Emily Paull

The Soldier's Wife Pamela Hart Hachette Publishing, 2015 (I own a copy courtesy the publisher) When Jimmy Hawkins enlists and is shipped off to fight in World War One, his new bride Ruby is forced to find herself a job in order to get by without him.  The daughter of a cloth merchant, Ruby is skilled in the art of running a business and keeping books, but as a woman in the early 20th Century, these are not acceptable talents for a young lady.  Even Ruby herself doubts her own abilities, when she gets a job at Curry and Sons timber merchants as a book-keeper.  The men in the office there are suspicious of her and feel she is taking a man's job, but there aren't any men around looking for work, and as it is, half the company has enlisted, including Mr Curry's son Laurie.  When Ruby and her employer discover that her husband and his son are in the same company over in Turkey, a strange and reluctant family is formed. This was an interesting book, in that it tu...

So I'm no stranger to classic literature, but last year I started reading Middlemarch  by George Eliot and boy has it taken me a long time to finish!  To be more precise, I started reading it on April 29th 2014 and I finished it last Saturday.  I'm not sure what it was about the book that made it take me so long; sure, the language was from a different era, and I do think some of Eliot's best quips may have sadly been lost on me, but I don't think it was a matter of it being too hard.  In fact, the more of the book I read, the more I liked it! The book is written in eight 'books', reflecting the serialised publication of it in the mid 1800s when it first came out.  The author, George Eliot, aka Mary Anne Evans, would become one of the most well known authors of the time, but during her own lifetime, she published under a male pseudonym.   Middlemarch  is a novel about a provincial town in the English countryside where several relationships play o...

My mother, Megan, is an extremely intelligent woman who often says she would like to write a crime novel.  If anyone could do it, it is her.  As it is, she's a busy academic who still finds time to devour at least two novels a week.  These novels are usually crime novels.  As I don't usually read crime, I thought perhaps it might be nice if every now and then, I got her to review something she rather liked for you all, seeing as my bias away from crime is surely not shared by all my readers.  In the style of Triple J's breakfast program, in which they ask their fathers to review the feature albums, I now bring you My Mum Reviews. Bad Seed Alan Carter Fremantle Press Cato Kwong is back. He’s a local cop working out of the new Fremantle police station, driving a Western Australia Police pool Commodore down familiar Leach Highway and carrying out his investigations against a backdrop of familiar local and national events.  It is interesting to rea...

The Painted Sky Alice Campion Bantam Books 2015 (I own a copy, courtesy the publisher) When Nina Larkin's Uncle Russell dies, leaving her his property in the small rural town of Wandalla, she decides to head out to see the place herself before it sells.  Her mother has passed away, and her father, the eclectic artist Jim Larkin, has been missing since the late 1990s.  Nina believes that there may be some clues as to what happened to him out at the property, The Springs, where Russell and Jim grew up.  But as her search begins to unfold, her troubles begin and chief among them is Hilary Flint, who happens to be the only buyer for The Springs.  Hilary is new money, and she takes an instant dislike to Nina.  Her plan is to buy The Springs, and along with her property, and the property belonging to her future son-in-law, Heath Blackett, she will restore the historic Durham estate and become the largest landholder in Wandalla.  Nina is in the way, and in mor...

March is always my favourite month of the year, because it is my birth month!  In our family, it's also the birth month of a great number of my family members, including two cousins, an uncle, an aunt, and my Grandpa who turned 80 this year and is still the sharpest mind I have the ongoing pleasure of speaking to. It was a month of highs and lows, of starting University (I am doing a graduate diploma as an external student, in order to become an editor), and of sending query letters to agents.  It was also the month in which one of my dear writing partners, Louise Allan, came within inches of winning the TAG Hungerford award.  I will let Louise tell you about the night in her own words , with a just few from me; Louise is a talented writer and her manuscript shows that she has the ability to elicit remarkable control over characters going through a range of high emotions and trauma.  Her book, Ida's Children , will not stay unpublished for long. Louise, with...