Articles about books

A book is a present you can open again and again.

The Mushroom Tapes – Garner / Hooper / Krasnostein

20 Sep 2026

A few years ago in Australia, a woman called Erin Patterson killed three of her in-laws by inviting them to lunch and serving them beef Wellington containing death cap mushrooms. Her murder trial was held last year in country Victoria and attracted widespread media attention. Three Australian writers – Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein – attended the trial. This absorbing book is made of edited transcripts of their conversations about the details of the case and their day-to-day thoughts as the trial progressed.

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Homage to Catalonia – George Orwell

13 Sep 2026

This is Orwell’s account of his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War. It’s mostly fun to read – I got a good sense of the life of a (motley) soldier. As they say, it’s long stretches of uncomfortable boredom punctuated by brief bursts of terror. Orwell gives us a mix of petty complaints and gossip, analysis of battle tactics, conspiracy theories (some true), politics and much more. He writes with increasing weariness and disillusionment about the political infighting on the anti-fascist side. You can tell it’s not going to end well, even without taking into account the fact that we actually know it didn’t end well.

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Alice With a Why — Anna James

13 Aug 2026

I like this! I’m a sucker for anything related to Alice in Wonderland. This is a sequel of sorts – the protagonist Alyce is the granddaughter of the original Alice, who she thinks of as a peculiar old lady who tells all these outlandish stories. When Alyce accidentally intercepts Alice’s tea party invitation, she ends up in Wonderland herself, and meets the expected bunch of eccentrics, including some favourites from the original book.

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Mrs Dalloway’s Party — Virginia Woolf

5 Aug 2026

If you liked Mrs Dalloway — and of course you did! — then you should also read this collection of further episodes from the famous party.

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In Cold Blood – Truman Capote

11 Jul 2026

In 1959 the Clutter family, of Holcomb, Kansas, USA, were all murdered by a couple of home invaders. Truman Capote decided to go to Kansas to research and write this book about the crime and the investigation. Fortunately, he stayed with the project long enough for the crime to be solved – I don’t think this book would have been quite as good otherwise.

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Malice — Keigo Higashino

30 Jun 2026

This murder mystery starts with an account written by an acquaintance of the victim. It sets the scene nicely. The next chapter was written from a different point of view, just to mix things up. I was pleased as well as surprised when the rug was pulled from under me quite early on (this is a mystery story after all).

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Dream Count – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

31 May 2026

This book is about the life and (mostly failed) loves of three women: Chia, her friend Zikora and her cousin Omelogor. They are all Nigerian, living variously in the USA and Nigeria, quite well-off, and each with their own interesting lives and stories. There is a fourth woman too, Kadiatou, an associate of Chia. She is also an African (albeit Guinean) living in the USA, but not at all well-off. Her role in the novel is quite different.

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Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf

14 May 2026

Two contrasting stream-of-consciousness narratives in this novel, set 100 years ago. Mrs Dalloway is preparing to host a party – we go inside her thoughts and also those of various friends and associates, so we get a full picture of her and her milieu. At the same time, we enter the lonely and disordered mind of Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked war veteran, and his put-upon wife Rezia. The two stories glance off one another at times during the novel. Mrs Dalloway’s narrative is interesting, petty, expansive, while Smith’s is just sad, especially by way of contrast.

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Feijoa – Kate Evans

7 Apr 2026

This is not the story of the feijoa. It is the story of Kate Evans’s journey investigating the story of the feijoa. Along the way we do learn a lot of interesting stuff about feijoas, but we also learn a lot about Evans’s life, her love of feijoas, her experiences travelling the world in search of feijoa lore, the people she met along the way and their stories, and how she came to write this book.

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The Guermantes Way – Marcel Proust

31 Mar 2026

This is the third volume of In Search of Lost Time, in which our hero (I’ll call him Marcel even though that’s probably not his name) enters the world of high society, basically by stalking Mme de Guermantes until he falls in with her social set and gets invited to her salons. In the meantime, a lot happens (relatively speaking; this is not The Three Musketeers). He hangs out with his friend Robert de Saint-Loup, who inexplicably thinks very highly of him. At one point Saint-Loup and friends have a long discussion of military strategy – I thought of that late chapter of War & Peace where the novel suddenly turned into a field marshal’s manual.

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