Linda Jaivin

Late in Molly, author Rosalie Ham introduces the Japanese concept of mottainai, “regret for something good when it is not fully utilised”. Mottainai could be said to be the theme of this compelling, enjoyable novel about …

As the focus of our collective anxiety moves between the horrors of Gaza, the political circus in the United States and other crises, few of us pay enough attention to what’s happening in the Taiwan Strait. Kerry Brown wants to change that. Of all …

Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell ran a child abuse and sex trafficking ring for years in plain sight, his wealth and her charm an apparent shield from consequence. The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell bears witness …

The latest book by acclaimed Nigerian novelist Chigozie Obioma, The Road to the Country, addresses brutal conflict and ideological tribalism front on.

American literature, like its history, is full of great transnational crossings which, no matter the direction, head always towards a kind of freedom. That freedom has traditionally been a male thing: Thelma and Louise could finally experience it only …

The protagonist of Siang Lu’s ferally imaginative Ghost Cities, Xiang Lu, knows only a few dozen Chinese words. That doesn’t stop him from working as a translator at the Chinese consulate in Sydney, although we meet him just as he’s busted …

An illustrated 1976 advertisement for Great Wall Chinese Vodka, “THE MOST EXPENSIVE VODKA IN THE WORLD”, portrays a party of happy white people raising their glasses under the tagline: “They told us we were making vodka for the good of the party!” …

The Work is the debut novel of Bri Lee, an accomplished nonfiction writer and public intellectual. It’s set between Sydney and Manhattan, in a milieu where art matters but money rules. It offers up steamy sex and cold characters along with …

Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, born in 1879 in backwoods Talbingo, famously defied restrictive patriarchal, familial and social expectations to become a pioneering feminist, iconic author and posthumous founder of Australia’s most prestigious literary …

Taiwan has again voted to re-elect the Democratic Progressive Party, further inflaming cross-strait tensions with Beijing.

In Yūka Ishii’s slender debut novel, The Mud of a Century, a girl sweeps resentment off a pillow where it had come to rest. Wealthy Indians fly above Chennai’s gnarled traffic on mechanical wings, staring at their phones. People sink into …

The Jakarta sky “had a rosy nuance that somehow seemed both warm and sad, like a freshly slapped cheek” the day a stranger, a photographer, told Nastiti that she was incredibly beautiful and took her picture. She enjoys a moment of glamour when the …

Traced opens in 2020. The narrator, Jane, is a middle-aged contact tracer at a New South Wales Health call centre in Sydney’s western outskirts. The novel transports us back to the time when Covid-19 was new and all talk was of clusters and …

The parade of lyrical fragments – sensual moments, family stories, ethical inquiries and daily records – that makes up The Swift Dark Tide isn’t easy to categorise, so author Katia Ariel does it for us. The book, she tells us, is “a diary …

“There was a moment of light relief towards the end of the Q&A following Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong’s address to the National Press Club on Monday. The Canberra Times’s Nicholas Stuart prefaced his question, …”

The unnamed narrator of Jente Posthuma’s second novel, What I’d Rather Not Think About, sees the play When Women Are Friends by the Dutch writer Hannah van Wieringen. She is struck by a character’s remark that there are many stories …

Yan Lianke’s Heart Sutra portrays a corrupt and materialistic world overseen by a cynical, sloganeering polity. And, yes, it is unpublishable in China. It centres on an official “religious training centre” in Beijing. There, Buddhist, Daoist, …

Christianity reframed the “good death” as a preparation for the afterlife: suffering and pain were seen as spiritually elevating. Religious pastors, not doctors, attended the deathbed. By the 19th century, medicine – which now focused on alleviating …

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this review contains the names of deceased persons. This is a tale of two tribes – one ancient, one modern, both wounded and alienated – and how they came together. It’s …

The epidemiologist Raina MacIntyre is one of the world’s foremost experts on biosecurity and bioterrorism. In 2006 she warned that the Australian health system was vastly unprepared for a pandemic. Nothing changed. Our governments remained “asleep …

“In my daily life,” Haruki Murakami tells us in Novelist as a Vocation, “I’m hardly ever conscious of myself as a writer.” He wants us to understand: “I am, when all is said and done, a very ordinary person.” For a very …

“The story of the first 70 years of lawn tennis (1875-1945),” the eminent immunologist and Nobel laureate Peter Doherty tells us in Empire, War, Tennis and Me, “is embedded in much bigger narratives about imperialist ambitions that led …

As a teenager growing up in a relatively secular Adelaide family, Louise Omer was so shocked to discover her parents smoked dope that she lost trust in their moral authority. An unhappy 15-year-old who felt “rejected and victimized, contemptuous of …

When he wanted to send a secret message, the ancient Greek tyrant Histiaeus shaved the head of a slave, tattooed the message on his scalp and, once the hair had grown back, sent him on his way. In this story, Ellis Gunn finds a key metaphor for how patriarchal …

