Book Reviews

Six Bedrooms by Tegan Bennett Daylight Published by Random House (Vintage) 240 pages Short story collections are something of a livre de jour, and this is a well-deserved player in this arena, unlike this clunky metaphor I've dragged from the recesses of my Sunday

It's hard to resist the comparison between this book and Lena Dunham's, not least because Amy Poehler herself refers to it in her introduction (alongside other wonderful books like Tina Fey's Bossypants). I will start by saying that I didn't think Yes Please was very funny. I mean, I didn't laugh once, and I'm the kind of person who laughs so much that I have to be sent away. I'm also a huge fan of Poehler and have Parks and Recreation repeating 24/7 on a dedicated television in my formal lounge area.

Late in the night, I sometimes click on New Post and unravel two-to-three hundred words of some memory I have: bushwalking with shoes full of leeches, the vinyl couches in my childhood doctor's waiting room, buying clay from the little studio down the road. I love these stories. I write and reminisce and smile and cry and laugh. Here are my stories. Here is my patchwork quilt of life. Somewhere during the writing process, I realise that I'm the only person who will care about it. No one else can relate to the memory. No one else will have an emotional response to catching two buses to visit my boyfriend, or to eating bain-marie noodles in a dirty food court. So I save the draft and never look at it again.

Did you know that women who earn more than 66% of the total household income actually spend more time doing housework than women who earn 50% of the total household income? The Wife Drought offers this and all manner of other depressing factoids, and they are certain to resonate with women (especially mothers) everywhere. When I was a new parent, I had a "wife". Lily was a little baby, and I worked for myself full-time. I was 23 and I was tired for every waking moment, and all the times in between. My then-husband worked on Saturday nights, but otherwise his role was to undertake parental duties while I worked. I had an office away from the house, but I also worked from home sometimes.

With thanks to Bookworld for sending me this tale. Buy their books you guys! I'm reading this right now. 3.5 stars. We Are Called to Rise calls itself "a story about a child's fate", and that is the crux of it. Told from the

Let's talk briefly about titles. Evie Wyld has the most wonderful knack for titles. I bought this book, and her debut (After the Fire, A Still Small Voice) on title alone, having no idea what they were about, nor any

I must confess to having bought into the hype of this book a little. I hadn't heard of it at all, and then in a flash it was on Australian Story, and every bookshop, and in my emails, and every

This is a tidy little story that follows Lily and her friend Eva through a period in the 1930s, when they are living in a house that has essentially become an artists' commune. There is plenty to like about it:

Favel Parrett's first book, Past the Shallows, remains one of the most starkly beautiful pieces of fiction I've ever read. So it was with (let's face it) an invasive level of enthusiasm that I went after her second book. And then

Anyone who ever went to primary school will be familiar with the notion of writing from an animal's perspective. Generally, mine went something like this: My fur is hot and matted, but I have to find the mouse. He's here somewhere.