Taiwan Travelogue

Image credit: Scribe Publications

Well, after weeks of going heavy on the cosy, fantasy reads, we have finally travelled somewhere a lot closer to home and am now reveling in the heady jetlag that comes from closing the cover on an immersive book. Cutting it a bit fine, seeing as we are meeting to discuss this tomorrow, I have just closed the cover on this month’s bookclub read: Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi.

It is May 1938 and Japanese woman author Aoyama Chizuko has arrived in Taiwan, invited by the colonial government to write a series of travelogue essays, even though she is personally indifferent and sometimes against their agenda. She determines to experience and devour authentic island life in every sense of the word, but fears this will be impossible with her assigned assistant/interpreter. Expressing these concerns to her hostess, she is then introduced to the charming, meticulous, and incomprehensible Chizuru, who quickly becomes her interpreter and guide. Over meals of winter melon tea, braised minced pork, silver needle vermicelli, and leftover soup, Chizuko becomes infatuated with Chizuru, but is kept at arm’s length for reasons that only become apparent after a painful separation.

Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text, Taiwan Travelogue is a gorgeous story about a beautiful relationship between two women while also being an immersive cultural exploration of history, language, power dynamics, and of course, food.  It’s an homage to the episodes of self-discovery that can occur only when you travel and stay with you for the rest of your life. I found it inspiring, engaging, and beautiful.

An accessible, academic, and yet poetic prose flavours the pages and completely envelopes the reader in the landscape as well as intimacies that come with sharing a meal. Each chapter is defined by a specific dish that accompanies a significant event in the story and the footnotes serve to cleanse the palette by breaking the narrative flow with academic flavours as well as further establishing the landscape in which we find ourselves.

Image credit: The Booker Prizes

Taiwan Travelogue is immersive and insightful and it very much has made me want to be more adventurous in the kitchen! It’s one of those books that makes you consider yourself a little more closely and from different angles, a truly beautiful and inspiring piece of fiction.

Author: Yang Shuang-zi, 2020

Translation: English translation from Mandarin by Lin King, 2024

Published: Springhill Publishing, Taiwan 2020. This edition published by Scribe Publications, ANZ, 2026.

Bookshops & Bonedust

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Still very much entrenched in the world of high fantasy and low stakes, I have just closed the cover of Travis Baldree’s prequel to Legends & Lattes: Bookshops & Bonedust – a cosy story of high fantasy about first loves and second-hand books.

Viv’s brutally glamorous career as a mercenary is just taking off. But it’s a fact of life that disaster always strikes just when things are getting good. Running with a renowned mercenary group called Rackham’s Ravens Viv is badly injured during a hunt for a fearsome necromancer, and she finds herself stranded in the sleepy seaside town of Murk to recuperate. Laid up with a bad leg and a growing fear that she might not be able to return to the action, what’s a thwarted soldier of fortune to do? Spending time in a struggling bookshop is certainly not how she would have imagined spending her time, but nevertheless when Viv discovers Thistleburr Booksellers she also discovers that adventure and excitement comes in different shapes like a fowl-mouthed rattkin proprietor, a flour-dusted dwarven baker, and a rambunctious gnome with a penchant for knives. Who knows? Maybe the action Viv craves is not as far away as she thinks.

As is the case with any particular mood you get into with reading, it ebbs and flows. For the last couple of weeks I have been all about cosy fantasy reads that I can while away some sunlit afternoons with, but it seems this mood is now ebbing as I found Bookshops & Bonedust to just not be as cosy and enveloping as Legends & Lattes. It’s a sweet and relatable story of self-discovery and growth through finding new interests, with a slightly more dramatic, adventure-y twist in the third act.

The prose is simple, not particularly memorable, but it does transport us into the sleepy seaside town: though this could just be because we are so overexposed to this kind of setting in a plethora of genres that it’s very easy to be transported there with just a few words.

It’s interesting to read a prequel written after a book establishes the central character, mainly because we get to see a greener (no pun intended) and underdeveloped version of this character that we’ve previously come to know. In Viv’s case, she’s young, aggressive, and itching for a fight; devoid of the wisdom and appreciation for the less-stabby pleasures the world can offer. This brings a little humour to the book in the scenes where people raise their eyebrows when they see her reading a book but for the reader, it does deplete her character a little bit, which is fine for the story but meant that I found it a little harder to pick up the book again once I’d put it down.

Image credit: Fantasy-Hive

But with a supporting cast of colour characters, I’m not saying this book is devoid of appeal. Filled with action, romance, comedy, and cosy vibes, Bookshops & Bonedust is a fine little fantasy read if you have the time to while away.

Author: Travis Baldree, 2023

Published: Tor, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, London, 2023.

Bookshops & Bonedust is the prequel to Legends & Lattes.

Legends & Lattes

Image credit: The Nile AU

Continuing on with cramming cosy fantasy reads before the book for July bookclub comes through, this week I travelled to Thune where I came across an adorable little café called Legends & Lattes.

“A novel of high fantasy… and low stakes” the front cover says, perfect for a cosy afternoon read.

Viv the orc barbarian has made the decision to hang up her sword, leave the life of the adventuring mercenary, and settle down to realise a new dream: opening the first ever coffee shop in Thune. While the locals have no idea what coffee is, this is not the only problem that Viv will face on her journey. A complete lack of business experience, the city’s shady criminal underbelly, and the arrival of a nettled old teammate threaten to turn Viv’s dream into a nightmare. But with hard work and the assistance of old friends and new, she might just be able to pull it off.

Written by audiobook narrator and videogame developer, Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes is a cosy, low-stakes read for anyone who enjoys the recognisable fantasy tropes of Dungeons & Dragons and slice-of-life anime. A simple story with a sweet, heartwarming message about backing oneself, it’s a book that is transportive, immersive, and fun.

Written in a simple prose in the third-person register, Legends & Lattes takes the recognisable fantasy settings and characters of Dungeons & Dragons and brings a little modern twist to them in a way that is rather vague and hand-wavey but nevertheless completely acceptable, as the book’s laid-back and nonchalant tone does not call for any deep-seated and stoic lore. Coffee is a gnomish invention – perfectly reasonable and believable, no further questions.

