June 1, 2021
‘Secrets of Happiness’ by Joan Silber
Culture
The American author’s Austenesque latest novel, a collage of short stories, traces the common pursuit of happiness through love and money
Helen Elliott
By this author
April 1, 2021
The lightness of unbearable being: ‘Double Blind’
Culture
Edward St Aubyn tackles familiar themes – desire, drug use, psychoanalysis – via a fresh suite of characters
May 1, 2021
‘Fury’ by Kathryn Heyman
Culture
With stripped-down eloquence, the Australian novelist delivers a raging memoir about her rape as a teenager
March 1, 2021
‘The Committed’ by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Culture
The philosophical thriller sequel to ‘The Sympathizer’ sends its Vietnamese protagonists to the Paris underworld
February 1, 2021
‘Fragile Monsters’ by Catherine Menon
Culture
Memories of the Malayan Emergency resurface when a mathematician returns to her home country, in the British author’s debut novel
December 1, 2020
‘Jack’ by Marilynne Robinson
Culture
History and suffering matter in the latest instalment of the American author’s Gilead novels
November 1, 2020
‘The Living Sea of Waking Dreams’ by Richard Flanagan
Culture
The Booker Prize winner’s allegorical new novel about the permanence of loss
October 1, 2020
‘The Time of Our Lives’ by Robert Dessaix
Culture
The memoirist’s latest, surprisingly unsettling instalment
September 1, 2020
‘Little Eyes’ by Samanta Schweblin (trans. Megan McDowell)
Culture
Intimacy and privacy blur as people adopt cybernetic pets inhabited remotely by others, in this disturbing speculative fiction
August 1, 2020
‘A Room Made of Leaves’ by Kate Grenville
Culture
The author of ‘The Secret River’ returns with a canny twist to fictionalise the life of Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of the Australian pioneering settler
July 1, 2020
‘The Rain Heron’ by Robbie Arnott
Culture
An unsettling near-future tale of soldiers hunting a mythic bird by ‘the Tasmanian Wordsworth’
June 1, 2020
‘The End of October’ by Lawrence Wright
Culture
A ‘New Yorker’ journalist’s eerily prescient novel about public-health officials fighting a runaway pandemic
May 1, 2020
‘Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982’ by Cho Nam-Joo (trans. Jamie Chang)
Culture
The coldly brilliant, bestselling South Korean novel describing the ambient harassment and discrimination experienced by women globally