Month: Jul 2025

Review: Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko (2025)

Blurb

TWO UNFORGETTABLE STORIES. TWO FAMILIES. TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF HISTORY.

1854: When Mulanyin meets the beautiful Nita in Brisbane – or Edenglassie, as it was once briefly known – his community still outnumbers the British settlers. Tensions are simmering just beneath the surface of a fragile peace, but hopes for independence are running high. Yet when colonial unrest tears through the region, Mulanyin’s passion for his new bride clashes with his loyalty to a homeland in danger.

Two centuries later, fiery activist Winona meets Dr Johnny when her grandmother Eddie has a serious fall. Winona just wants the obstinate centenarian back on her feet, but a shrewd journalist has other ideas. Eddie becomes a local celebrity, dominating the headlines as ‘Queensland’s Oldest Aboriginal’. 

Her time in the spotlight brings past and present crashing together, the legacy of Nita and Mulanyin’s tragic past reaching into Winona and Eddie’s lives with consequences they couldn’t have predicted. 

Review

Many thanks to the publisher and the lovely Squadpod for providing me with a copy of Edenglassie in exchange for an honest review.

I’m a big fan of a dual timeline novel, and this is one of the best examples of the form that I have read in a while. There’s a cracking ‘present’ storyline set in 2024, full of characters I’d happily follow for a whole book, particularly the fierce, uncompromising Winona, who is an absolutely brilliant creation – I loved her. There is a lot of humour in this section, as well as piercing political commentary, and an insight into modern Australian society that I found fascinating.

As well as all this, the book is also a treat for historical fiction fans, with Mulanyin’s story playing out in a historical context I knew little about. I learned a lot and uncovered even more gaps in my knowledge – Australia isn’t a country whose history I’m particularly familiar with, and this book sent me down a lot of research rabbit holes, which, for me, is part of the joy of this genre. I think the main thing I hadn’t fully grasped before I read Edenglassie was just how thin the line between coexistence and violence can be in a colonial situation, and how an uncertain peace can be just as psychologically damaging as open hostility. The emotional heft of Mulanyin’s story really left an impression on me as a reader, and he’s yet another character from this powerful book who will stay with me. His romance with Nita is portrayed with just the right blend of idealism and practicality – and I defy any reader of their love story not to root for them throughout.

There’s such a skillful balance between all the many threads of this novel – it was no surprise for me to learn that this is Melissa Lucashenko’s seventh novel, such is the deftness of the writing and the elegance of the complex structure – but I’m delighted to find out that there’s so much more by this author for me to enjoy. This is novel writing at its finest: raw, intelligent, real, bringing the secrets of the past into the light of the present – it’s a book that really speaks to the reader, with urgency and eloquence and a sense of challenge.

I thought the way everything came together at the end was so clever – for me, it worked beautifully, and it felt tragic, literary, angry, hopeful, and a bit magical all at once. There’s some serious heft to the writing in this novel, and its one that I will be thinking about for a long time to come. I can’t recommend Edenglassie highly enough – this is an important, urgent, stunning novel.

Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko is published by Oneworld and is available to purchase here.

Review: Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (2025)

Blurb

Thomas lives a slow, deliberate life with his mother in Longferry, working his grandpa’s trade as a shanker. He rises early to take his horse and cart to the grey, gloomy beach to scrape for shrimp; spending the rest of the day selling his wares, trying to wash away the salt and scum, pining for Joan Wyeth down the street and rehearsing songs on his guitar. At heart, he is a folk musician, but it remains a private dream.

When a striking visitor turns up, bringing the promise of Hollywood glamour, Thomas is shaken from the drudgery of his days and begins to see a different future. But how much of what the American claims is true, and how far can his inspiration carry Thomas?

Haunting and timeless, this is the story of a young man hemmed in by his circumstances, striving to achieve fulfilment far beyond the world he knows.

Review

Many thanks to the publisher and the lovely Squadpod for the opportunity to read a proof copy of Seascraper in exchange for an honest review.

This is such a beautifully written, atmospheric book – the coastal setting and carefully wrought descriptions of the sea put me in mind of Garrett Carr’s The Boy From the Sea, which I also read recently and loved. Unlike Carr’s book, however, the focus is less on community and more on the individual character of the protagonist, Thomas, to whose perspective the story cleaves throughout. The present tense makes for a very close link between reader and protagonist, and, appropriately enough, reading the book feels a little like watching a film, due to the vivid descriptions and real-time unfolding of events.

Thomas is a fascinating character – there is something ancient about the way he slips into the rhythms of his job, at one with the sands and the tides. And yet he is a young man, with hopes and dreams that he keeps hidden, a yearning for more from life than his current hard, stoic existence. His relationship with his mother is a complex web of duty, guilt and affection that keeps him trapped in Longferry, and it is only the unlikely appearance of film director Edgar Acheson that allows his dreams to grow bigger in his imagination. I also really enjoyed Thomas’ interactions with his unnamed and equally hard-working horse, who plays a vital role in the book!

The compressed timeframe of the novel, set over a couple of days, adds to its intensity – we are utterly immersed in this small slice of Thomas’ life, in a way that makes us as readers prepared to follow the unexpected turns the story takes. I liked that the book went beyond stark realism into another mode – but I won’t say too much for, because the surprises are best discovered fresh. The prose is similarly restrained and elegant, reminding me, as Carr’s novel did too, of Claire Keegan’s writing. If you like your novels tightly packed with meaning, substantial in matter if not in page length, then this is the book for you.

I am surprised I haven’t come across Benjamin Wood’s work before, and I suspect he ought to be much better known. I’m pleased to discover he has a backlist of four more novels, which I am definitely going to be checking out. This is a skilful exploration of a very specific life that nevertheless opens out to bigger questions of how to live, a book that is utterly entrenched in its setting but with wider applications of its hefty themes. Seascraper is a very fine novel indeed, and I highly recommend it.

Seascraper by Benjamin Wood is published by Viking and is available to purchase here.