everybody’s got a hungry heart. The trick is to learn when you’re eating to fill the heart instead of the stomach. Feeding the stomach, she said, is easy. That’s just diet. It’s learning how to feed the heart that’s hard.

Cleopatra and Frankenstein is a meander about the ordinary struggles of life with the self and others, and about falling in and out of love. The novel is primarily character driven with lots of big intense feelings. If you like action, it might not be for you as the plot is loose.

Book review: The Road Trip by Beth O’Leary

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Who doesn’t love a road trip?

The Road Trip by Beth O’Leary is set in Scotland. Sisters Addie and Deb are on a road trip in their Mini to attend a friends wedding in the north. Accompanying them is some random guy from Facebook called Rodney who needed a lift. 

But that’s the thing about almost: you can be ninety-nine per cent there, you can be an inch away from doing it, but if you stop yourself from stepping over that line, nobody will ever know how close you were.

Part way into their trip another car slams into the rear end of the Mini. The offending driver is Addie’s ex, Dylan who she’s been avoiding since their break up two years prior. Dylan is accompanied by his best friend Marcus, a spoilt, rich man-child with addiction issues.

Everyone’s got the potential to do the wrong thing—if we were measured that way, we’d all come up short. It’s about what you do.

Dylans car is wrecked, so Addie offers he and Marcus a lift. The Mini is soon straining with sweat, resentment, unfinished business, bottled up frustration and seething anger. And just a little bit of sexual tension.

The story line covers two time frames, the current one in the car and the time when Addie and Dylan first met, while she was working as caretaker of his families villa.

Love as a bargain. Like, giving up your heart is scary, but doable if the other person does it at the exact same moment, like two soldiers lowering their weapons.

The big question is will Dylan and Addie reunite?

The Road Trip is a rollercoaster with many laugh out loud moments, plenty of tension and awkwardness, misunderstandings and misdirections.  An easy light read.

Book review: There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

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Water will always find a way. Water is life-giving, scarce (despite covering over 70% of the earth’s surface) and political.

Water is the consummate immigrant, trapped in transit, never able to settle.

There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak revolves around the points of view of three characters, spans centuries and moves between London, Ancient Mesopotamia, Turkey and Iraq.  Shafak is also the author of The Island of Missing Trees.

Home is where your absence is felt, the echo of your voice kept alive, no matter how long you have been away or how far you may have strayed, a place that still beats with the pulse of your heart.

Narin is a young Yazidis girl who lives near the Tigris and is gradually losing her hearing. Her grandmother is determined that Narin be baptised in the Valley of Lalish in Iraq. The Yazidis community has been subject to persecution since the year 637 of the Common Era.

Better to be a gentle soul than one consumed by anger, resentment and vengeance. Anyone can wage war, but maintaining peace is a difficult thing.

Arthur is highly intelligent and has a brilliant memory but was born into extreme poverty in London in 1840 near the river Thames.  Arthur begins his working life in a publishing house, but his passion is a quest for the sacred tablets that depict poems dating back to Mesopatamia. Arthur’s character is based on Assyriologist George Smith, who first discovered and translated the The Epic of Gilgamesh.

It is an odd thing, to lose faith in the beliefs you once held firmly. How strange it is to have carried your convictions like a set of keys, only to realize they will not open any doors.

Zleekhah is a hydrologist who moves to live in a houseboat on the Chelsea Embankment on the River Thames in 2018 after her marriage fails. The houseboat is owned by a tattooist who befriends her, and then becomes her lover. Zleekhah studies the lifecycle of rainfall and her character gives voice to the water crisis unfolding from climate change.

As ripples of heat rise into the air, the raindrop will slowly evaporate. But it won’t disappear. Sooner or later, that tiny, translucent bead of water will ascend back to the blue skies. Once there, it will bide its time, waiting to return to this troubled earth again…and again. Water remembers. It is humans who forget.

The story begins  in ancient Mesopotamia with a droplet of water falling into the hair of erudite king Ashurbanipal. We follow the raindrop through cycles, forms and centuries as it interacts with each of the characters until it intersects in 2018 with the main protagonist Zaleekhah Clarke who is fascinated by the notion that water might have memory.

She wants to excuse herself from a world where she often feels like an outsider, a confused and clumsy latecomer, an accidental guest who walked in through the wrong door at the wrong time.

It is hard to imagine initially how the disparate threads will come together, but they do. Along the way you learn about the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, the architecture and art of Mesopotamia, cuneiform writing, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the horrors of living under ISIS, as well as about life along the River Thames in the UK.

For every displaced person understands that uncertainty is not tangential to human existence but the very essence of it.

There are Rivers in the Sky is an exquisitely written, vibrant, rich and meticulously researched story. Sharak is a great story teller and the novel is both intellectually stimulating and thought provoking. 

people fall into three camps: those who hardly, if ever, see beauty, even when it strikes them between the eyes; those who recognise it only when it is made apparent to them; and those rare souls who find beauty everywhere they turn, even in the most unexpected places.

