20 posts published by Lisa Hill during September 2025| ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
Longlisted for the ARA Historical Fiction Prize and the UK Walter Scott Historical Novel Prize, The First Friend by journalist, author and SMH columnist Malcolm Knox, is a black comedy starring Stalin’s henchman, Lavrenty Beria and his (fictional) best friend and adopted brother Vasil Murtov. This is the book description: Even the worst person has […]| ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
Firstly, I would like to thank everyone who contributed to #ShortStorySeptember. The aim was to discover short story collections that are good to read, and what we have collectively achieved is to offer something for everyone. There are stories from all over the world, there are translations, there are stories from the 19th (colour-coded green) […]| ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
Aiming to complete one more post before #ShortStorySeptember ends, I was plodding through Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories when the Asian Review of Books popped into my inbox and with its very first review introduced me to Ayelet Tsabari, an Israeli-Canadian writer of Yemeni descent. Her family comes from the 800,000 Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews who […]| ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
It might seem like excess, but I have three collections of stories by Isaac Babel (1894-1940): Collected Stories, translated by Walter Morison and with an introduction by Lionel Trilling. Published in Penguin Books in 1961, first published in 1957 by Criterion Books and bought in an OpShop in 2015. Red Cavalry and Other Stories, translated […]| ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
Andrew Roff’s first novel Here Are My Demands is left-wing political fiction at its most forceful. It’s speculative fiction set in a near-future Australia where there is government rul…| ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
It’s Short Story September! The aim is to discover short story collections that are good to read. Something for every taste! To participate, please keep it simple. We all know that it’…| ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
Mary Barton (1848, revised edition 1854) is one of three books by Elizabeth Gaskell that are listed in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. The other two are Cranford, (1853, see my review) a…| ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
Dottie, the third novel from 2021 Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah, is #No11 of #20BooksofWinter, but despite the looming deadline (August 31) to read the other nine books, I have taken my time to …| ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
Listed in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s People (1979) is a superb novel about the collateral damage to family members of activists. …| ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
As Robert Burns once wrote ‘the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry’… and yes, I’m a day late with my plan to foreshadow #ShortStorySeptember with a post about Chr…| ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
This month, this year, the theme for Spell the Month in Books hosted by Reviews from the Stacks, is… This month’s theme is “set in a fantasy world or fictional place!” Oh, this was hard! I d…| ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
For lovers of Australian and New Zealand literary fiction; Ambassador for Australian literature| ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
Readers know right from the start of Catherine Chidgey’s new novel The Book of Guilt that there is something odd about this narrator… Before I knew what I was, I lived with my brothers …| ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
At first, I was a bit puzzled by award winning Emily Maguire’s venture into historical fiction in her new novel Rapture. I know her as an author who writes powerful novels that explore cont…| ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
This month’s choice for #AYearofNZLit is a classic work of Kiwi Science Fiction… Wikipedia and Goodreads tell us that Born in England in 1942, Craig Harrison came to New Zealand in 1966…| ANZ LitLovers LitBlog