Naama Grey-Smith

Naama Grey-Smith reviews 'The Signal Line' by Brendan Colley

June 2022, no. 443 • 23 May 2022

Winner of the University of Tasmania Prize for best new unpublished work in the 2019 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes, The Signal Line is Brendan Colley’s first book. As it happens, my review copy arrived just as I launched into Rhett Davis’s Hovering (2022). Although fundamentally different, both novels open with a fraught return to a family home and a resident resentful sibling. Both pr ... (read more)

Naama Grey-Smith reviews 'Where We Swim: Explorations of nature, travel and family' by Ingrid Horrocks

August 2021, no. 434 • 22 July 2021

Where We Swim takes the broad view on each component of its title: the ‘where’, the ‘we’, the ‘swim’. Wellington-based author Ingrid Horrocks explains that her original idea – to record a series of solo swims – was transformed when she realised such deliberate solitary excursions were ‘bracketed moments held deep within lives’ and that their contrivance ‘felt too close to the ... (read more)

Naama Grey-Smith reviews 'The Believer: Encounters with love, death and faith' by Sarah Krasnostein

April 2021, no. 430 • 23 March 2021

Subtitled ‘Encounters with love, death and faith’, Sarah Krasnostein’s The Believer takes on big themes. In this work of creative non-fiction that combines memoir, journalism, and philosophical inquiry, Krasnostein details her meetings with people whose beliefs she finds unfathomable but whom she is driven to understand. Her own guiding faith on this journey is that ‘we are united in the e ... (read more)

Naama Grey-Smith reviews 'At the Edge of the Solid World' by Daniel Davis Wood

January–February 2021, no. 428 • 17 December 2020

‘Every last word that follows from here is a word I have tortured out of myself. If what I have written sometimes warbles towards the inarticulate, that is the price exacted by torture and the price of articulating ... at all.’ So warns the narrator of Daniel Davis Wood’s first novel, Blood and Bone (2014). He may well be describing Davis Wood’s second novel, At the Edge of the Solid World ... (read more)

Naama Grey-Smith reviews 'Rise & Shine' by Patrick Allington

June–July 2020, no. 422 • 26 May 2020

‘What is the use of saying, “Peace, Peace” when there is no peace below the diaphragm?’ asks Chinese writer Lin Yutang in The Importance of Living (1937). The subject of food and its manifestations – sustenance, communion, gluttony, longing – has claimed a place in the books of every era and genre, from heavenly manna in the Book of Exodus to starving gladiators in Suzanne Collins’s ... (read more)

Naama Grey-Smith reviews 'The Loudness of Unsaid Things' by Hilde Hinton

April 2020, no. 420 • 20 March 2020

Hilde Hinton’s début novel is character-driven storytelling at its best. Its narrator, Susie, is a perpetual outsider whose world comprises ‘her dad, her crazy sometimes-there mum and a house that didn’t look like the others’. Susie faces life’s brutal realities earlier than most: by Year Seven she has moved from the country to the city, taken up selling newspapers in Melbourne’s stre ... (read more)

Naama Grey-Smith reviews 'Wolfe Island' by Lucy Treloar

September 2019, no. 414 • 27 August 2019

With Wolfe Island, Lucy Treloar joins a growing number of novelists whose fiction is marked by anthropogenic catastrophe. Her latest offering confronts two urgent global crises: the climate emergency, and the plight of refugees. Treloar reveals startling connections between the two through the shared thread of displacement in a work that is more than powerful: it’s transformative. Treloar’s s ... (read more)

Naama Grey-Smith reviews 'Gravity Is The Thing' by Jaclyn Moriarty

May 2019, no. 411 • 22 April 2019

The first thing one notices about Jaclyn Moriarty’s Gravity Is the Thing is its narrative voice: distinctive, almost stylised. Exclamation marks, emphasised words in italics, a staccato rhythm, and clever comments in parentheses add up to a writing style sometimes deemed quirky. This style is not restricted to the voice of the first-person narrator but rather is a lens through which the work and ... (read more)

Naama Grey-Smith reviews 'A Universe of Sufficient Size' by Miriam Sved

April 2019, no. 410 • 25 March 2019

At the front of Miriam Sved’s A Universe of Sufficient Size is a black-and-white photograph of a statue. The cloaked figure holding a pen (‘like a literary grim reaper’, reflects one character) is the statue of Anonymous in Budapest, a significant setting in the book. Its inclusion is a reminder that the novel draws on the story of the author’s grandmother, mathematician Marta Sved (née W ... (read more)

Naama Grey-Smith reviews 'Gravity Well' by Melanie Joosten

June-July 2017, no. 392 • 29 May 2017

Gravity Well opens with Carl Sagan’s famous ‘mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’ quote, suggesting themes of astronomy, loneliness, and humanity’s cosmic insignificance. Though I was immediately smitten with the cover design (a nebula-coloured orb, its top and bottom halves depicting mirrored but not identical female silhouettes amid a sea of cosmic black), I worried that the novel might ... (read more)