Fleur Macdonald
Australian Gothic
Chloe Hooper’s debut, A Child’s Book of True Crime, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2002. It was about a young teacher who – while pursuing an affair with a pupil’s father – becomes obsessed with his wife’s novelised account of a local murder, in which the victim’s life seems to mirror her own. In The Engagement, fact and fiction form an unequally uncomfortable marriage.
Over the cusp of thirty and recently unemployed, interior architect Liese Campbell has left England to work at her uncle’s estate agency in Melbourne. During a viewing, she acts on impulse, leading Alexander Colquhoun, a handsome client, into the bedroom and undressing. When he leaves money for her, she’s initially
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'Two things prevent [this book] from collapsing under the weight of its own wayward ambition. Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, is no ordinary historian. And the day in question, 27 July 1794, was no ordinary day'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/night-of-the-guillotine
The Anatomy of Melancholy 'has never quite become a widely recognised, bona fide "classic". For long stretches, the bulk of its readership has been restricted to bibliophiles and scholars. It has had an air of murkiness and desuetude'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/phantoms-of-the-mind
'Don’t think of Watergate as being about a break-in, but about what the break-in exposed: dirty ops, dirty tricks, dirty money.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/all-the-presidents-mendacity