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Mary Wakefield (Jalna #3), Mazo de la Roche
1949 Club The Jalna series, known properly as The Whiteoak Chronicles, consists of 16 novels written between 1927 and 1960 by Canadian author Mazo de la Roche (1879-1961). 1879 is also the year...
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She Came to Stay, Simone de Beauvoir
1949 Club I’m a guy, so while I recognise The Second Sex is important, I have never read it. I come to de Beauvoir via a life-long admiration of Jean Paul Sartre, albeit I haven’t read him for a...
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Violence, Festus Iyayi
The first wave of African post-colonial writing is associated with Makerere (Uganda/East Africa) and Ibadan (Nigeria) universities in the 1950s and 60s. The most notable writers were Chinua Achebe...
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Babysitting
Journal: 137 The track into Gee’s place and a child heading out I might as well babysit, I’m not doing much work in the truck – not helped by putting it in for a routine, major-ish service at the...
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The Employees, Olga Ravn
One of you mentioned Olga Ravn, I was intrigued. I walked into my local bookshop, there it was on the shelf, I bought it. Olga Ravn is a Danish writer and poet. The Employees (2018), the second of her...
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Slow Gods, Claire North
Ursula K Le Guin Prize 2026 Slow Gods is the one novel I’ve read off the UKLGP2026 Shortlist. Marcie is reading a couple of others, and I read a couple that didn’t make it and which I still think...
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Double Act, Sylvia Martin
Double Act, out earlier this year, is a biography by Sylvia Martin of life partners Eirene Mort (1879–1977) and Nora Kate Weston (1880-1965), Australian artists working in the tradition of the English...
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Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who turns 50 next year, hasn’t written as many novels as I expected. Dream Count (2025) her latest, is just her fourth. It is of course an interesting book, Adichie is a fine...
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Burger’s Daughter, Nadine Gordimer
Nadime Gordimer (1923-2014) was a South African writer and activist, raised in a secular Jewish household. She was a member of the ANC while it was still banned; she wrote 15 novels and innumerable...
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Two (French) SF Novellas
Horsefly, Mireille Gagné Autrice (romancière, nouvelliste et poète), Mireille Gagné est née à l’Isle-aux-Grues et vit à Québec. Elle travaille dans le domaine de la culture et des communications. I...
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House Made of Dawn, N Scott Momaday
I said in my recent review of Fools Crow that James Welch was a founding author of the Native American Renaissance but that N Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize winning House Made of Dawn (1968) was...
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Under the Udala Trees, Chinelo Okparanta
Chinelo Okparanta (1981- ) was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Igbo country. She was raised a Jehova’s Witness, moved to the US as a child, and is the author a short story collection and two novels of...
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Silence is my Habitat, Jessica White
Jess White is a writer and academic who has been a long-time friend of this corner of the blogosphere – as an editor for AustralianWomenWriters.com, as a guest poster here on early Australian women...
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Uprising, Tahmima Anam
Uprising (2026) is a novel about young women trapped into prostitution, held against their will, with their girl children – boy children are sold – on a small, shrinking mud island at the mouth of a...
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UKLG Prize 2026 Shortlist
Journal: 136 My intention this week was to post a review of Uprising (2026) by Tahmima Anam, a fable about a rebellion by women sold into prostitution and held with their girl children on a small,...
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Literary Geographies and the Work of David Ireland, Brett Heino
Brett Heino “is a legal scholar and historian in the Law Faculty at the University of Technology Sydney”. Last year, seeing that John/4ZZZ and I were discussing the works of David Ireland he asked...
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Women’s Work
Journal: 135 One of my earliest posts was ‘I am not a Feminist‘. I’ve spent a lot of the intervening years writing about the Independent Woman in Australia and elsewhere and reading women writers. But...
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Fools Crow, James Welch
I’ve had Fools Crow (1986) in my Audible library since I first wrote about making Black and FN North American writing a ‘project’ – five years ago this month as it happens (Project 2022). That project...
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Broken, Remote Control
To be clear, this is two reviews – Broken: Not a Halal Love Story (2023) by Fatima Bala and Remote Control (2021) by Nnedi Okorafor. Both are Nigerian women living in N America and, as it happens, I...
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Desolation, Hossein Asgari
What is the Resistance? Brave patriots using any means at hand to fight back against the evil subjugator.What is Terrorism? The Resistance as the subjugator would like you to see it. On the weekend of...
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