If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting!   Venice is the only place in Italy I’ve been to–unless the countryside scudding along outside the train window counts–and it’s a city that straddles so many realities. With a foot on...

  I have a friend who’s a former chef. The only thing he loathes more than poor-quality coffee is the current trend of amateur food photography. “Wouldn’t you rather enjoy the food that someone’s prepared for you, and spend some time hanging out with your friends rather than fiddling around with the filters on Instagram?” he...

Upon the hill above the kirk at moon rise she did stand To tend her sheep that Samhain eve, with rowan staff in hand. And where she’s been and what she’s seen, no living soul may know And when she’s come back home, she will be changed – oh! I picked up Sharyn McCrumb’s The Songcatcher several years ago when on holiday in...

Melbourne is a city of serendipity and chance meetings, and I rather suspect that if Kevin Bacon lived in Melbourne I suspect that he would know everyone. I met my husband by chance–twice in one night at two different venues, in fact, but that’s a story for a forthcoming review–but continue to be astonished by just how much our social circles...

Languid, dark and poetic, The Wish House is unlike any young adult novel I’ve read recently. In fact, with its rich language and dark undercurrents it exhibits a similar aesthetic to Helen Dunmore’s Talking to the Dead. Even the setting is similar: a blazing hot summer, so hot that the world seems to fade and feather a little, and a ramshackle...

I’ve been known to complain about author blurbs on books, but in the case of One Mountain Away the cover quote is fitting indeed. Not only does it warn you up-front about the box of tissues you might need handy, but the quote comes from highly regarded women’s fiction author Diane Chamberlain, of whose work this book is strongly reminiscent: it...