After his profile last week in "The Sydney Morning Herald", Azhar Abidi continues to surf the wave of publicity in "The Age" this weekend: Jane Sullivan provides the interview. It's all to do with his new novel, Passarola Rising which has just been published, and which is described as "Part historical drama, part Boys' Own Adventure, part moral and philosophical tale, it's being pitched to fans of such books as Yann Martel's Booker Prize-winning The Life of Pi." It also continues Abidi's interest in flight, following his famous mock-history essay of a few years back, The Secret History of the Flying Carpet.
Apart from that it's a slow week in "The Age" with the only other Australian reviews being of two poetry collections, Fragmenta Nova by Alan Loney and Broken/Open by Jill Jones; neither of which are on the website.
In "The Weekend Australian" Graeme Blundell reviews four Australian crime novels: Saving Billie by Peter Corris, a Cliff Hardy novel: "Since 1980, Corris has woven his serial narratives in and out of the politics of their day, seldom shouting, never polemical, just sad at the way things are"; Dead Set by Kel Robertson, featuring Bradman Chen, Chinese Australian Federal Policeman investigating the murder of the Minister of Immigration; The Apricot Colonel by Marion Halligan, "think Agatha Christie with more cats, more cooking and more chardonnay"; and The Berlin Cross by Greg Flynn, which is "good at the furtive, frantic atmosphere of this genre, which blends historical espionage fiction with elements of the PI tale." Something there for everyone I suspect.
In "The Sydney Morning Herald" Aviva Tuffield reviews Dreams of Speaking, the new novel by Gail Jones: "This is Jones's third novel in four years and, like all of her fiction, is teeming with ideas: about the aesthetics of technology, the definition of family, the presumptuousness of human relationships and - her eternal preoccupation - the nature of grief."
