Clive Small is a former detective and Assistant Commissioner of the NSW Police. His investigations included the murder of anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay, the Nugan Hand bank, the shooting of police officer Michael Drury, the murder of Cabramatta MP John Newman and the backpacker murders which led to Ivan Milat being convicted. Continue reading
Category Archives: Fiction
The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award
The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award is for an unpublished manuscript by a writer under the age of 35. It comes with $20,000 in prizemoney and publication of the winning novel.
This year’s award has been announced and the winner is Paul D. Carter for his ‘Eleven seasons’.
Previous winners are some of the most admired writers of contemporary Australian fiction: Tim Winton, Kate Grenville, Gillian Mears and Andrew McGahan. Continue reading
Book review: Sister by Rosamund Lupton- Thanh’s pick
This is a rather unusual book.
It presents itself as a crime thriller, the story of Tess, a missing young pregnant woman, later found dead in a toilet building, presumably by suicide.
Beatrice, her older sister, didn’t believe it, because it’s totally out of Tess’s character, a life-loving, joyous optimistic person, and because of other suspicious circumstances: there was cystic fibrosis in the family history, so Tess went through a trial test for genetic therapy for her unborn baby – the baby was supposedly cured but died of another disease.
Beatrice tried to unravel all the cover-ups, originally suspecting everyone – the illegitimate father of the baby, the love-struck college student in Tess’s class etc… She ended up finding the real truth: the cure trial test that Tess went through was hijacked by a rogue doctor who did his own genetic enhancement test, then murdered first the baby, then the mother to cover his trail. Continue reading
No Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2012
The Pulitzer Prize for fiction is an award “for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life”. Past winners include Cormac McCarthy, Jeffrey Eugenides, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison.
This year the committee has not given the award to any of the finalists. Continue reading
How important is a novel’s first sentence?
The first sentence of Mary Robinette Kowal’s ‘Regency fantasy’ novel, ‘Glamour in glass’, disappeared during typesetting, and was only discovered after printing was complete. Rather than collapse in despair, she’s taken some interesting approaches to managing the situation, and thanks to the publicity generated, may well do even better out of it than otherwise! Continue reading