Joanna Di Mattia
Joanna Di Mattia is from Readings Carlton
Review — 20 Apr 2023
August Blue by Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy’s new novel unfolds like a dream – surreal, beguiling, enigmatic. As with most of Levy’s work, it creates a singular world, influenced by Duras and de Beauvoir and…
Review — 27 Mar 2023
Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas
Madelaine Lucas’s gorgeous debut opens with her unnamed narrator’s discovery of a photo of a man with a little girl: his daughter. She recognises him – Jude, older now than…
Review — 28 Jun 2021
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
‘It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.’ A great opening line: nervous, brittle, crackling…
Review — 30 Aug 2022
This Devastating Fever by Sophie Cunningham
Leonard Woolf – writer, publisher, colonialist, gardener, animal lover, and husband of Virginia – called his personal battle between desire and repression ‘this devastating fever’. Leonard is a major protagonist…
Review — 28 Jul 2022
Melbourne on Film: Cinema That Defines Our City by Melbourne International Film Festival
Cities are central to the history of cinema. New York. Paris. London. Hong Kong. All cities with an identifiable, iconic visual language. Cities are both setting and subject. It’s not…
Review — 3 Apr 2022
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
Mira and her father live in the first draft of existence: a world like our own, but where people have evolved from either birds, bears or fish. Mira is the…
Review — 2 Mar 2022
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka
Julie Otsuka’s third novel, The Swimmers, opens in a strange but spellbinding way, with a cultural anthropology of a California swimming pool and the people who regularly swim in…
Review — 27 Jan 2022
Free Love by Tessa Hadley
Tessa Hadley’s fine new novel opens on a late summer evening in comfortable suburban London. It’s 1967. Phyllis Fischer, 40, lives with husband Roger, who fought in World War II…
Review — 6 Sep 2020
Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald
I adored H is For Hawk, Helen Macdonald’s memoir of grief and falconry, which took an unconventional approach to the wellworn idea that the natural world has healing power…
Review — 3 Oct 2021
Matrix by Lauren Groff
Scour the formal historical record and you won’t find much about the woman known as Marie de France beyond information that she lived in the 12th century and wrote a…
