In Ecstasy is Perth author Kate McCaffrey’s second novel for teenagers. It was released in April of this year by Fremantle Press, and should be widely available in W.A. and elsewhere. McCaffrey is a high school English teacher like myself (and a lot of other writers, apparently) and her novel seems directed toward students in [...]
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“Hal Spacejock: No Free Lunch” is the fourth installment in Simon Haynes’ series, and it’s another strong showing for Hal, Clunk and co. For the uninitiated, Hal Spacejock is an interstellar freight trader running cargo to and fro, but he rarely has enough credits for a nice meal, or a change of clothes for that [...]
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“Hal Spacejock: Just Desserts” is the third in Simon Haynes’ humorous SF series, and it’s the best yet. Before I get into discussing this book explicitly, I want to give potential readers an idea of what makes this series different to most of the other SF on the market today. The “Hal Spacejock” books are [...]
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Brenda Walker’s first novel, published in 1991, has the distinction of being the inaugural T.A.G. Hungerford Award winner. Set in Perth in the late eighties, it is a strange and slender novel of two people: a barrister named Tom O’Brien, and a writer called Anna Penn. The story is told in a distinctively dispassionate style [...]
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This is the first novel in the “Hal Spacejock” series, and I’m reading it second, after “Hal Spacejock: Second Course.” Confused yet? Luckily, I wasn’t. Simon Haynes has constructed his series in such a way that each book is a stand-alone novel; it’s not at all like a fantasy epic where you have to remember [...]
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Boy, have I read a lot of books so far in 2008! I worked out today that I’ve read no fewer than 20 novels so far this year, and I’ve written reviews on about half of them. It’s strange-last year I read very little, perhaps as few as 10 books for the whole year, but [...]
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The story of how Simon Haynes’ “Hal Spacejock” series of novels came to be published by Fremantle Press is an inspiring one. Haynes’ first Spacejock novel was self published (by Bowman Publishing) in 2003, as were the second and third in the series. Haynes did all his own PR in those early years, getting copies [...]
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I don’t know if Bruce Russell was a late starter in writing, but he was certainly a late starter in getting his books published. His first novel, Jacob’s Air, won the TAG Hungerford Award in 1995, at which time Russell must have been over 50 already. I haven’t read Jacob’s Air or Russell’s second book, [...]
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