Image credit: Fantasy-Hive

A motley and eclectic group of characters make up the central cast with Viv the hulking orcish barbarian turned café-owner, Tandri the reserved succubus with an artistic flair, Thimble the quiet rattkin who creates wondrous baked goods, Cal the stoic handy-hobgoblin, and Pendry the shy bard. While it’s fair to say the characters are a little two-dimensional, the overall cosy vibe of the book allows for this: there are enough generic cues that let your brain know exactly what type of book this is and how lightly or heavily you need to get emotionally invested in order to enjoy it, so the basic story, the simple characters, and the lack of drama are not problematic in the slightest.

Legends & Lattes is just a nice, cosy, fantasy read filled with tropes and triggers that allow your brain to hunker down for some smooth rundown time.

Author: Travis Baldree, 2022

Published: Tom Doherty Associates, 2022. First published in the UK by Tor and imprint of Pan Macmillan, 2022. Picture paperback edition published 2023

A Fellowship of Games & Fables

Image credit: Paperchain Bookstore

On top of exposing me to books that I normally would not pick out for myself and unearthing other ways in which I can be interpreting the books that I read, being part of a book club has made me really appreciate the different reading experience I get when I read a book recreationally. It occurred to me recently that a lot of the books that I've consumed over the years have been as part of some sort of assignment: university, the 1001 project, and now book club. I have just closed the cover on J. P. Penner’s third instalment in the Adenashire series and, perhaps it’s been the winter weather, perhaps it’s been a stressful workweek, but the hours I was able to steal cosying up with this book that I was reading for me and no other reason have really been some of the most enjoyable.

Jez is not looking forward to the Adenashire Yule Games. She’s not a fan of the cold weather or the large crowds. She would much rather be allowed to sleep the entire Yule season away. But a drunken encounter lands her right in the middle of the festivities with a wager to beat a boastful human team. Not only that, but she must also fake a relationship with her friend Taenya, a woodland elf. Plagued by long-standing insecurities about her worth and a sense of pride that won’t let her back out of her mess, Jez tackles each Yule Game event with cold pragmatism. But the more time she spends with Taenya, the warmer her demeanour becomes. Could she be falling for the elf, and would a romance ruin a perfectly good friendship?

A Fellowship of Games & Fables is the third book in Penner’s Adenashire series: a collection of incredibly cosy fantasy reads that are best enjoyed with a cup of tea and some form of warm baked-good. Each book is a sweet little romance novel, following a trio of protagonists introduced in the very first instalment:  A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic. Book three follows Jez, an aloof and emotionally closed-off fennex and, similar to its predecessors, it chronicles a sweet and wholesome story of self-discovery and romance.

Similar to book one, in that the central drama is in the form of a competitive situation, where Games & Fables surpasses Bakers & Magic is in its solid establishment of drama. It could be that book one was Penner finding her feet with the series, but the low-stakes quickly went down to no-stakes and the thrill that should have come with a competitive setting just didn’t. This is not the case with book three. Penner works with the knowledge that readers are immediately going to side with Jez and uses that character misdirection to create a good sense of drama and suspense where the narrative requires it. It’s a fun play on the idea of the unreliable narrator, without the omniscient narrator doing any real misleading – just letting the reader do all the work based on their relationship with the character.

Image credit: Instagram

Written in a prose accessible to a wide audience-range, A Fellowship of Games & Fables is a delightfully cosy read filled with drama, romance, very cute scenes of social awkwardness, and complete with recipes in the back! I have since discovered that there are yet more instalments in this series and I am quite excited to get them on my shelf.

Author: J. P. Penner, 2024,2025

Published: Poison Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Illinois, 2025

Mantle

Image credit: Amazon

Part of the human condition is having the need to identify and label something so as to be better prepared for the type of experience you're about to have. This is why we love genre. When you go into a cinema to see a rom-com or horror movie, you are armed with the security of an unspoken generic contract; you’re going to experience warm and fuzzy feelings during the rom-com, anticipation and anxiety during the horror, etc. While genre and its contracts are present in literature, the security is not quite as apparent and there are many authors who deliberately muddle and mix the building blocks of genre to create new experiences for the reader. The blurb of a book can only give so much forewarning and often, the book will turn out to be way different to what you expected from the summary on the back. Case in point, Romy Ash’s Mantle.

Ursula travels to the cold and scenic wilds of lutruwita/Tasmania to be with her ailing more who is suffering from a strange and mysterious illness. What began as a rash has turned into something dangerous. And now Ursula has it too. With the illness spreading across the island and beyond, Ursula finds herself stranded in her mother’s house, entangled in a relationship with a younger man she met at the pub, and finding solace in the unknowable, wildness of nature. But just like her, nature is changing, shifting, and turning into something else.

My initial thoughts upon reading the blurb were that this was going to be some sort of eco-horror, dystopian, contagion novel with heavy allusions and allegories to Covid, global warming, and the ways in which humans have destroyed the planet. And to an extent it is. The most intriguing thing about this book is the way in which Ash writes about horrific events but, rather than layer on the drama, doom-and-gloom, and scariness of the scenario in which the protagonist finds herself, the book reads as a tranquil journey of metamorphosis. Ash is an amazingly transportive writer: when you’re reading her descriptions of the pebbly beach or the windy, woody bushland, you can hear the wind, taste the salt, and feel the hard smoothness underfoot. The enrapture of Mantle is not in the story it’s telling or the scenes it describes, but in the sensory feelings it prompts as well as the many ideas and messages about the natural world and the nature of humankind that lines its pages.

Image credit: Melbourne Writers' Festival

Like a few of the books I have read in book club, this is not a story I would have picked for myself. And I certainly struggled with it in the beginning, as it did not read like the dystopian horror I had intoned from the blurb. The pace is slow and sauntering even though it's describing some truly disturbing things and the evolution of the narrative and acceptance of the reader is so gradual that it’s hard to pinpoint just where in the book I started to power through the pages. I guess this is reflective of the nature themes; ever-changing and sometimes going unnoticed.

