Author: Emily Paull

Emily Paull is a former bookseller, and now works as a librarian. Her debut book, Well-Behaved Women, was released by Margaret River Press in 2019.

International Women's Day

Five Biographical Fiction Picks for International Women’s Day

International Women’s Day (March 8th) is a day to celebrate the achievements of women and raise awareness of the discrimination still faced by many women all over the world. In celebration of IWD, we have put together a list of five recent or forthcoming novels which fictionalise the lives of real-life heroines – women who…

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The Moon Gate

Book Review: Amanda Geard’s The Moon Gate is a refreshing historical delight

You may think that the dual-timeline historical fiction novel has had its moment. But recently there have been a number of novels which have played with the braided, three-narrative structure. While difficult to pull off, these blends of historical fiction and mysteries that span across time are very popular, especially with readers who enjoy the…

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The Fiction Writer

Book Review: The Fiction Writer pales in comparison to its enduring antecedent

Perhaps as a reader, I have finally had enough of books that are trying to be Rebecca. Or perhaps it is just that the story doesn’t transpose well into a modern setting, but Jillian Cantor‘s latest novel The Fiction Writer didn’t quite work for me. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a compelling read. It’s got a…

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Book Review: Hungerford Award winning novel Salt River Road collects another accolade

Molly Schmidt‘s hotly anticipated debut novel, Salt River Road, won the 2022 City of Fremantle TAG Hungerford Award. It has now gone on to be longlisted for this year’s Indie Book Awards Debut Fiction Award, looking to continue Fremantle Press’s tradition of unearthing stand out Western Australian Writers. The story of the Tetley family, and their…

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The Witching Tide by Margaret Meyer is a midnight blue cover with an illustration of a witchfinder's pricking stick hidden in a field of yellow flowers

Book Review: The Witching Tide is historical fiction that should be read by the light of day

In Margaret Meyer’s The Witching Tide, the story of a witch-hunt is seen through the eyes of Martha Hallybread, a mute midwife, who may actually be a witch. Ironically, she is the only woman in her town who seems to be safe from the paranoia and suspicions of a community riddled with bad luck – failed…

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The Hummingbird Effect is an orangey-red book with a green geometric pattern that looks like wings underlayed below the title. The author's name is along the bottom: Kate Mildenhall.

Book Review: Kate Mildenhall’s latest is a multi-faceted examination of some of our scarier philosophical challenges

For many writers, their second novel is often less remarkable than their debut. Not so the case of Kate Mildenhall, whose sophomore book, The Mother Fault, cemented its author’s status as a writer to watch in Australian literature. Mildenhall’s third novel, The Hummingbird Effect continues her trajectory as a writer who is not afraid to push boundaries…

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Celia Stone

Book Review: Emma Young’s The Disorganisation of Celia Stone is a diary novel with a lot of heart

Emma Young’s second novel, The Disorganisation of Celia Stone, is so much more than an updated homage to Bridget Jones’s Diary. Though it may start off with a number of similarities – chief among them, the diary format, and witty, self-deprecating tone, the book goes beyond the ground covered by that beloved 90s classic, exploring…

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Perfect-ish

Book Review: Perfect-ish is the perfect read for your weekend switch-off

It seems that the Australian publishing industry’s hunger for anti-rom-coms (or as I like to call them, Sad Girl Lit) is showing no signs of abating. The perfect successor to the Cecelia Ahern and Marian Keyes heyday of the last decade, today’s heroine is stressed out and has major FOMO. Prue, the heroine of Jessica…

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Laurie Steed

Book Review: Laurie Steed’s Love, Dad is more than a parenting memoir

Laurie Steed‘s second book, Love, Dad, came out just in time for Father’s Day. It was not, as you might expect, a treatise on how to be a good father. Instead it’s a memoir of one man’s experience of fatherhood, along with a collection of musings on how to be a good father, a good man, and…

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The Heart is a Star

Book Review: Megan Rogers gets to the heart of a family secret in her much-lauded debut

In The Heart is a Star, debut novelist Megan Rogers explores one woman’s struggles to balance the demands of her career and family against her own needs as a person. As the book opens, we meet Layla Byrnes, an anaesthetist who is just ending a period of enforced leave when she receives a disturbing phone…

