Q & A with Michael Botur
Was a pleasure to do Q & A with NZ author @MichaelBotur. His novel ‘Crimechurch’ was a great read. We discussed my book ‘Buenos Aires Triad’ and stuff related to writing. Read the full article here.
Review
Graham Greene Reviews
As a teenager, I read ‘The Comedians’ and in my twenties ‘The Power and the Glory’, ‘The Quiet American’ and ‘The Human Factor’. I remember swapping my copy of The Quiet American for ‘Off the Rails in Phnom Penh’ when in Laos. The Human Factor I read in a hostel in Colombia. In my early …
A Review of Buenos Aires Triad
A review from Carlos Hughes, author of White Monkey: What’s an honest man to do for a living when they live in a country where inflation rises up by 20% overnight and the price of bread becomes an expensive commodity? This is the dilemma of the main protagonist ‘Lucas’ in the wonderfully written crime noir …
Teacher, We Girls!
In the animated film “The Swallows of Kabul” the Taliban force a man to pray in a mosque and his wife must wait outside in the hot sun wearing a suffocating cover-all burqa. We see the world as she does: through the grill of a veil. And we hear her laboured breathing as she nearly …
A Certain Kind of Power
‘A Certain Kind of Power’ is an entertaining dissection of corruption, in which Australian author Ryan Butta recreates an Argentina of scandals and cloak and dagger moves. Our guide in the county’s capital, Buenos Aires, is Mike Costello, a jaded American corporate spy. An aging one-time army man, Mike has been in Argentina too long …
Too much New York
Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg: Five stars for the characters and detailed, but never boring, descriptions of New York in 1959. Harry Angel is a private detective living in the Chelsea Hotel. On the job, he drives and subways around town with soup stains on his tie. Harlem, Times Square, Coney Island, the apartment buildings, the …
Rebellion in the Backlands
In Canudos, a backlands town in the Northeastern State of Bahia, Antônio Conselheiro (Anthony the Counselor) preached against the republic. His followers, leather-clad ruffians or ‘jagungos’, terrorised the countryside. In the 1890s the Republic of Brazil was in its infancy and insecure, rumours of monarchist plots abounded, troublemakers like the Counselor needed to be dealt …
Devil of a State
Devil of a State, published 1961, is set in Dunia, a fictional East African state on the verge of independence. In this novel Burgess draws on his experiences as an Educational Officer in the Sultanate of Brunei where the original manuscript was set. Fearing a possible libel case, the publisher, Hutchinson, had Burgess change the …
Wake in Fright
This is a classic tale of the civilised man from the coast going mad in the barbarous interior. John Grant is a country-town school teacher on his way back to Sydney for the summer. However, because of problems with his flight, he gets stuck for one night in the Yabba, a town based on Broken …
Confucius and Opium
The American writer Isham Cook is an eccentric who might be telling us the truth – or at least trying to. An open minded reader, who doesn’t mind having their leg pulled a bit, will find the erudite “Confucius and Opium” a rewarding read. This work contains eleven ‘book review essays’ that are in-depth, no …