Mantle is a truly provocative read. It’s one of the few books that I have been left feeling confused as to whether I liked it or not. Perhaps it warrants a second reading? Looks like I might need to keep it on the shelf next to Arborescence.

Author: Romy Ash, 2026

Published: Ultimo Press, an imprint of Hardie Grant Publishing, 2026

A Fellowship of Librarians & Dragons

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While we often think about curling up and reading as the ultimate form of cosy, there are many factors to consider when measuring the cosiness of a designated blanket, couch, bed, or tea reading session. Of course, the biggest is the type of book one is choosing to cosy up with. Having powered through the mellow, romantic, and no-stakes comfort of A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic, it seems the thing I really needed this week was more cosy comfort reading and so it was onto the next Adenashire instalment: A Fellowship of Librarians & Dragons.

After becoming best friends with Arleta Starstone at the Langheim Baking Battle, Doli Butterbuckle decides that moving to Adenashire is the next logical step for her. Peaceful, quiet living, being near her best friends, and spreading her infectious good humour through working in a bookstore seems like the ideal life. Plus, it’s away from the pressures of her overbearing family in Dundes Heights, where she’s never felt she could really be herself. But Doli’s quiet life gets shaken up when she inherits a dragon egg. Faced with a responsibility she’s not sure she’s ready for, Doli enlists the help of the newly-arrived gargoyle librarian, Sarson, to learn as much as she can before the egg hatches. Not only does her research uncover a myriad of potential challenges in dragon-rearing, but as she spends more time with him, Doli finds herself falling for Sarson.

Now that I have cottoned on to how these books are meant to be read, it was easier to simply fall into the enveloping warmth and cosiness of A Fellowship of Librarians & Dragons. Reading like a PG erotic romance, whilst simultaneously making fun of the fact that it knows it’s doing that, the second book in the Adenashire series is every bit as sweet and warming as its predecessor. It’s an adorable little tale of how relationships can help to shape one’s identity, as well as inspire ambition, passion, and strength that one never knew they had.

Image credit: Instagram

The romantic in me very much enjoyed the wholesome but still suggestive interactions between Doli and Sarson, and the dragon-lover in me was very satisfied with the cute and cheeky character of Evvy, a pink baby dragon with a penchant for mischief and an insatiable appetite. It also felt that there was more drama happening in this book than in the first one, taking it from no-stakes to low-stakes, which made the pages flip even faster.

Filled with romance, comedy, character growth, and just as many delicious-sounding recipes as the first book, A Fellowship of Librarians & Dragons is another perfectly cosy read.

 Author: J. Penner, 2024

Published: Poison Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Illinois, 2025.

A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic

Image credit: Goodreads

After the rapid pace, thrilling tension, and macabre fantasy nightmares of Holy Terrors, I was definitely keen on the idea of a cosy read for my next book. Something cute and comforting with low stakes. A while ago, I came across a children’s trilogy by J. Penner that sounded right up my cosy fantasy alley, so this is what I’ve chosen to settle the nerves and adrenaline from last week’s read with. This week I travelled into the quaint magical world of Adenashire with A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic.

Arleta Starstone is a human with an incredible talent for baking. While she may need to work twice as hard as everyone else because of her lack of magic, her baked treats infused with herbs are her own unique form of magic. While Aleta does not believe she is anything special, her orc neighbours do and to prove it they enter her into the prestigious Langheim Baking Battle. Nervous that her being magicless and competing against the likes of elves, dwarves, and other magical beings will surely work against her, Aleta nevertheless travels to Langheim to compete. But the competition turns out to be a life-changing adventure as Arleta discovers her own self-worth and makes some unique friends along the way.

So admittedly I got a little bit of whiplash in the difference in prose, coming from the more mature writing of Owen and then diving into a book that is definitely aimed at a younger audience. The Adenashire trilogy feels like it’s a bedtime story for that age bracket between childhood and angsty adolescence. The writing is very simple and plain, comfortably building the world and its characters, but not quite doing it with as much flare as one would expect from a fantasy novel.

The events of the novel are then told in very quick and factual succession with a ‘no-muss no-fuss’ attitude. The story itself is very sweet and wholesome, a perfect cosy read when you’re wrapped in a blanket with a cup of tea. One thing I would have liked though is a bit more drama and sense of stakes. Our heroine, despite being described as constantly nervous and keeping everyone at arm’s length, doesn’t really have a lot of dept to her. We aren’t given the story as to why she is standoffish and a loner, which I feel would then give her being in the competition – and indeed the competition itself- some stakes. It’s true I was after a low-stakes read, but not a no-stakes read. But in all honesty, this was the only area in which I felt that the book was lacking, and to give credit where it is due, once the supporting characters are established then the pace and the atmosphere of the novel picks up.

Image credit: Instagram

Filled with romance, humour, and a cosy token fantasy world, A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic is a very sweet and cosy afternoon read.

Author: J. Penner, 2023

Published: Originally self-published by J. Penner, 2023. Pictured edition published by Sourcebooks, 2025

Holy Terrors

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After what seems like an age since I discovered that Little Thieves is a trilogy and ecstatically bought the remaining two books, I have now been able to hunker down and read the final instalment in the thrilling adventures of Vanja Ros: Holy Terrors.

After banishing the vengeful ghost of her mother who has haunted her for years, Vanja is slowly coming to terms with who she is as a person. Still unable to believe that she won’t be used against Emeric in his career, she has chosen to go it alone and has made a new name for herself as the Pfennigeist: helping those that the law cannot. After one particularly irksome job, Vanja discovers that there is a serial killer tearing through the country’s royalty. Normally this would not concern her, except that the killer is leaving her signature red penny on all the victims and the Pfennigeist is fast becoming a villain rather than folk hero. In order to save her name (and herself), Vanja has to team up once again with Emeric Conrad after breaking his heart a second time.