Book review: The Awkward Truth by Lee Winter

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The Awkward Truth by Lee Winter is a fun light lesbian mystery-romcom.

Protagonist Felicity Simmons is a socially awkward but brilliant corporate lawyer, and a tough negotiator who takes independence and self-sufficiency to the extreme. Totally career focussed, she doesn’t need friends, though she does worship her mentor-boss. Felicity is the protégé of Elena Bartell, media tycoon and owner of Bartell Corporation and is in training to become COO because Elena wants to move to Sydney.

“I’m perfectly calm,” Felicity snapped. “You know, this is not the first time I’ve been treated as though I’m some zoo oddity to be picked apart. People often assume the worst about me because I don’t conform to how they think I should be. I’m not warm enough. I don’t smile enough. I don’t hold my tongue or lie or coddle to protect fragile egos. Apparently, I have ‘all the maternal instincts of an alpine glacier.’ Direct quote from my previous boss.”

Felicity is a bit prickly. Her boss Elena sends her protégé off to investigate the charity Living Ruff that provides vet services to the pets of people experiencing homelessness. The charity has announced it’s in financial trouble and about to fold and Elena wants to know what happened to a significant $1.4 million donation she gave it recently. She also wants to test whether Felicity has a heart.

“Then it seems to me you have a choice. Show her she’s wrong about you. Or do absolutely nothing. Those are your options. But understand that if you want to know what your life will be like in ten years, change nothing now.”

Felicity is eager to impress, and takes her logic and smarts off to visit the homeless charity and sort it out. This is where she meets the kind, humble amazonian veterinarian Dr Sandy Cooper. Gradually Felicity starts to see the world through different eyes.

As long as she lived, Felicity would never forget what she’d just seen. It hadn’t ever occurred to her that a powerful, imposing woman might need a Harvey in her life. He seemed to recharge her emotional reserves. That’s why Rosalind loved her mild-mannered bookkeeper. Among other things, he kept her going when she was drained by a demanding world.

The Awkward Truth is a fun engaging opposites attract mystery with bold characters. The story reflects on the notion that the peaks of success are a lonely place without a passion, compassion and people to connect and share you endeavours with. It also explores homelessness, human-animal relationships, and how being confronted by those things can impact and change others. I particularly liked the charity/cute pets element.

Book review: Blue Sisters By Coco Mellors

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Set across Paris, LA, London and New York, Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors is about four very different sisters, one of whom (Nicky) has recently died in an accident. Each chapter follows a different remaining sister (Avery, Bonnie, Lucky) as they grapple with grief and self-destructive behaviours. A year after Nicky’s death the sisters meet up in New York City when their parents have decided to sell Nicky’s apartment.

Barely perceptibly, unnoticed by anyone else, they leaned toward each other, like plants for whom the other was the sun.

The remaining sisters are between mid twenties and mid thirties. Each leads a very different life. Avery the oldest is a former addict turned corporate lawyer married to a woman who was her therapist. Bonnie is a champion boxer working as a bouncer in Los Angeles and in love with her boxing coach though neither have acknowledge this. Lucky the youngest has been a model since she was fifteen and lives the party life in Paris. The deceased sister Nicky was a Manhattan high school English teacher who longed to become a mother but died from an overdose of painkillers taken to try and manage very painful endometriosis. 

The trick to loving Lucky, Bonnie wanted to tell Avery, was to respect her need to be free. Let her come and go as she pleased and eventually, she would land on you

Avery’s carefully managed life starts to crack under the strain of her grief.  Lucky’s drug fuelled party life leaves her feeling more and more isolated. Bonnie takes out her grief fuelled rage on a racist patron at the bar she works at.

None of us really know what another is going through until that person feels able to share the truth of their lived experience.

As the story unfolds family and sibling dynamics and triggers and their influence on shaping character are gradually unveiled. This forms the spine of the novel which shows how these dynamics impact day to day life of each of the sisters in their relationships with each other and their relationships with other people. There is a great Freudian tension throughout. 

Avery had previously thought love was built on large, visible gestures, but a marriage turned out to be the accrual of ordinary, almost inconsequential, acts of daily devotion—washing the mugs left in the sink before bed, taking the time to run up or downstairs to kiss each other quickly before one left the house, cutting up an extra piece of fruit to share—acts easy to miss, but if ever gone, deeply missed.

Themes in Blue Sisters include grief, sibling relationships and the impact of addiction in families. The prose is beautiful, rich and visceral and the characterisation is an excellent driver of tension throughout. Blue Sisters is a great read even for someone who doesn’t have sisters.

Once you get to my age, you will learn that you can take a lot of wrong turns and still end up in the right place.

