Emily Paull

In a few weeks, a book with my name on it will be available for pre-order. It has a cover now (not that I am allowed to show anyone yet) and it's been copyedited and rewritten and it's ready for the world to read. But it's not the book that I thought would be my first. I've always thought of myself as a novelist. I wrote my first 'novel' in high school, a 30 000 word novella called 'Quoting Shakespeare' which was about what I realise now was a toxic friendship between a girl with a strong personality, and my main character, a girl who would do anything to be liked. I did not know what I was doing, but I enjoyed doing it. I printed pages off as I went and displayed them in a folder, harking back to the days when I used to run my own 'publishing house' in my bedroom as a child and design covers for all my short stories. A few years later, I wrote a 50 000 word 'novel' called 'Invisible Girl' which I suppose was urban fantas...

A Book Spotlight is not a review but a feature of a book by a person I know and admire. In Perth author Bindy Pritchard's debut collection of short stories, the ordinary is turned extraordinary by degrees. Pritchard's characters, all of whom are dealing with situations that test them in some way, are confronted with the magical, the frightening, and the down right impossible, and even occasionally manage to see the miraculous in the mundane. The first of the sixteen stories, titled 'The Shape of Things', is the story of Leonie, a woman who finds a young, naked man lying on the ground outside her apartment who may or may not be a fallen angel. In 'The Bees of Paris', Louise befriends a woman with a curious hobby after witnessing her falling off the roof of the apartment across the street and is drawn further into her life than perhaps she would like. In 'The Egg', Bryant discovers his own capacity for greed is larger than he would have hoped after h...

The Forgotten Letters of Esther Durrant Kayte Nunn Hachette Publishing, June 2019 The Forgotten Letters of Esther Durrant  is the story of three women-- Esther, whose story begins in 1951 when she is committed to a mental asylum by her husband; Rachel, whose story begins in 2018 when she is sent to the Scilly Islands as part of a research project; and Eve, whose story also begins in 2018 when a woman named Rachel contacts her to tell her that she's found some letters belonging to her grandmother.  Unfortunately, the novels three timelines mean that little time is spent developing the characters and their stories before the plot switches to another viewpoint. Esther's point of view is the most well-fleshed out of the story, and Nunn does an excellent job of creating the remote island setting for her asylum. But there is a sense that we as readers only get to skim the surface of what could be a rich topic, and one that is close to the author's own family history. Esth...