Shannon reviews Murray Bail's novel Eucalyptus on the weblog "I'll Have My Cake and Eat Yours Too". "The book is full of beautiful imagery, using words to tell multiple layers of a story, like bark on a tree."
Somewhat behind other UK newspapers, "The Guardian" has Andrew Motion run an eye over Robert Hughes's memoir, Things I Didn't Know. As much as he is impressed with this work he is already looking forward to the follow-up. "Readers of Hughes's mature work know that the best is yet to come - his most vibrant essays, and the great foundation stones of his reputation: The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore and American Visions. Inevitably, this has its frustrations. More importantly, though, it means we can trace the evolution of his guiding principles without being distracted by celebrity."
Dealing with the same book in "The New York Times" is the "interesting" critic Michiko Kakutani who finds it rather "uneven". "Introspection does not come naturally to Mr. Hughes, the reader suspects, or else he is ambivalent about the enterprise of making such personal investigations public. As a result the camera lens used in these pages seems awkwardly trained on the middle distance: individuals he knew back in the day come sharply into focus, while the young Mr. Hughes and the larger world of Australia after World War II remain fuzzily indistinct."
