ArteFact

A Review of Tim Winton's The Shepherd's Hut.

A Review of Edwin O'Connor's The Edge of Sadness.

More often than not, the modern memoir proves to be a survivor’s field notes on the loss and reconstitution of self: a lush, gory, or strident examination of a protagonist’s memories—and an antagonist’s sins. So when we pick up a memoir, we assume we will find these two central characters... The first clue that Ron Hansen’s Hotly in Pursuit of the Real: Notes Toward a Memoir is something different to this is its borrowed title...

A Review of Ann Patchett's The Dutch House.

In Paula Huston’s novel A Land Without Sin, it is 1993 in the war-torn jungles of Central America, and Eva Kovic is looking for her lost brother.

Lucy Beckett’s novel The Time Before You Die: A Novel of the Reformation effectively conveys a queasy, uncomfortable immediacy to the whiplash-inducing movements of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and subsequent backlash against the Counter-Reformation, in England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Several centuries later, Philip Trower’s A Danger to the State depicts the consequences of the Reformation in the full bloom of the Enlightenment - one of which is that religious truths increasingly serve politically expedient realities.

Morris West, The Devil’s Advocate (William Morrow & Co, 1959).

In nostalgic conversations among friends over favorite childhood literary characters, I inevitably propose Edmund Pevensie from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Much enthusiasm meets this choice. We all agree that as much as we admire the older Peter, Edmund is more interesting.

At first sight, Dorothy L. Sayers’ character Lord Peter Wimsey, does not strike one as a particularly Christian gentleman... And yet, he displays virtues that only caritas and humility can bring to flower.

Wemmick is a man divided. Divided between work and Walworth, where he lives out an idyllic denial of all that is dehumanising about his workaday existence.