Emily Paull

Beyond Carousel Brendan Ritchie Fremantle Press, 2016 9781925164039 This review may contain spoilers.  If you don't want to see spoilers about Beyond Carousel,  get to your nearest indie bookshop, buy a copy, read it and then come back and talk to me about it in the comments.  If you've read it, or spoilers don't bug you, feel free to read on. When we last left Nox, Taylor and Lizzy at the end of Carousel , they'd finally managed to make their way out of the shopping centre which had imprisoned them for eighteen months.  Now, living in a deserted, post-apocalyptic Perth with no power and limited clean water and food, they're starting to think that maybe they were better off where they were.  Still, outside the confines of the centre, the trio are slowly starting to piece together what may have happened to everyone else.  The arrival of a Danish filmmaker, Tommy, to the property in the Perth hills where the gang are bunking down alerts them to so...

Le Chateau  by Sarah Ridout Echo Publishing 2016 9781760404413 I was immediately fascinated by Le Chateau  when it began to get coverage on a few Australian blogs and social media accounts the weekend before it was due to be released.  Previously, I hadn't heard a thing about it.  The premise was intriguing-- Charlotte, an Australian woman, is returning home to a French chateau in the middle of a vineyard after a head injury.  She is returning to a husband and a daughter that she doesn't remember, and the life she expected to fit back into doesn't seem to suit who she feels she is.  Add to the mix a highly manipulative mother-in-law who keeps hinting at some indiscretion that had been going on between Charlotte and the riding instructor from the next property over and the result is a novel which twists the best strands of a few genres together.  While Le Chateau  could be said to be a romance, a thriller or a literary novel respectively, I thi...

Love at First Flight  Tess Woods Harper Collins, 2016 (I own a copy, courtesy the publisher) 9781460752647 Image from Goodreads Love at First Flight , the debut novel by WA-based physiotherapist Tess Woods was released as a paperback in August this year, but not before garnering thousands of fans all over the world as a digital release.  The novel follows Mosman Park GP, Mel, who appears to have the whole package.  She has a great job, is married to an anaesthetist who people frequently describe as a Greek God, two gorgeous teenagers, and lives in a big beautiful house in one of Perth's most elite suburbs.  Yet as the book opens, the reader is given a glimpse of Mel's inner life.  Something is missing.  She just doesn't know what it is yet.   Then, on a flight to Melbourne to have a girls' weekend with her best friend Sarah, Mel meets Matt.  He's younger than she is, but the attraction is instantaneous and mutual.  As the plan...