Among the 13,000 Australian prisoners of war forced to slave on the infamous Thailand–Burma “Death Railway” in World War II were 50 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. One of these – and one of the lucky POWs of any background to make …

The eponymous “good captain” of Sean Rabin’s second novel is Rena, previously known as Idu, Margit, Nina and then Karen. She has never lived on land; proximity to the stench of it makes her retch. People don’t thrill her either. The ocean, however, …

There are few Australians who would have a better claim to the title of “battler” than the post-gold rush Chinese immigrants and first-generation Australian-born Chinese whose stories are told in South Flows the Pearl. In fact, they tell …

In A Witness of Fact, Drew Rooke dissects the career of Colin Manock, an English immigrant who retired in 1995 as South Australia’s chief forensic pathologist after a career spanning almost three decades. Rooke carefully weighs its …

A public intellectual is a person, traditionally from within academia, who has big ideas and the ability to communicate them to the wider community. Younger readers won’t remember this, but in the 1990s and early 2000s, newspapers such as The Sydney …

At least half the nation face-palmed when Prime Minister Scott Morrison explained to journalists that his wife told him that he should think about Brittany Higgins’ rape allegations “as a father first”. He said that Jenny had prompted, “What would …

A significant figure globally in the culture war over Covid-19, Sharri Markson gives an account of the virus’s outbreak that is lucid, flawed and revealing.

In 2005, the CSIRO predicted that climate change would lead to catastrophic fires in south-eastern Australia by 2020. But rather than treating the climate crisis as “a question of science and how we prepare”, as journalist Bronwyn Adcock writes in …

The Christchurch earthquake of February 22, 2011 hammered Michelle Tom’s house, but the terror didn’t stop that day. It was repeated in the “ten thousand aftershocks” of her memoir’s title. One day the following December after two giant aftershocks, …

“How to be alone yet to be in company? That,” the unnamed narrator of Travelling Companions tells us, “is the conundrum.” As a train strike throws him into travel limbo with other tourists on the Spanish–French border, he observes: …

Hear “mutiny”, think “Bounty”. The shipboard rebellion of 1789 has enjoyed a long and fertile afterlife. It has inspired three films and more than a dozen books, fiction and nonfiction alike, including several titles promising the “true …

While a laboratory leak may never be ruled out as the origin of Covid-19, the sources of that theory remain highly questionable.

Fury begins with a young Kathryn Heyman perching precariously on a narrow and slippery boom 50 metres from the deck of a fishing trawler, over a roiling sea. It’s night and a wild storm has blown up, threatening to capsize the boat. It’s …

As Australian writer Yang Hengjun awaits a verdict after being tried in China on charges of espionage, a conviction seems likely. Harder to predict is the sentence he will be given.

As dusk closed in on isolated Talga Lane on a cold winter’s night in 2014, Glen Turner, a compliance officer with the Office of Environment and Heritage, crouched behind his vehicle in terror. He was bleeding from bullet wounds and pleading for his …

As with so much of Murakami’s fiction, the narrators of the stories collected in First Person Singular tend to be going about their mundane lives when there is suddenly a hallucinatory rupture in perception, a slip sideways into unreality. …

When he was finally able to return home after the catastrophic Black Summer bushfires, Jimmy visited each of the places where he and Katy used to go. His life companion had died in the fires. Barely able to eat, he lay listless on the ground, until finally …

If the philosopher’s premise is that everything has meaning, then there is no such thing as meaningless sex. This is true, observes the philosopher Damon Young, even if many of his fellows treat sex “as something a bit stupid”. In On Getting …

The climate crisis demands urgent action. Our democracy, with its “oligarchic” major parties – “shelf companies” with “small, ageing memberships” that serve as little more than “executive-placement agencies” – and an “infantile” …

There had been an undercurrent of speculation aboard the Étoile about smooth-faced Jean Barret, the stoic and hard-working assistant and personal valet to the ship’s naturalist-doctor, Philibert Commerson. In April 1768, after the ship moored …

Bluebird, the setting of Malcolm Knox’s latest novel, is an insular little community on the coastal periphery of “Ocean City”, a wink-wink stand-in for Sydney. The problem with Bluebird, and it’s mostly a problem for the middle-aged white male …

It used to be a given that to understand the People’s Republic of China, one had to be familiar with the workings of the Soviet Union, including Leninist organisational principles, Stalinist methods of terror and control, and the nature of propaganda. …

Watching the news of the 2018 climate strike, Rebecca Huntley suddenly understood that when the young people demanded action from the older generation, they were talking to her. She had, she says, a visceral reaction to this realisation. As a lawyer and …

Amid rising tensions between Beijing and Canberra, the fate of Australian academic and writer Yang Hengjun, imprisoned in China on espionage charges, hangs in the balance.