The final instalment in Margaret Owen’s Little Thieves trilogy is every bit as exciting and intriguing as its predecessors: a ghoulish fantasy-whodunnit with an underlying love story and journey of self-discovery. All our favourite characters return for a thrilling final adventure in which everyone is in mortal peril every single minute.

Image credit: Bookrelease.com

Following the classic themes and formula of the whodunnit, Holy Terrors elevates the genre by being a noir thriller set against a delightfully macabre Scandinavian fantasy background. While a few modern musical throwbacks jerk you out of the world for a minute, Owen’s delightful banter between characters as well as her rapidly flowing prose guarantees total immersion and memorable scenes that cause you to exclaim out loud.

If the book falls down anywhere, it would probably be with the introduction of a comic-book narrative trope that is just everywhere at the moment (obviously I don’t want to spoil anything). There are also a number of places in which major plot twists or dramatic reveals don’t feel like they land the way there were intended to, either because they were nonchalantly dropped onto the table or were not sufficiently set up to achieve the desired response.

But having said that, Holy Terrors is still a wonderfully intriguing and action-packed end to a refreshingly different type of YA fantasy novel. Filled with suspense, gore, humour, romance, solid character development, and practically everything in between, it’s very easy to fly through its five hundred plus pages in no time at all!

Author: Margaret Owen, 2025

Published: Hodder & Stoughton, a Hachette Uk Company, Great Britain, 2025.

A Rising of the Lights

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I wonder if there is a term for fictional works that chronicle a narrative but also a mental journey of its characters. Considering the existence of the omniscient narrator, the ideas that fictional characters are a means through which the author communicates/examines a multitude of thought processes, and then stories in which absolutely everything happens within the confines of a mind, ‘mental-fiction’ or ‘psych-fiction’ is probably too broad and flimsy to act as a binding label to a subgenre…

Sorry, my own thought process are running away with me; a side effect from just finishing Steve Toltz’s A Rising of the Lights.

Russell Wilson’s world has never been like that of other peoples’, but that hasn’t stopped him trying to secure love and normalcy. However, it’s incredibly hard to find security when everything that happens to you feels like having the ground disappear from beneath your feet. In quick succession, his wife confesses to an affair and leaves him, his elderly parents decide they no longer wish to see him, and he loses his job to an AI system. When his childhood friend Edwina sets him up with a job as a high school guidance counsellor, the dilemma of trying to inspire young humans to care about their future becomes the next mystery for Russell to grapple with. After all, is it worth crafting a future for yourself when the horizon is populated with robots and AI? Is the future even worth considering when it’s only the present that really affects the human condition? And then there’s the contradiction of the human condition: the cure for loneliness causes loneliness…

My immediate thought upon closing this book was that it reminded me of The Great Gatsby. Despite being written in a nonchalant and cynically humorous way, it’s a book that is really a lament for an age of uncertainty. With the rise of AI, generational attitudes are crashing upon each other, culminating in a person that has no static sense of self and is wholly influenced by external events and the behavioural messages that they have absorbed through media on how to deal with them. While the overarching cloud of gloom and doom (a la Great Gatsby) definitely left me feeling that something had been scooped out of my brain with a melon-baller, it was quickly smoothed over with the clever prose, intellectual dialogue, and leisurely rapid-fire pace in which disasters befall the protagonist (like the author forgot their finger was holding down the trigger).

Image credit: Amazon

To say this book is ‘thought-provoking’ is putting it mildly. ‘Mind-exploding’ might be a better way of phrasing it. Imagine that it only blows up a portion of your brain and the shrapnel just continues to flutter about: thoughts chasing each other. Like when you kick up sand underwater. The brilliance of it really is how it makes you aware of the cloudy, chaotic, undefined swirling of your identity. Especially in this day and age where we're constantly absorbing so many messages through media and machinery. The dynamic, wavering, fragility of the sense of self - we see this reflected in the entire cast of characters; an ensemble that I still don’t know if I liked any one of them, but they all work together to tell a most interesting story.

I thoroughly enjoyed A Rising of the Lights and would absolutely recommend it. It's deep, funny, chaotic, and slightly unbelievable, still with a nice hopeful nugget at the end. 

Author: Steve Toltz, 2026

Published: Penguin Random House Australia, 2026

Helm

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While there is absolutely nothing fun about being in a ready slump, the inflating sense of accomplishment that comes from finally finishing the book that you were struggling through is nothing short of magnificent. It’s a different kind of reading experience that comes from encountering a book that provides challenges, takes you out of your comfort zone, makes literary/character/narrative decisions that you can’t really fathom... or a mélange of everything heretofore mentioned.

This month’s book for Bookclub was Helm by Sarah Hall, a book that is about everything and nothing, is enlightening and confusing, and took me over a month to read because once I had put it down, I struggled to aspire to pick it back up again.

Helm is a ferocious wind that presides over the southwestern slopes of the Cross Fell range in Cumbria England. Helm doesn’t know when Helm was born or when Helm will die, nor does Helm really care. But humans do: the Neolithic tribes that tried to placate it, the Dark Age zealot who attempted to banish it, the Victorian steam engineer who tried to capture it, the free-spirited little girl who loved it, Dr Selima Sutar who is trying to study it, and a whole bunch of other people all have stories connected to Helm.

The blurb advertises that this is a life story of Helm, though that term is about as unstable as the subject matter. The novel is a collection of individual stories, spanning throughout the ages of human history, that all have some tie-in with Helm. They are stories without closure, that raise questions about their narrators, and teach us little to nothing of Helm.

The sensual reading experience of this book was funnily enough like being caught in a multidirectional wind. With the exception of the 4-6 central stories, there is nothing that grounds the narrative or keeps you fixed and focused on a cemented path. The tone, the tales, the characters are discordant and higgledy-piggledy and it feels like there is no real space to breath and take in the sights before another blast from the narrative wind (either the ‘character’ of Helm or the narrative devices that Hall employs) scoop you up and deposit you somewhere else; like Dorothy and Toto.

