The Age
Gideon Haigh is one of the great cricket writers going round, so any new collection is very welcome. Chris Wallace-Crabb finds his latest, The Green and Gold: Writings on Australian Cricket Today "is in its timing, a triumphalist book. Its wandering islands are all to be found within an Aussie period of triumph, ending just before our failure to win the Twenty 20 Championship, taken out by India who fare poorly in the book." But Haigh is constrained by the requirements of the original publications - writing for the dailies doesn't allow enough room for contemplation. "The reader keeps starting and stopping, even if he or she picks up a fair bit about the politics of the modern game."
I found a lot to like about Venero Armanno's previous novel Candle Life, only to feel a bit let down by the ending. Peter Pierce considers Armanno to now be "near the forefront of contemporary Australian novelists" which is a big call. The author's new work "The Dirty Beat is a bold, original and moving reckoning of a life in those final post-mortem moments."
The Australian
Graeme Blundell is pretty taken with Skin and Bone by Kathryn Fox, saying she writes better than Kathy Reichs and less baroque than Patricia Cornwell. "Sydney-based Fox has parlayed her interest in forensic medicine into a full-time career as a thriller writer after three best-selling novels in a highly competitive field. She is the author of the internationally successful and critically acclaimed Malicious Intent and Without Consent published in more than 20 countries."
The Orphan Gunner is another fine publication from Giramondo, and is reviewed by Kathy Hunt. "Inspired by love letters found accidentally behind a family photo frame, Knox had in mind 'an alternative, yet historically accurate, image of war' in which same-sex relationships take their rightful place as 'realities of the period'...Sensitively written and intelligently crafted, The Orphan Gunner reminds us of the manifold possibilities of love and, even now, the fraught cultural pluralities of that many splendoured thing."
Richard King finds that Glyn Parry's first novel for adults, Ocean Road, doesn't quite make it. "The problem with the book is the lack of an interesting voice at its core. In the absence of any extraordinary incident (marital breakdown is a tragic phenomenon but not, alas, an unusual one), the narrator assumes responsibility for bringing the reader into the story. Unfortunately, the narrator's internal life seems to be almost nonexistent."
