Carmen Callil

Gillian Mears’s new novel tells the story of the Nancarrow family of One Tree Farm, subsistence farmers in rural New South Wales. Its heroine Noah (‘Noey’) is 14 when the novel begins in 1926; her daughter Lainey is a grandmother as it comes to …

“Don’t look back. You’ll turn into a pillar of shit,” is the opening quip, but this could never happen to Kate Jennings, who is in a sense presenting her autobiography in this trawl of selections from her writing life. Raised on a farm in New …

It is always a pleasure to read a biography by Hazel Rowley. She is an enthusiastic chronicler of the lives she chooses to present to us, and has considerable narrative and research talents. Her biography of Christina Stead remains her best. Always she …