Having so much happen (and seemingly nothing resolve) over the course of 300+ pages made this a very challenging book for me. So much so that I failed to really admire the scenic walk through the Ages or the Historic Tour of How Human’s Destroy the World that the author takes us on. The messages about climate change did not become present to me until they were literally voiced at the end.

Image credit: Faber

This book is a literary achievement. One that I think people smarter that me, able to see further than me, and more attuned to the subtle mechanics of narrative devices are able to appreciate more than I can. While I recognise the tricks and tropes that make this book different to other speculative fiction, and appreciate that the reading experience was reflective of the nature of the narrative subject, I just really struggled with it. I turned up to Bookclub having only made my way through half of it.

Author: Sarah Hall, 2025

Published: Faber & Faber Limited, London, 2025

Unbury the Dead

Image credit: Simon & Schuster Australia

The crime novel is a genre that has been through a plethora of transformations over the years. From the sophisticated detective novels of Conan Doyle to the gritty noir of Chandler, names like Poe, Harris, Christie, Du Maruier, Larsson, Le Carre, Collins, etc. trample over each other as they traverse the genre landscape. When we pick up a crime novel, we are promised a challenge in trying to solve the mystery before the protagonists, as well as the added thrill of a race against time to tie everything up. We expect charismatic characters, immediate intrigue, and (often) a pace that keeps us on our toes. It’s thus, deflating when we get to the end of a crime novel and feel that it hasn’t delivered.

Unbury the Dead follows ‘heroines’ Alice and Teddy: best friends and hired hands with flexible moral boundaries who provide a variety of services from chauffeurs to bodyguards, to private detectives, to crime scene cleaners. Teddy is searching for a missing teenager while Alice is driving one of Australia’s richest men to his final resting place. When their individual cases suddenly collide, sparking a large and sinister mystery, the girls go rogue to find the truth about who is dead who shouldn’t be, who’s alive who should be dead, and how it all ties together.

My overall thoughts on this novel is that it needed flavour. I feel like it maybe could make a very good TV series with the added spice of music, moody lighting, and diverting camera angles. The story, characters, and landscape are perfectly solid, but there is something about the prose that just leaves everything feeling flat and bland. Hardy writes in short, to-the-point sentences, many of which don’t employ the flavour-enhancing power of adjective or adverbs, and while this certainly lets people know what’s happening it doesn’t really lead the reader on a journey: instead it lets you sit still while it just hands you mounds of stuff to hold. It reminded me of Carl Hiaasen’s work, another crime writer with solid stories but a similarly nourishing but flavourless way of telling them.

But to give credit where it is due, there is enough intrigue in the mystery itself that inspires you to keep turning pages (after persevering with the 150-page setup). Classic genre tricks are employed to encourage the brain to store information and form theories: things like red herrings, repeated incidents, and vague dialogue.

Image credit: Bendigo Writer's Festival

It felt that Hardy was trying to explore the nature of criminals and exploring the nitty-gritty of labelling people into the binary of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ when a person doesn’t really fall into either of those categories. She starts to build on this with internal monologues and emotional self-processing of the heroines during traumatic scenes and it finally comes to a more pronounced head in the story’s third act. Sadly, I feel like this social commentative part of the book just didn’t really gain any traction. Perhaps it’s because the blunt prose also served to dull down the charisma that the girls could have had. You know how Phil Spector was famous for the ‘Wall of Sound’ that managed to bury Tina Turner’s voice in River Deep Mountain High? This is the literary equivalent of that.

As crime novels go, Unbury the Dead leaves a bit to be desired, but it does provide an engaging mystery that does set the brain whirring and pages turning at a reasonable pace.

Author: Fiona Hardy, 2025

Published: Affirm Press, Melbourne Australia, 2025.

Painted Devils

Image credit: Amazon

After the epic tome that was Don Quixote, I felt that I deserved to dive back into some mindless YA fantasy: my guilty pleasure. A few months ago, I discovered that Little Thieves by Margaret Owen was the first book in a trilogy, so I promptly picked up copies of the other two books and reread Little Thieves to reacquaint myself with the world and characters. It’s a joy to be back in the cold, Scandinavian setting with Vanja trying to navigate her way through encounters with nachtmaren, Low Gods, and maleficent spectres.

After leaving Minkja to start a life a little more on the straight and narrow, Vanja stumbles drunkenly to the small village of Hagendorn one night, accidently spilling her rubies into the river as she does. Rather than risk the frostbite of fishing alone, she scams the town into helping her retrieve them, inventing a goddess called the Scarlet Maiden and a promise to bless the town should they find all the rubies. When minor miracles of good fortune start to happen, a cult springs up for the Scarlet Maiden and the lie then spins out of control when Emeric appears to investigate the anomaly and Vanja’s fake goddess manifests and claims him as a sacrifice. Vanja, now accused of profane fraud, finds herself in another dangerous race against time to save Emeric, prove her innocence, and learn the truth of the Scarlet Maiden.

With the characters, setting, and lore established in Little Thieves, Painted Devils focuses on furthering the character and relationship development of the two romantic leads: Vanja and Emeric. Owen’s sassy and modern prose complete with snide asides that are almost metafictive but not quite, is still going strong in this book. Unlike its predecessor, I found this one to be a little bit of a slow starter, a gas stove on the fritz that is click-click-clicking with sparks before (finally) bursting into blue flame.

The central story is no less thrilling than the first one once it gets going. In fact, there actually proves to be a lot more in this one than just ‘break curse and bring evil prince to justice’. The to-do list of quests that make up Painted Devils is impressive: save Emeric, prove Vanja’s innocence, find alternate means to appease goddess, steal a sacred relic, find missing persons, expose a town-wide business scam, solve the mystery of the Scarlet Maiden… it goes on.

Image credit: Bookrelease.com

Vanja and Emeric’s relationship definitely develops, still being reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler. One thing that I did find myself hitching on was the introduction of sex. To be fair, sex is kind of integral to the story and the character development of both Vanja and Emeric and there are a couple of amusing scenes in which Owen very succinctly depicts the awkwardness that adolescents encounter when they are required to talk about sex. She also highlights a prominent point in her heroes’ obliviousness about sex and sexuality: sexual education during adolescence is ludicrously poor. It’s astounding that in such a modern age, open discussions about one of the most natural things that humans do productively and recreationally are still considered dirty and taboo. This was the little slice of hidden social commentary that I got out of this; you can always find them in fantasy.

