The Sum of our Sorrows by Lisette Brodey is a story of grief and its aftermath. When Abby Sheppard is killed in a car accident her husband and three daughters are bereft. The novel focuses on Lily, the eldest of the three daughters. At seventeen, she is in her final year at school with plans … Continue reading Book Review – The Sum of our Sorrows by Lisette Brodey
Family life
Book Review – From the Drop of Heaven by Juliette Godot
From the Drop of Heaven by Juliette Godot is an engrossing and unsettling story set in the Salm region of France in the late 16th century. It begins against the background of the ascendancy of Calvinists in Geneva and the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in Paris setting the scene for the dissentions, religious rivalries and … Continue reading Book Review – From the Drop of Heaven by Juliette Godot
Early Modern Children
We are fortunate that a number of portraits survive of children from the upper levels of society in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period. These give us a glimpse of childhood in that period and hint at the ways childhood, the raising of children, and even life itself differ from today. Infants were swaddled … Continue reading Early Modern Children
Book Review – Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski
Little Boy Lost begins at Christmas 1943 when poet Hilary Wainwright receives the news, brought by Frenchman, Pierre Verdier, that his three year old son, John, is lost somewhere in France. Hilary has only seen his son once, just after his birth, as he had to flee France following the German invasion. His wife Lisa, … Continue reading Book Review – Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski
Book Review – Wintercombe by Pamela Belle
Wintercombe by Pamela Belle follows a year in the life of the St Barbe family, from October 1644 to September 1645, at the height of the First English Civil War. The St Barbes are a Puritan family and hold the estate of Wintercombe near the village of Norton St Philip in Somerset. Two years earlier, … Continue reading Book Review – Wintercombe by Pamela Belle
One Minute Book Review – Tomaree by Debbie Robson
Tomaree begins in 1972 with Peggy Lockwood returning to Nelson Bay, a coastal town in New South Wales where she had grown up. In 1943 Peggy had married an American naval Lieutenant, Tom Lockwood, who was stationed at Nelson Bay and, as a war bride, Peggy had moved to the United States following the war. … Continue reading One Minute Book Review – Tomaree by Debbie Robson
Book Review – Gilgamesh by Joan London
Gilgamesh by Joan London begins in 1918 with Frank Clark an Australian soldier in a convalescent hospital in England meeting Ada who is there ‘to visit the soldiers’. He invites her to come with him back to Australia, to ‘go far away to a country where there will never be another war’. Ada accepts the … Continue reading Book Review – Gilgamesh by Joan London
Book Review – The Golden Age by Joan London
The Golden Age is a Perth convalescent hospital for children recovering from poliomyelitis. Under the care of dedicated nurses and physiotherapists, the children are taught to use their limbs again and to gain the independence necessary for their return to the outside world. In this nurturing environment, cut off from their familiar lives with family … Continue reading Book Review – The Golden Age by Joan London
Book Review – Towers in the Mist by Elizabeth Goudge
This delightful novel covers a year in the life of the Leigh family, from the arrival on May Day 1565 of Faithful Crocker, a 14 year old orphaned vagabond, carrying his meagre possessions, a copy of Virgil and of Foxe's Book of Martyrs, and a burning desire to become a scholar, to the visit of … Continue reading Book Review – Towers in the Mist by Elizabeth Goudge
One Minute Book Review – 12 Edmondstone Street by David Malouf
12 Edmondstone Street by David Malouf is a memoir/essay which uses his childhood home in Brisbane in the 1930s and 1940s to gently observe the way the beliefs and experiences of a family’s past shape a child's view of and relationship with the world as an adult. Room by room, down to the space beneath … Continue reading One Minute Book Review – 12 Edmondstone Street by David Malouf
Catherine Meyrick 