Book Review: Bottom of The Breath by Jayne Mills

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Debut novel Bottom of the Breath by American author Jayne Mills is intriguing from the opening. It is a story about a woman called Cyd coming to terms with revelatory family secrets after receiving a surprise inheritance, overcoming betrayal, and facing her fears to discover that she is much stronger than she believed herself to be.

Helen’s recipe for a happy life, then and now: Stop wanting something other than what is. 

There is a massive storm heading straight for the small coastal town of Lola in Florida and the residents are battening down the hatches in preparation. The approaching hurricane provides an ominous backdrop and sense of foreboding to the beginning of Cyd’s story and is a great vehicle to amplify the tensions emerging in her life. Cyd is helping her friends Helen and Nick for prepare the Osprey Cafe for the onslaught of the storm. 

I’ve lost my ability to imagine what I should do or can do. I need something or someone to believe in.

Nick asks Cyd to drive to a nearby town to pick up some supplies for the café and she agrees despite an aversion to driving. Noticing patterns in the everyday, Cyd experiences a surge of happiness when she glances at the car’s clock and sees the time 11:11 right before a cataclysmic event. When Cyd discovers the circumstances of what happened to her it disrupts her life and her sense of self, and a transformative journey begins.

There is no beginning and no end, just layer upon layer of rock and sediment for as far as she can see, dug through to expose the very heart of the earth. The colors are endless, at once muted and brilliant: purples and blues, oranges and golds, deep green and stark white. There are cliffs and gullies, mesas and buttes, and sandstone walls penetrating a vertical mile from top to bottom.

Travelling from Florida to Sedona and the Grand Canyon in Arizona, Cyd goes in search of answers, and in search of self. I remember visiting the Grand Canyon back in 2005 and being in awe of its vastness and Mills does a great job of capturing that sense. The Grand Canyon scenes are another example of environment as character in the story and how nature can shape us. I particularly enjoyed this element of Bottom of the Breath.

It represents beginnings and endings, the natural passage of the cycles of life. The perfection of the path that has led her to this moment is as clear as the stream she waded in the previous day. There is no room for regret. Regret is wasted energy. None of her past can be changed nor should it be. Only her mindset can change. The story can change.

Bottom of the Breath is contemporary fiction with elements of adventure, mystery and romance. Discover a new literary voice by pre-ordering Bottom of the Breath now from your preferred bookstore or it will be available for general released on July 8, 2025, published by She Writes Press. Thanks to Jayne Mills and She Writes Press for the ARC.

While I was reading Bottom of the Breath some questions came to mind that I wanted to ask Jayne and she was kind enough to take the time to respond:

What inspired you to write this particular book?  I’ve heard it said that oftentimes the book you set out to write is not the book you actually write. That was true for me. The first germ of an idea was one I carried around for decades. It is based on a true family secret. After the shock of what I learned wore off a bit, I thought, “This would make a great book.” Much of the story changed as I wrote, but that part never did.

What was most challenging in the writing of the book? You don’t know what you don’t know. Although I have always been a voracious reader, it wasn’t until I wrote the first draft of this book that I realized how little I knew about structuring a novel. I had to study the craft over the course of years as I wrote. I also had to write as much as I could while working full-time in my “real” job as a portfolio manager. I would tell any writer, don’t doubt that you can write a book in 15-minute intervals. You absolutely can!

What’s your favorite part of the writing process? I love writing. It’s my meditation. I truly never tire of it.

Do you have a specific writing routine or environment? I wrote this book whenever I could, mostly early mornings and weekends. But I will write whenever and wherever. I don’t have a particular routine as far as a place or a word-count goal. My life is too varied for that type of structure. I am a disciplined and determined person, though, so that helped me stay committed over a long period of time.

What are you working on now? I’m working on my second novel, which is set in my hometown of St. Augustine, Florida, the nation’s oldest city. I love setting. It plays a huge role in Bottom of the Breath, and it will play a big role in my next book. St. Augustine is steeped in history and is known for its ghost stories. The town and some of its past residents will be part of my next literary adventure. I’ve also gone deep down into the astrology rabbit hole over the past couple of years. It’s my latest obsession, and I’m studying every chance I get.

What authors inspire you? So, so many. I love everything by Liane Moriarty and Ann Patchett. Lauren Groff and Maria Semple are incredible. I just discovered Eleanor Lipman, who is delightful, and I recently devoured Bear by Julia Phillips. Alice Munro and Claire Keegan are among my favorite short story writers. I just reread Jane Eyre. (It was my mother’s favorite.) And I’m reading Constance Fenimore Woolson, who wrote in St. Augustine in the late 1800s as part of the research for my next novel. (Yes, I read men, too! I thoroughly enjoyed Who is Rich by Matthew Klam, and I could read Breakfast at Tiffany’s every year.)