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The Magpie's Sister

Book Review: All the fun of the circus and then some in Kerri Turner’s The Magpie’s Sister

There’s an old trick that writers who participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) know, and that’s when in doubt, add a circus. It works. Circuses are fun. They have glitz and glamour, and underdogs, and sometimes literal dogs and other animals. Everyone loves a circus story. In recent years, the darker side to circuses…

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Sad Girl Novel

Book Review: Pip Finkemeyer’s Sad Girl Novel takes on a publishing-world trend from the inside

The sad girl novel is a relatively new concept in the book world, but it’s one that has fascinated readers since its invention. Hallmarked by novels such as Meg Mason‘s Sorrow and Bliss and often distinguished by cover images of women lying or leaning face-down, this new kind of book takes the classic ‘chick lit’ à la…

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The Midnight News

Book Review: The Midnight News is a rare new take on the Blitz novel

Jo Baker doesn’t just write historical fiction; she plays with it in the way only a writer at the top of their craft can. She is a writer whose work takes the reader’s expectations of the genre and twists them into something marvellously unexpected. Her latest novel, The Midnight News, is no different. To start,…

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The Silk Merchant's Son Cover

Book Review: Misguided missionaries make for fascinating history in The Silk Merchant’s Son

The Silk Merchant’s Son isn’t Peter Burke‘s first foray into writing historical fiction based on the stories West Aussies think they know. His first novel, The Drowning Dream, was shortlisted for the Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award in 1996, and was a mystery set against the backdrop of the Broome pearling industry circa the 1920s. His second novel, Wettening…

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Where Light Meets Water

Book Review: Where Light Meets Water is a moving look at life, love, art, and the high seas

Beginning in London in 1847, Susan Paterson’s debut novel Where Light Meets Water is a subtle, delightful work of historical fiction. Its protagonist is Tom Rutherford, a young man who has never known any life other than on the sea. From the time of his father’s death, Tom has been apprenticed on ships, working his way…

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Cover of The Anniversary

Book Review: Stephanie Bishop’s The Anniversary dives deep into the writerly mind

Award-winning Australian author Stephanie Bishop published her fourth novel The Anniversary in late March, though you may be forgiven for having missed it given the proliferation of big names with novels due out around the same time. (Pip Williams, anyone?) Centring on the relationship between a novelist J B Blackwood and her filmmaker husband, Patrick (who…

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Book Review: The Theory of (Not Quite) Everything is *not quite* the romance it could be

Kara Gnodde’s debut novel The Theory of (Not Quite) Everything has been compared to Australian bestseller, The Rosie Project. I can see the similarities, but the starkest comparison to my mind is TV’s The Big Bang Theory. Imagine if Sheldon Cooper was looked after by his sister instead of by Leonard Hofstader. Now imagine him devising an experiment…

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The cover of Duck a' l'Orange for Breakfast by Karina May has the title in a light pink and the author's name in white capital letters. Next to these words there is a blonde woman sitting at a table with a cup of coffee and a basket of pink flowers looking out the window deep in thought

Book Review: Grab a fork and dig in, because Duck a l’Orange for Breakfast is a real treat

When Maxine ‘Max’ Mayberry’s life falls apart around her, she doesn’t just get mad… she gets hungry. When Max discovers her long-term boyfriend Scott in bed with a glamorous ad executive from her work, her life begins to fall apart. Not to mention that she’s recently discovered that she has a brain tumour and needs…

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Higher Education by Kira McPherson features a salmon pink cover with yellow title text. The illustration is of a cartoon woman dangling her toes into an open book like she's paddling in a pool.

