All liquored up …

No, not us, our cover. The new issue (August) has landed and the cover is a celebration of, well, ouzo, but also Food from Many Greek Kitchens, the new book coming from the one and only Tessa Kiros in October (Murdoch Books).

The new mag has plenty else to recommend it: news, author Q+As with Kimberley Freeman, L A Larkin and Charlie Pickering, a round-up of Father’s Day titles to look out for come September and, of course, all our reviews.

This time around the titles reviewed include some November releases, among them Preincarnate by Shaun Micallef (Hardie Grant), which reviewer Dani Soloman has awarded five stars. ‘This book sees Shaun Micallef swing a sledgehammer through the fourth wall of literature in order to take his readers on an impossible journey through time,’ writes Soloman. ‘Micallef has managed to transfer his irreverent sense of humour onto the page beautifully, producing a book that is as interesting, clever, funny, distinguished and as good-looking as the Silver Fox himself.’

Also among our reviewers top picks this time around were Bereft by Chris Womersley (Scribe, September), which, Angela Meyer writes, is ‘a rich, gripping tale of love, loss, conflict and salvation’ (‘I had that very rare experience of wanting to read it again, almost immediately,’ she says); YA novel The Innocents by Nette Hilton (Woolshed Press, August), which Jan Bull says ‘has the suspense of Michael Grant’s Gone and the rites of passage elements of Wendy Mass’ The Mango-Shaped Space‘; Singing Saltwater Country: Journey to the Songlines of Carpentaria (John Bradley & Yanyuwa Families, A&U, August), which Clive Tilsley says is ‘an engrossing book’ that should be read by ‘anyone with even the smallest interest in Australia’; and Like Being a Wife (Catherine Harris, Vintage, September), a collection of short stories that Rachel Wilson says ‘firmly lives up to’ some high expectations.

In children’s titles, Chris Morphew’s third book in ‘The Phoenix Files’ series, Mutation (Hardie Grant Egmont, August), got an emphatic thumbs up from reviewer Meredith Tate and Kumiko and the Dragon’s Secret (Briony Stewart, UQP, August) charmed Robin Morrow.

These are only a handful of the more than 40 titles reviewed in the issue, check out the magazine itself for more. (Subscribers, look out for your copy, non-subscribers, here’s a list of places good enough to stock the mag, as well as details on how to subscribe.)

Category: Fancy Goods Reviews