https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/JASAL/article/view/22148 I’m pleased to share that the latest JSAL (Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature) has published my review of The Name of the Sister by Gail Jones. Jones’s novel is a quietly powerful meditation on memory, absence, and the ethical weight of writing fiction. It invites critical thinking about the potential of crime fiction to impact socially in a negative way. In the review, I also explore how the book engages with the textual juxtaposition of two historical, and arguably genocidal, stories—the Holocaust and Australia’s colonisation, through considered questioning of the ethics of the genre, a lesson and call for all authors to consider their social responsibility for the impact of their narratives on the psyche of their readership. Grateful to JSAL for the publication, and to Gail Jones for a novel that continues to resonate long after the final page.

A Wilderness of Mirrors is now available.... When housekeeper Susan Ainsworth finds Harvey Kashton dead in the gentlemen’s withdrawing room of Bancroft House, she acts swiftly to prevent a scandal. Within days, his death will bring police, spies, and gangsters traipsing through the gracious old hotel to find out what Susan knows, but they underestimate her ability to deceive and misdirect. That is, until Chris Davis, an unassuming intelligence officer, arrives in this wilderness of mirrors.

In The Conversation, June 2024, David Rymer asked, 'Why have Australia’s espionage authors been renditioned to a literary black site?' I have asked myself the same question as, in vain, I have searched for a contemporary spy novel set in Australia. There are plenty of crime novels, but few, if any, real spy novels. Rymer suggests Australians are coy about admitting we have anything like a spy agency, but I do not think that is the issue.

And the inspiration behind writing the historical novel Becoming Helen (2022) My mother, Margaret Latta Landale, was a registered nurse in 1943 when she packed up and left the United Kingdom for Zanzibar, where she was to take up a Commonwealth Office position, training local nurses in midwifery. The question burning through my ignorance was why? Why would a genteel Scottish woman of that era, up-sticks in the middle of a global war, board ship in convoy to travel across the north Atlantic via Iceland to Nova Scotia, before travelling to New York and, according to my sister, across to California before arriving in Panama, and perhaps Trinidad, where she may have joined the City of Baroda as it set sail across the southern Atlantic to Cape Town.

Reading can change the brain.