If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting! (aka Well Witched in the USA) My morning walk to work takes me past the National Gallery of Victoria, and past the gallerys huge water feature, a thing loaded and glimmering with tossed-in coins. And no...

Under my bed is the hatbox my mum gave me when I turned 21. In that hatbox is a jumble of receipts, tickets, cards, notes and tidbitsmany of them from the early flushes of my relationship with my husband, whom Id started dating not long after. When we moved in together, I found that he had his own hatbox of sorts that contained all sorts of...

I was not expecting, in my rambles through the bookshops of Buenos Aires, to come across much in the way of Australian writing, let alone a crumpled Penguin edition of a 1970s modern classic by Shirley Hazzard. I picked up this slim volume to keep me occupied whilst my husband snoozed in the small plazas wed settle into after a day of walking, or to read...

The monster arrived at midnight.' As they do. So opens Patrick Nesss'A Monster Calls, a brilliant and moving exploration of grief and loss and of the different paths different people take in dealing with them. Twelve year old Conor has been watching his mother slowly succumb to terminal cancer, a disease that is famously not only a physical disease,...

Having been utterly enamoured of Mary Hoopers Fallen Grace, I was more than delighted when a copy of Velvet'arrived on my doorstep. Im pleased to say that my anticipation was entirely justified, as Hoopers latest effort contains many of the same elements that made Fallen Grace'so outstanding.'Though'Velvet'is set some forty years after...

  The cover of Favel Parretts debut is understated yet quietly eerie: theres a sense of something canted and off-kilter, of loss and confusion. And its apt, for this laconic little read is in equal parts challengingly compelling and surprisingly sympathetic from start to finish. Harry and Miles live with their widower father off the...