Kerryn Goldsworthy

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Thea Astley' by Karen Lamb

September 2015, no. 374 • 24 August 2015

‘If there are going to be any more of her novels, perhaps we should come right out and promote her as an utter bitch?’ So wrote Alec Bolton, the London manager of Angus & Robertson, to his senior editor John Abernethy in Sydney. The novelist in question was Thea Astley, and the book was A Boat Load of Home Folk (1968). Bolton had optimistically sent a copy of this bleak and savage novel ... (read more)

Reading Australia: 'The Slap' by Christos Tsiolkas

Reading Australia • 30 June 2015

The slap that I wanted to deliver with that book was to a culture in Australia that had literally made me sick, sick to the stomach. A middle class culture that struck me as incredibly selfish and ungenerous … I wanted to try and write a book ... that represented that culture. And to do that, honestly, I had to put myself in the middle of it. I also had to put my Greekness in the middle of that ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Forever Young' by Steven Carroll

June-July 2015, no. 372 • 27 May 2015

Most Australians, if asked to name a date they associate with the name Gough Whitlam, would say ‘11 November 1975’. Steven Carroll subverts this expectation at the outset with Forever Young, which uses the last days of Whitlam as its historical backdrop as well as for other less tangible things. And the last days of Whitlam came not in 1975 but on 10 December 1977, when he was still leading th ... (read more)

Reading Australia: 'Tirra Lirra by the River' by Jessica Anderson

March 2015, no. 369 • 01 March 2015

In 1978, Australia’s two most coveted national literary prizes of the time were both won by women: Helen Garner’s first novel Monkey Grip (1977) won the National Book Council Award for fiction, and the Miles Franklin Literary Award was won by Tirra Lirra by the River (1978), Jessica Anderson’s fourth novel. Both of these books have since become classics of Australian literature, rarely out o ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'The Golden Age' by Joan London

September 2014, no. 364 • 01 September 2014

When the polio epidemics at the hinge of the twentieth century were catching hundreds of Australian children and adults in their web of pathogens, a pub in suburban Perth called ‘The Golden Age’ was converted – with its name unchanged – into a convalescent home for children who were recovering from polio but still unready to go back into the world. Joan London has used this fact as the sta ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'MaddAddam' by Margaret Atwood

October 2013, no. 355 • 25 September 2013

Any sequel, much less the final book of a trilogy, intensifies the dilemma presented to a reviewer who does not wish simply to provide a plot summary, but for whom it’s impossible to say anything coherent about the book without giving some idea of what happens in it. For any reader who might not have read or can’t clearly remember the first two books in this trilogy, Oryx and Crake (2003) and ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Big Brother' by Lionel Shriver

June 2013, no. 352 • 26 May 2013

The novel for which Lionel Shriver is best known, We Need to Talk about Kevin (2003), generated endless discussion across the spectrum of readers, from buzzing suburban home-based reading groups to the pages of the Guardian and the New York Times. Much of this discussion circled around the question of the first-person narrator and mother, Eva Khatchadourian, and her relationships with her uncompre ... (read more)

ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellowship: 'Everyone’s a Critic' by Kerryn Goldsworthy

May 2013, no. 351 • 24 April 2013

‘We place on paper without hesitation a tissue of flatteries, to which in society we could not give utterance, for our lives, without either blushing or laughing outright,’ wrote Edgar Allan Poe in 1846. His title was ‘The Literati of New York City’; his topic was the discrepancy, as he saw it, between the critics’ private opinions of books and the polite reviews of them that appeared in ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'The Watch Tower' by Elizabeth Harrower

October 2012, no. 345 • 27 September 2012

‘Too many vampires,’ wrote Patrick White. The year was 1980; the document was a letter to Shirley Hazzard; the subject was their friend and fellow novelist Elizabeth Harrower, who had published nothing but a handful of uncollected short stories since 1966. ‘Elizabeth keeps her principles,’ he wrote. ‘Whether she is also writing, I have given up asking in case I get the wrong answer. Too ... (read more)

Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Cold Light' by Frank Moorhouse

November 2011, no. 336 • 25 October 2011

Admirers of the first two volumes in Frank Moorhouse’s ‘Edith Trilogy’, Grand Days (1993) and Dark Palace (2000), will remember the gripping and heartbreaking scene at the end of Dark Palace in which Edith Campbell Berry, her British husband, Ambrose, and several of their senior colleagues are humiliatingly informed, in the cruellest possible way, that after two decades of hard work for the ... (read more)