AustLit

'‘That’s music to my ears!’ says Ceridwen Dovey, when I tell her that I think her new novel is like a love-child between Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty and The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Life After Truth is set over three intense days as the class of ‘03 meet for a reunion weekend on the Harvard campus. It’s a wonderful, compulsively readable novel following five friends—Jules, Mariam, Rowan, Eloise and Jomo—on the cusp of middle-age. During their weekend of soul-searching and reminiscing, the most infamous member of their class, Frederick Reese [senior advisor and son of the recently elected and loathed US president—sound familiar?], turns up dead. ‘I found it a really fun book to write,’ Dovey says. ‘It’s probably the most fun I’ve had writing ever.’' (Introduction)

'When Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man was published in 2008 it became an instant Australian classic. It was a compelling and confronting book about the worst of colonial Australia: police brutality, racial and judicial injustice, dispossession and the enduring trauma of colonialism. The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire (Hamish Hamilton) is Hooper’s first non-fiction book since then (she published a novel, The Engagement in 2012) and displays all the sensitivity, nuance and lyricism that readers found in The Tall Man. ' (Introduction)