This ancient-world whodunnit, A Roman Death, is set in 45 BC. Julius Caesar is at the height of his power, yet disquiet grows under his dictatorship. The Ides of March looms, and Rome will soon descend into turmoil. And yet Caesar's is not the only Roman death!
Over the summer holidays, I caught an ABC Science Show podcast, The Year in Tech. Science reporter, Ariel Bogle, discussed with her editor, Jonathan Webb, tech stories which had caught her eye in 2017. She opened with an audio clip from the Ex Machina movie that instantly spiked my interest.
Dog On It is the first book in Spencer Quinn’s Chet and Bernie mystery series. It’s a detective novel featuring Bernie Little, “a slightly down-at-heel private investigator”, and Chet, his “partially K-9 trained” dog who failed the police-dog test when a cat appeared. Chet is also the book's narrator.
Loopholes by Thirroul based author, Susan McCreery, is a collection of microfiction, or very short stories. Wiktionary.org defines the genre as “Fiction that has a significantly shorter than average length.” Synonyms include drabble, flash fiction, flashfic, short-short story, sudden fiction and even twitterature.
Ben Elton set Three Summers at a fictional folk festival in southwest Western Australia, "Westifal". Over three consecutive summers, we meet an ensemble cast of characters who bring their individual stories and issues to the festival campgrounds. Elton has described the film as "Australia in a tent".
Kate Liston-Mills sets her slim volume of short stories in her hometown of Pambula, on the south coast of NSW. The metaphor in the opening story, Bound, about a fox raid on waterfowl nests, is threaded through the volume: There is a "twine" that ties the waterfowl (and humans) to each other and Pambula.
One ordinary morning, an image invades 67-year-old Abel Marvin's thoughts as he swims his laps: the "twisted, burned-out hulk of a wheelchair with two welded, gaping red and black skeletons". It's a scene that's haunted him for most of his adult life, and he buries his face in the water to drown it.
The cover of Nicholas Jose's Bapo, a 19th-century hand-fan decorated with Chinese characters and a collage of contrasting patterns, catches the eye. It invites the reader to open the book, learn about its author and title, and delve into his short story collection.
Patrick White won the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award in 1957 for Voss. A year later, Randolph Stow won the award for To the Islands. He was 22-years-old and had already published two novels, A Haunted Land (1956) and The Bystander (1957) and a collection of award-winning poems.
As his work on an Aboriginal mission informed the award-winning To the Islands, Papua New Guinea left an indelible mark on Randolph Stow and was the basis for Visitants. However, the novel was not published until twenty years after his return to Australia.
Joan O'Hagan was born in Australia but studied Latin, Greek and Ancient History in New Zealand. O'Hagan lived and worked overseas for most of her life – including 30 years in Rome, working at the Australian Department of Immigration. And O'Hagan drew upon her education and experience to write crime fiction.