Filled with action, adventure, drama, romance, and sex, Painted Devils is a fun and rollicking follow-up to Little Thieves that ticks all the boxes for a good, comfy, YA fantasy.

Author: Margeret Owen, 2023

Published: Hodderscape, Hodderscape & Stoughton, Hachette, Great Britain, 2023. Paperback edition published 2024.

Don Quixote

Image credit: The Nile

There are all kinds of answers to the question ‘why do we read?’. For some, it’s the voyeurism and escape from the everyday that entices them to turn pages. For others, it’s the broadening of literary, cultural, social, or even vocabulary horizons. There are some who like the challenges that reading can pose and thus, the thrill of overcoming those challenges when you close the cover on the book now read. For myself, it’s all of these things, but in regard to the latest book that I have closed the cover on, it is certainly the latter.

After a couple of months, I have finished reading Don Quixote.

This classic Spanish work from the 1600s chronicles the humorous and bizarre tale of Senor Don Quixote who develops a madness after reading too many novels about knights and chivalry that he believes them to be histories and determines to re-establish the golden age of knights errant in modern Spain. With armour made from a pasteboard, a noble steed (actually a broken-down old nag) and a loyal squire (a simple-minded neighbour), he leaves his village in search of adventures in which he can right wrongs, save damsels, and raise his good name of Don Quixote, Knight of the Sorrowful Face, into the famed realms of those good knights he has read about.

Miguel de Cervantes is credited with inventing the form of the novel by first creating the role of the reader in literature. The book’s prologue begins with addresses to the ‘idle reader’, the hero’s trials and quests are determined by his understanding of the narrative form of such stories, having read an abundance of them, and in the second instalment of his adventures, it is made clear that the inhabitants of Spain have read about his adventures and misadventures, indeed making him a famous knight errant – though not for the reasons he wishes.

Despite its date tag of the 1600s, Don Quixote is really a thoroughly modern book. It’s the first example of a number of meta techniques that other famous authors would go on to use. First, we have the idea of the fictional history, Cervantes constantly refers to the work as a history chronicled by someone else, establishing the bizarre Don Quixote as a real person rather than a fictional character. This heightens the humour in the second instalment of the knight’s adventures as characters recognise Don Quixote, having read the first published chronicle of his trials and deeds, thus mirroring the reader's own experience.

Second, we have a constant underlying current of social commentary focusing on society’s relationship with literature as well open discussions about the nature of literature as well as its makeup. There are many scenes in which Don Quixote confuses characters by speaking about literature so eloquently that he causes them to forget that he is indeed mad.

Finally, we have the constant references and addresses to the reader. Cervantes consistently reminds us that these chronicles were written down by another and brings us out of the voyeuristic riptide of the book by referring to the thoughts of the author on the hero’s misadventures, as well as commenting on or drawing attention to details that have been omitted or summarised for the sake of the novel.

Despite there being many layers to process and pass through on an academic or critical-thinking level, the book also offers its readers a delightfully chaotic and humorous voyage of action, drama, suspense, romance, and fantasy. Through Don Quixote’s misadventures, we get to enjoy stories within stories such as the great romance of Cardenio and Luscinda, and the tragic tale of curious Anselmo, as well as the humorous tricks of the duke and duchess who seek to play on Don Quixote’s madness for further entertainment.

Image credit: Britannica

While absolutely a challenge, the story/stories of Don Quixote are true classics filled with action, adventure, romance, chivalry, and comedy. They have inspired novellas and plays, continue to be referenced and adapted, and have been canonised in literary history as the birth of the novel and the reader.

Author: Miguel de Cervantes

Published: Juan de la Cuesta, Madrid, 1605-1615. Pictured edition published by Vintage, Random House, London, 2005.

Translation: Edith Grossman

The Transformations

Image credit: Harry Harthog

What better way to ring in the new year, then by closing the cover on a book? I had hoped to make this month’s bookclub read the last one of 2025, but it’s been a year and I threw in the towel at 11pm when my eyes and brain could not take in any more words.

2025 was a year in which a lot of things changed for me, there were a lot of upheavals, adjustments, and reshufflings. It’s kind of eerily apt that the final book I consumed this year was The Transformations by Andrew Pippos.

The story follows George Desoulis, a subeditor at The National and a functional loner by nature. His contented bubble of solitary routine is shaken up one night when he allows Cassandra Gwan, a self-assured journalist and coworker to enter it. Soon the two begin an unorthodox relationship, each becoming increasingly aware of the intimate ways in which they are transforming from one person to another, as they respond to the changing landscape of their jobs, their responsibilities to family, and the events of their past that still live in the dark corners of their characters.

I like to think of myself as an open reader, an eclectic in that I enjoy a variety of genres, writing styles, and author timbres. If I have learned anything about myself while reading this book, it is that I respond better to books that are not quite so calm and subtle. It’s a bit of a cliché, but this girl likes a bit of drama!

The Transformations is a book that explores the intricacies of emotional human development and how we are constantly morphing from one identity to another, creating a human-shaped papier mache of labels that bears a name. Pippos as an omniscient third-person narrator follows his romantic leads in equal measure as well as the supporting characters, giving readers a rich understanding of who these people are and what types of events and experiences have shaped them.

The prose is blunt with the odd adjective or adverb breathing life and personality into the scene. It’s a book in which the real stories are told between the lines, through subtle hints in dialogue or a throwaway sentence of self-analysing exposition. The problem that I encountered with this is that, while it made the book easy to read, I felt that the characters and the events that were taking place lacked personality, vibrance, and drama and thus, it was a bit hard to really become enveloped in the world of the book. I enjoyed reading it for reading’s sake, admiring the author’s literary craft rather than the story or characters he had created.

