This is the story of “Ruth”, the name she called herself, being born Ruchel Dwajra Zylska, an Orthodox Jew. She always thought she was different and lived this out all her life. Her family lived in a mixed-race community and owned a general store where Ruth worked. She was closely watched by her parents and …
Everybody is touched by cancer – be it family, friends, or acquaintances. Marking Time is a wonderful collection of verse that describes the first diagnosis through the stages to the hoped-for remission. Most beautifully written, it is deeply moving in sadness, patience, loneliness, and hope. The ‘Book Club in the Mallee’ has had some of …
Ernest Pettigrew is a retired, widowed army Major living in the small rural English village of Edgecombe St Mary. He leads a quiet, respectable, and predictable life with a small circle of friends and a slightly distant relationship with his only son, Roger, who is upwardly mobile and ever on the lookout for ways of …
Do you like a laugh? Then read Girt. Our National Anthem tells us that Australia is “girt by sea” but did you know that girt is an old-fashioned word for “encircled”? Hunt explains this with humorous overtones. Did history classes at school bore you because you had to learn about the Tudors and the Stuarts …
“ . . . it’s amazing what you can learn about a book by studying the chemistry of a breadcrumb.” This statement in the opening chapter of this book sets the scene for the story. There are two streams of narrative – present-day from 1996 to 2002 – and historical components reaching back to from …
It is 1922 in post-revolutionary Russia as a Bolshevik tribunal finds an unrepentant Count Alexander Rostov guilty of treasonous writing and corruption. He is sentenced to indefinite house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel in Moscow near the Kremlin. Despite his cramped living conditions in a tiny attic room, he remains in good spirits …
Perhaps the biggest challenge for any author is to bring their story to full life, making the characters real and the scenes tangible. Most books do a decent job of this, expressing their story in a way that allows readers to sufficiently understand the story. Anthony Doerr, however, brings this to a new level as …
By E. Jane Mall I purchased this wonderful book some 50 years ago from the Lutheran Bookshop in Pirie Street, Adelaide. I read it with my fifteen-year-old eyes and felt such sympathy for the young child of nine who had been placed in the Nimbschen Convent. Even though her father’s sister, Magdalene, was a nun …