Long Island by Colm Tóibín
‘That Irishman has been here again,’ Francesca said, sitting down at the kitchen table.

The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia by Joy Damousi
‘No event has ever destroyed so much,’ wrote Sigmund Freud a year after the outbreak of the First World War, ‘that has confused so many of the clearest intelligences, or so thoroughly debased what is highest’.

Exiles by Jane Harper
Think back. The signs were there. What were they?

Conflict on Kangaroo Island by Stephen Crabbe
Her fingers wrapped the inside doorknob the same instant his rapped the wood outside.

Snapshots from Home by Sasha Wasley
The train journey east was fifty miles of noise, heat and discomfort, but the beauty made up for it.
While this novel is a ‘nice’ read, with some touching stories of the families photographed, it is marred by a number of historical errors, the most glaring being that the main character, Edie Stark, is encouraged by her brother to sign up for the Snapshots from Home Scheme four months before it was in operation in Britain and seven months before it was established in Australia where the novel is set. Perhaps the author didn’t think it mattered, but many readers do take the history on which historical fiction is based very seriously. Errors like this, early in a novel, undermine the reader’s confidence in the author’s presentation of the past. I won’t go into the hero’s complete set of twenty-first century sensibilities. The novel, which begins in 1917, is also let down by the cover (not the author’s fault) which has a woman in 1940s dress!