Image credit: Writing NSW

While I don’t believe that this is a book that I would revisit, I am pleased to have read it, taken a few life perspectives away from it, and been exposed to a new author who has a talent for conveying and traversing the finnicky emotional labyrinths of the human condition. The Transformations is a book that very simply explores the changing nature of relationships and boundaries of relationships, the decline of the newspaper as an institution, and the various ways in which change happens, sometimes suddenly sometimes unnoticed over time.

Author: Andrew Pippos, 2025

Published: Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd, 2025.

What We Can Know

Image credit: Wikipedia

Like actors, writers can be versatile and traverse the multiverse of genre and form but at the same time they are people with strengthened talents in specific areas. While some actors are usually cast as the girl next door, or the leading man of action, authors are the same with some banking on their ability to create thrilling suspense as others primarily work within the confines of the quest narrative.

Ian McEwan is an author who specialises in dissecting and magnifying the human complexities of his characters, which I think is what makes his books compelling, popular, and perfect for film adaptations. Having only read two of his novels previously I can’t call myself a fan, but I can appreciate his craft and admire his talent for creating compelling and confronting character-driven narratives. I have just closed the cover on his latest book, What We Can Know, and while I don’t think it is a book for me, I certainly was intrigued by it.

Tom Metcalfe, a scholar at the University of the South Downs, spends his adult life poring over the archives of early 21^st century literature, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life in, what he deems, the Golden Age. His prime obsession: a legendary poem by Francis Blundy read aloud during a dinner party in 2014, never published and never heard from again. Over the years the poem has become a great myth and symbol of what has been lost, but when Tom discovers a clue that may lead to the poem’s resurrection, hope of finding this lost masterpiece is kindled. However, the clue takes Tom on a journey of terrible discoveries about a world and people he thought he knew so intimately.

What We Can Know primarily explores the idea, as well as the dangers, of ‘Golden Age thinking’ mixed with that adage of ‘you should never meet your heroes’. Set in a future where the physical world has taken on new shapes thanks to climate change, war, and other human-related follies, it is divided into two parts told by separate narrators. Part One is narrated by Tom Metcalfe and it chronicles both the research and journey to find the lost poem, with the famous ‘Second Immortal Dinner’ pieced together from journal entries and emails, as well as the intimate relationship that Tom has with Francis Blundy, his wife Vivien, and the other figures of his research. Part Two takes us back in time with an intimate journal entry from Vivien Blundy that tells the true story of that dinner, the poem, and what it meant.

McEwan is one of the most intimate writers that I have come across. While events that are dramatic by nature do appear in his novels, they are made more traumatic by their being character-driven and then internally analysed by those characters. The physical events are nothing compared to the emotional scrutiny and dissection that they are subjected to afterwards. What We Can Know chronicles epic journeys of self-analysis, emotional paralysis, metamorphosis, and destruction. Written plainly but with enough adverbs and adjectives that do an impressive amount of heavy lifting, it’s an ingeniously deceptive story that looks romantic, poetic, and exciting on the surface but is dark, confronting, and nightmarish underneath. An olive in a dish of chocolate-coated almonds, a seasoned doughnut where tyrannical cinnamon has overthrown the sugar.

Image credit: Wikipedia

It's complex, intensely voyeuristic, confronting, and rather difficult to talk about, as it is so provocative and churns up such a tsunami of thoughts that it’s impossible to sort through the wreckage. Fans of McEwan will be delighted, and dabblers will find an appreciation for the insane talent he has for putting the turbulent and terrible nature of humans into words.

Author: Ian McEwan, 2025

Published: Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage; Penguin Random House UK, 2025

Arborescence

Image credit: Hachette Australia

A reading experience can be many things. It can be immersive, disruptive, comforting, harrowing, scary, exhilarating, it can be anything and everything all at once sometimes. While we are tempted to measure the brilliance of a book by how positive we find the reading experience that it provides, that’s not always the best way to go about it. Sometimes we need to consider that the books that disturb and unsettle us are just as brilliant as the ones that excite and uplift us. Having been late on the last book for bookclub, this week I have gone to the other extreme and finished the book with almost a month to spare! It’s a cliché to gush that the brilliant thing about bookclubs is that they encourage you to read books that you ordinarily wouldn’t, but it’s one hundred per cent the case. A complete departure from the hilarious detective-noir farce that was The Empress Murders, this week’s read had me skeptical, curious, enthralled, unsettled, and dispirited. This week I’m talking about Rhett Davis’ Arborescence.

Bren works for a company that he doesn’t understand the point of with colleagues whom he has never met. His partner Caelyn cycles through jobs looking for something, though she’s not sure what. One day the couple discover a group of people in a nearby forest who believe that if they stand still for long enough, they will eventually take root and become trees. While Bren dismisses the idea as a weird cult ideology, Caelyn becomes fascinated by it. She goes back to university and writes articles about it and soon the two realise that the idea is spreading. People are going missing and trees are appearing in places where they weren’t before. Could arborescence really be true? As the world becomes greener and cities and technology stagger, Caelyn sees nothing to fear but Bren is not so sure.

Arborescence begins as a wholesome, almost hippy-dippy exploration about the bizarre and dysfunctional love triangle that is the human-technology-nature relationship. It then begins to slowly and eerily turn towards the avenue of thriller territory before suddenly taking a hard turn into the realm of dystopia. It’s a hugely provocative book, inspiring an absolute tirade of thought processes regarding the state of the world, the toxicity of humanity, what the human condition truly means and how it affects everything it around it, as well as social, economical, and natural evolution.

Davis writes in a structurally fragmented way to depict the erraticism of human thought processes while at the same time using prose that is rich, poetic, slow-moving, and even soothing. The disjointed paragraphs mixed with this soothing, measured language has an unsettling effect as it both startles and lulls the reader, diverting their attention away from the creeping doom that inches ever closer. This way, when the horror of the story does finally settle in, it’s truly upsetting enough to inspire stomach drops, gooseflesh, and shivers.

