These two unusual books reflect on aspects of the prisoner-of-war experience in Singapore, Thailand and Burma during World War II that have not been much canvassed in Australia. "One Fourteenth of an Elephant", Ian Denys ...

The book opens with 'The Visitor’s Preface.' The person in question is a writer who is given permission to enter a detention centre on the outskirts of Sydney where he meets an asylum seeker called Alan Sheriff. But first, ...

The scene of Paul Hetherington's ‘verse novel’, "Blood and Old Belief", is established in the opening stanza. From the start, we are in the hands of a skilled verse practitioner for whom ‘conservative’ metrical forms are ...

Edmund Campion's latest book, "Lines of My Life", is an elegant hybrid, part meditation, part gossip (of edifying kinds), part political testament. Its genial tone is suggested by the source of the title, which comes from ...

Brett D'Arcy's novel, arrestingly titled "The Mindless Ferocity of Sharks", is one of the most unusual and accomplished to be published in Australia for years. The setting is a decaying town called the Bay on the coast of ...