In the 1930s, as Robert Cutter, he sold more copies of “Hawaiian Paradise” than Bing Crosby. He performed before Katharine Hepburn and Clark Gable at the Academy Awards. He hadn’t quite finished divorcing his best friend’s sister when he fell …

As Australia entered World War II, its all-male armed services had a problem only a woman could solve. That woman was Violet McKenzie, Australia’s first female electrical engineer, a wireless radio pioneer, one of the ABC’s first broadcasters, and …

Yan Lianke’s Three Brothers is a tender, frank and philosophical memoir of growing up in a rural family cursed by “constant poverty” but blessed with “boundless grace”. Yan, a novelist whose biting political satires (Serve the People!, …

Donna Ward’s piano was stranded in the middle of her study. She’d pushed it out from one wall but couldn’t get it to the other side. Two friends, a couple, came to dinner. As they were leaving, they noticed the piano. “This is a time when you …

We are living on the doorstep of a new global dark age, in which superstition, conspiracy theories and distrust of scientific expertise have risen hand in hand with right-wing authoritarianism. The howls of climate crisis denialists fill the air, gleefully …

Jayne Tuttle’s memoir, Paris or Die, is a literary suitcase packed with sparkling friendships, startling discoveries, mad love, intriguing challenges and hot sex. Quite a bit of hot sex, in fact. There’s also mortal danger and helpless loss, …

Testosterone, we thought we knew you. All those scientific studies, and all those reports in newspapers and magazines over the years, have told us you were directly linked to violence, aggression, athleticism, libido, focus, risk-taking, power and even …

Three sisters born to a wealthy Christian family in Shanghai towards the end of the 19th century influenced the course of modern Chinese history. The roles played by the legendary Soong sisters, however, were as different as their politics and personalities. …

When I immigrated to Australia in 1986, this country was notably forward-looking compared with the United States and Britain, where Reagan’s and Thatcher’s neoliberal policies were busily dismantling civil society and social welfare. Here was universal …

There is a thin line between the present and a dystopian future in Lucy Treloar’s second novel, Wolfe Island. The story opens on the eponymous island, located in the Chesapeake Bay and sinking a little more with every wild storm. Once-abundant …

Mother of Pearl tells the story of a surrogacy from the perspectives of three different women. Meg, a married 39-year-old jeweller from Melbourne, is desperate for a child. Years of IVF treatments have left her bereft, her grief like “a wild …

Things go missing in Disappearing Earth. Children. Friends. Lovers. Dogs. Love. Life as it once was and as it seemed it always would be. We learn early on that 11-year-old Alyona, a natural storyteller, “liked, every so often, to bring her …

Damian Barr’s first novel, You Will Be Safe Here, grips you by the throat from its ominous prologue to its shattering conclusion. Set in South Africa, it weaves together two historically disparate narratives united not only by geography. The …

A disruptive student is a teacher’s nightmare. A disruption in normal programming can signal very bad news. But the meaning of the word “disruption”, with its traditionally negative connotations, has itself been disrupted. According to the neoliberal …

When Kaya Wilson, a writer and scientist, transitioned to male, he suddenly realised he could own the streets. In his contribution to this pioneering anthology, he writes about passing a group of drunken men on a dark street, soon after transitioning. …

Silence is not always golden, as the prizewinning British journalist and filmmaker Harriet Shawcross attests in Unspeakable. At the age of 13, she tells us, she lost the ability to speak more than was absolutely necessary to function. Nearly …

“Language is important,” Sarah Maddison tells us at the start of The Colonial Fantasy, a necessary and purposefully confronting book. She sets out the vocabulary on which she believes any discussion of black–white relations in this country …

The 20 short stories in this collection by Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin ooze with menace, seethe with anxiety and bristle with humour. The children of a mining town in “Underground” excavate a mysterious mound of dirt and then themselves disappear …

Make Me a City is a biography of Chicago in its first, dynamic century, and a wondrous, bold and playful first novel. Seductively fascinating characters, real and imagined, populate this fiction with their interweaving and intergenerational stories. …

The protagonist of The Hollow Bones, Ernst Schäfer, is an ambitious young German zoologist and hunter. It is the 1930s and he has joined Himmler’s SS for the opportunities it will give him to lead a major specimen-collecting expedition to …

Nakkiah Lui is one of the country’s funniest, smartest and most deliciously outrageous playwrights. To call her a force of nature is less accurate than saying she is a one-woman cyclone. Her work – including her scripts for TV and her podcast Pretty …

Chigozie Obioma’s spectacular second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities, begins with the quotation of an Igbo proverb: “If the prey do not produce their version of the tale, the predators will always be the heroes in the stories of the hunt.” …

The Ponte City apartment tower in Johannesburg was built for high-flyers before becoming a violent slum ruled by gangsters. Its rebirth as respectable, affordable housing is a model of community renewal.

Within Borneo’s Gomantong Caves – slippery with teeming insects, bird droppings and guano from two million bats – fine dining is likely far from the mind. But overhead a perilous harvest ensues for the key ingredient of Chinese bird’s nest soup.

Los Angeles’ pop-up Museum of Ice Cream has visitors shuffling from one branded photo op to another, stretching the idea of a museum until it has no meaning.

Sarajevo’s streets bear the scars of the Bosnian War siege, but people are pursuing a relaxed approach to life.