While I spent a fair potion of this book being captivated and then horrified, the remainder was spent feeling depressed as Davis really writes about two dystopias, one replacing the other. When the book starts in what I assume is the modern day, AI or ‘alternative intelligences’ are prevalent, running entire companies, issuing orders and workloads, and even hiring human actors as representatives when face-to-face interviews are required. It’s eerily science fiction without really being in that hyper-futuristic setting and the interactions between human and technology are so nonchalantly depicted that the strangeness of it doesn’t quite register until you realise that the ‘boss’ sitting across from Bren in the café is actually a man working for a robot. This technological dystopia that the book begins in establishes the shift in human relationships with one another, showing a lack of vibrance, energy, or spark. Perhaps I interpreted this on a more personal level as I’ve recently had to adjust to working remotely with all colleagues being online: isolation can really be a downer. By the time the natural dystopia takes root, Davis has raised so many questions about the changing flavour of human relationships that it’s hard to find the will to stand up.

Image credit: Curtis Brown

I think if I read this book again, it will be some years down the track, but I do think that it was brilliant! There is so much going on and being explored narratively, structurally, and socially. It really makes the mind whirl with theories, questions, anxieties, and hope. And while I haven’t come away from a read so depressed since The Great Gatsby, Davis does leave readers on a hopeful note. It’s certainly not a comfy, cosy read, but I think I would recommend Arborescence if you’re out for a challenge, a stimulant, or an emotional shakeup.

Author: Rhett Davis, 2025

Published: Hachette Australia, 2025

The Empress Murders

Image credit: Allen & Unwin

So it’s early days of having joined a real book club – I attended my second meeting this week- and I have already become that person who totally mistook the date and ended up in the position of having one day to read the book! Thankfully, our book this month – The Empress Murders- is such a fast-paced and engaging read that I was able to get through to thirds of it before the meeting!

Aboard the Empress of Australia, a plethora of passengers are crossing the Atlantic and heading for New York. It is smooth sailing until a dead body is discovered. It quickly falls to house detective Archie Daniels to find the killer but as soon he begins, it escalates into a case of solving not just one murder, but two, and then three, and then more. Suddenly Daniels is on the trail of a serial killer and no passenger, from the wealthy 1^st classers to the societal dregs below deck, is safe from being either victim or villain. 

Beginning life as a play, The Empress Murders is the debut novel from actor and writer Toby Schmitz and it’s a book that promptly catapults you into its world and mirrors the plights of the characters in that it keeps you hostage. While I had other reasons for wanting to read through it as fast as possible, the fragmented prose, compelling take on the genre, and delightfully despicable characters really aid you in absolutely powering through its pages.

The events are uniquely chronicled with the ship (or the idea of the ship) as the narrator, an omniscient being that still has a direct connection to the unfolding events. While Daniels’ hunt for the serial killer is undoubtedly the main story, the book is fleshed out with wispy side hustles featuring a revolving cast of select characters: all of them pretty pitiful. The fragmented style in which Schmitz chooses to tell the story not only gives the book its machine-gun pace but also makes it read in a more visual manner with events being crafted to read more like a script or screenplay. On top of this novelty, the book is also a farcical take on the detective-noir genre. There are definitely vibes of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie, while at the same time the language and character dialogue is spliced and very modern. We then have increasing levels of ridiculousness that manifest in the form of the murders – these paragraphs are not for the squeamish. I personally found the thick and bloody layers of gore added to the nonsensical farce of the narrative, but they can seem gratuitous and not really adding anything to the story – how you interpret it depends on the type of reader you are.

Image credit: The Sydney Morning Herald

Despite the very serious and gruesome events that unfold, I found The Empress Murders to be an extravagant and often hilarious farce, a bit like The Master and Margarita. It’s filled with action, characters that you love to hate, intriguing little histories that you want to find out more about, and plenty of drama. There is certainly a lot packed into it and the machine-gun pace does make the reading experience akin to staring out the window of a speeding train. I’m certain there are things that I missed, no doubt a revisit is warranted.

Author: Toby Schmitz, 2025

Published: Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2025

Odyssey

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I have recently been meditating on several ironies in the world, most pointedly the argument in mainstream cinema that there are too many reboots and remakes and not enough films being made from original content. On the opposite side of the coin, in the world of literature there are seemingly endless fonts of (at least) semi-original content, and isn’t it funny to consider the joy of reading something that is essentially a reboot of a classic work? What is it about literature that makes the remake more enjoyable than cinema? This train of thought was prompted after I closed the cover on this week’s book of choice: the fourth instalment in Stephen Fry’s Ancient Greek series – Odyssey

As the name suggests, the book is a retelling of Homer’s epic poem of Odysseus and his dramatic adventures on a ten-year journey home from the Trojan War. As the Olympian gods fidget uncomfortably at the idea that mortals are moving on without them, petty squabbles turn deadly when Poseidon sends a great storm to punish Ajax. While the other fleets survive and make it home, poor Odysseus’ ship is buffeted from shoreline to shoreline with the cunning king and his men faced with many trials and tribulations that waylay them for over a decade.

Odysseus’ story is a mighty one that really highlights the idea that home is where the heart is. Like its predecessors – Mythos, Heroes, and Troy – Odyssey retells the story, jumping from kingdom to kingdom, in a clever and concise modern voice that not only expertly conjures the scenes in the mind’s eye but also simplifies them and powers through them with a pace that pushes the reader further and further along in the story – like Poseidon’s stormy seas.

Image credit: AXSChat

While primarily a tale about the allure of home and the anchor that a steadfast home and hearth is to morals, the book also explores the human nature of evolution and social progression and delivers a tickling truth in the idea that ‘the times are a ‘changin’ is actually an idea that has been around for millennia. Added to this at the very end is an indulgent little social commentary on the current progression of mortals and storytelling: the evolution of AI.

While I didn’t find Odyssey as compelling as his other books in the series, I can’t deny that the hero’s journey narrative archetype is a classic for a reason and it’s really nice (and relatable) to read a book about a hero going through epic adventures just so he can sleep in his own bed at the end.

Author: Stephen Fry, 2024

Published: Penguin Random House UK, 2024