Book Review: Higher Education is a Rooney-esque exploration of Australian universities in the late 2000s

Whilst reading Kira McPherson‘s debut novel Higher Education, I couldn’t help but feel like the interior world of the novel was familiar. It wasn’t until I was a few chapters in that I realised it was set in Perth. Don’t get me wrong – it was not the book’s fault that I didn’t realise. It’s just…

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Tuesday Evenings with the Copeton Craft Resistance

Book Review: Colourful threads come together in Kate Solly’s debut novel

If you’ve ever seen a knitting or crochet group get together at your local library or community centre, you’ll know that craft groups are a hive of big personalities. The Copeton Crochet Circle, AKA the Copeton Craft Resistance, are no different. These ladies (and gentleman) are the cast of Kate Solly‘s charming debut novel, Tuesday Evenings with…

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Kevin Wilson

Book Review: Street art goes under the microscope in Kevin Wilson’s latest

Quirky American author, Kevin Wilson‘s latest fictional offering was released in late 2022 to much anticipation. Called Now is Not the Time to Panic, the novel once again explores the line between art and chaos as it follows sixteen-year-old Frances ‘Frankie’ Budge through the summer of 1996. A loner and an aspiring writer, Frankie is a…

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Book Review: Alice Nelson translates familiar territory in Faithless

In Faithless, Alice Nelson’s third novel, we follow Cressida as she writes a letter to her former lover, Max, dissecting the psychology of their relationship. Born the daughter of Lord Farley and his mistress, Cressida and her brother Lucian are part of a second, unacknowledged family. They share an idyllic childhood in India, growing up on…

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Ithaca

Book Review: North turns her pen to weaving tales from Greek Mythology in Ithaca

It’s no secret that Greek Mythology retellings are having something of a moment. Madeline Miller‘s The Song of Achilles – published in 2011 – was one of the most talked about books on TikTok this year; and in the last couple of years, we’ve had novels which focus on the forgotten women’s perspectives within these…

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Joanna Morrison

Book Review: The Ghost of Gracie Flynn is a literary ghost story with a bittersweet twist

There are echoes of The Lovely Bones in Joanna Morrison’s debut novel, The Ghost of Gracie Flynn. Narrated by Gracie, the story is told as if her ghost is talking directly to the infant daughter of one of Gracie’s university friends, Sam. Gracie, Sam, Robyn and Cohen were a tight knit foursome, once upon a time, but…

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Hydra

Book Review: There’s something about Anja in Adriane Howell’s Hydra

The protagonist of Adriane Howell’s debut novel, Hydra, has a very distinctive voice. An antiquarian with dreams of becoming a specialist at the auction house where she works; Anja has developed her own taxonomy of classifying objects based on the way they make a person feel rather than on where they are from, who made them…

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The Glass House

Book Review: Brooke Dunnell’s debut is a compelling domestic noir steeped in nostalgia

In Brooke Dunnell‘s Fogarty Award-winning debut novel, The Glass House, Julia Lambett returns to her childhood home in Perth to move her father into care. The timing, as is usually the case in such novels, couldn’t be worse. Julia and her husband Rowan have taken to sleeping in separate beds; with some sort of unspoken issue…

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The Stranger

Book Review: The Stranger introduces a new voice in the emerging Feminist Western genre

Question: What do you get if you mash up Charlotte Wood‘s The Natural Way of Things, Anna North’s Outlawed and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale? Answer: Kathryn Hore’s latest novel, The Stranger.  Set in an unspecified frontier-like future on an unnamed continent, in a small, gated town called Darkwater, The Stranger is a twist on the classic story prompt, a stranger comes…

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Natasha Lester

Book Review: All that dazzles is Dior in Natasha Lester’s latest hit novel

The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre treads familiar territory for seasoned Natasha Lester readers, namely the streets of Paris during and immediately after the Second World War. The novel opens with Alix about to leave her Swiss finishing school to pursue her dream of working in fashion. She is devastated to leave her closest…

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Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls

Book Review: Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls is a sparkling debut collection from Anne Casey-Hardy

 – With pull quotes on its cover from the likes of Charlotte Wood, Tony Birch and Laura Elvery, Anne Casey-Hardy’s debut collection of short stories, Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls promises to be something special – and it does not disappoint. Often exploring themes of coming of age, motherhood, loss and friendship, these stories are about…

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The Ballroom Murder

Book Review: The Ballroom Murder shines a light on one of Perth’s most fascinating murder trials

In 1925, Perth woman Audrey Jacob shot dead her former fiance, Cyril Gidley in the middle of the ballroom at Government House in front of hundreds of witnesses. Yet she did not go to jail for her crime. Now, almost one hundred years later, historian and author Leigh Straw has delved into this case for…

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