Kathleen kindly gave permission to reproduce her excellent launch speech for Annette Trevitt for her first book, a work of narrative nonfiction I Had a Father in Karratha. The launch was at Readings Carlton bookshop on 3 April 2023. Well, isn’t it exciting to be here to celebrate the launch of Annette Trevitt’s ‘I Had […]

19 April 2023 JR Burgmann’s masterful debut novel is a speculative climate epic forecasting events across the 21st century. In a book spanning multiple generations, family members each inherit escalating, catastrophic change. It’s also a literary triumph. Every line dazzled and struck me as poetry, and any given page or chapter could easily stand alone. […]

Like to the Lark by Stuart Barnes Reviewed by Magdalena Ball https://compulsivereader.com/ Like to the LarkBy Stuart BarnesUpswell PublishingPaperback, 100 pages, Jan 2023, ISBN13: 9780645536980 Like to the Lark is a fitting follow-on to Stuart Barnes’ debut Glasshouses, which won the 2015 Thomas Shapcott award. The book is full of tight structuring and a clever use of constraints, with […]

The 21st century is when it all goes wrong. All the sins since the Industrial Revolution manifest in calamity and collapse. The planet is on track to overshoot, missing deadlines by which some of the disaster could be averted. Yet people go on living, if they’re lucky, and loving through this all-encompassing catastrophe. This is […]