The Long, Long Life of Trees

The Long, Long Life of Trees is a beautiful book. I picked it up on impulse at a Blackwell’s book event four years ago, enticed by its cover and its promise of calm. Its author Fiona Stafford is a Professor of English, and this book gathers all manner of writings together as references in her arboretum. It begins with a rumination on a pine cone that sits on Stafford’s desk at home, a memento from Croatia. She describes soaking it in water, so that its scales close up again tightly, then watching it relax and unfurl again as it dries, “to reveal caramel-coloured chevrons”, “each wooden spatula offer[ing] a small scoop of unremembered time.” That’s just the first paragraph.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 2

And Fire Came Down

And Fire Came Down, the second book in Emna Viskic’s Caleb Zelic crime thriller series, finds our hero back in Melbourne and coming to terms with the events at Resurrection Bay seven months previously. Out for a jog without his hearing aids or phone, he encounters a local drug addict and can’t make sense of what he is trying to tell him. A scrap of paper with Caleb’s name and address scrawled on it in pink lipstick and the lip-read words ‘Tall, black’ that the addict uses to describe the woman who gave him the piece of paper, lead Caleb to a conclusion: that his ex-wife Kat is in danger again.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 4

Terra Nullius

Published in 2017, Terra Nullius is the debut novel of Noongar author Claire G Coleman. It’s an interesting work of speculative fiction. Its title is the 19th century legal term for land without sovereignty, a term that colonisers from Europe invented to justify grabbing uncultivated land from the indigenous people who occupied it. It’s a term that was applied to Australia, and Coleman draws on the colonial history of her homeland in creating the world in her novel.

Society is separated into Settlers and Natives. The Settlers have established religious orders to run missions where the Natives are educated and civilised to be more useful to their colonisers. At the start of the book, we meet a nun at one such mission, Sister Bagra, and an escapee from the confines of a Settler station, a young man called Jacky. Jacky has vague memories of the bush, although he was taken from his family as a child and doesn’t really remember much from the time before his servitude to the Settlers. His escape through the bush and the forest, running as fast as he can, trying not to leave tracks that the Troopers can follow, is thrilling. His path takes him back to the mission run by Sister Bagra, where he hopes he will discover where he was born, before sending him onwards again. Jacky’s sections of the novel were the most compelling for me. I was there with him, heart in mouth, on the edge of my seat, willing him to succeed.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 3

All My Puny Sorrows

All My Puny Sorrows, the sixth novel by Canadian author Miriam Toews, is set in her fictional Mennonite town of East Village, Manitoba. Narrated by Yolandi Von Riesen, the youngest of two sisters, it is the story of a family attempting to survive the strictures of the religious community they belong to and life itself. It’s a novel about the ways people leave and the ways they leave their mark on others. It’s about understanding the holes we all feel within us and finding the best ways to fill them.

My first encounter with Miriam Toews was 21 years ago, when I read A Complicated Kindness, a novel also about growing up in the Mennonite community in East Village, narrated by a wise and wise-cracking teenager. Nomi Nickel is the younger sister in her family and is left to look after her dad after her older sister and mother both leave town, the mother in mysterious circumstances, and much of the novel is about Nomi’s attempts to fit in and comply, in the hope that she will somehow reunite her family. While the two novels share a lot of common ground, All My Puny Sorrows is a very different story.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 8

Six Degrees of Separation, June 2026

June. The weather is strange in the north west of England, and on this first Saturday of the month our central heating came on this morning. I don’t know how many degrees below the threshold on the thermostat that the temperature fell. It probably wasn’t six. That would have been too coincidental.

For Six Degrees of Separation this month, our host Kate has chosen The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig as our starting point. You can find out more about the meme at Books Are My Favourite and Best.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 9

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Winifred Watson’s classic novel of 1938, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, is a satire on the social scene of the 1930s, when the Bright Young Things held court. Miss Pettigrew is of indeterminate middle age, a spinster gentlewoman who has had to work to earn her keep, but isn’t very good at it. We meet her in dire straits, unemployed and undernourished, on her way to an interview for a potential job.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 15

Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

Insurgent Empire is simultaneously a wide ranging book that takes in a century of resistance to the British Empire and a book that focuses in on what author Priyamvada Gopal refers to as “exemplary crises” – a set of rebellions and political movements that each helped anticolonial resistance travel further along the path to the breakup of the British Empire. It is a dense book but one worth reading. Gopal presents another perspective, a post-colonial literature perspective, that adds to the historical perspective in books like David Olusoga’s Black and British, Afua Hirsch’s Brit(ish), Sathnam Sangera’s Empireland and Kim Wagner’s Amritsar 1919. There is so much within its pages that I resorted to underlinings and marginalia to keep track of how it made me think and feel. That detail is not in this review.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 5

The Governess, or, Little Female Academy

The Governess, or, Little Female Academy, by Georgian writer Sarah Fielding, first published in 1749, is said to be the first novel in English aimed at children. It recounts a ten day period at a boarding school for girls run by Mrs Teachum. Each chapter involves either a story told by the eldest girl, Miss Jenny Peace, to her classmates, or the life story of one of the schoolgirls, or a vignette from the communal life of the boarding school. Mrs Teachum is an occasional presence. The central character of the book is Miss Jenny Peace who spends her time outside of lessons encouraging her fellow pupils to think through the consequences of their instinctive behaviour.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 2