A Dream Life

The latest effort to make short books commercially viable comes from Down Under. Tablo Publishing, a self-publishing company in Melbourne, is launching a separate literary imprint called Tablo Tales. The director, Jemma Birrell, understands the challenge but is undaunted. “I think there’s a gap in t......more

An odd book...a novella. I was at the library last week looking at the new book selections and espied an author who I knew and who I used to read and collect her books...so I grabbed it was it looked like it would be a quick read, which it was. The publishing house is interesting...it appears that i......more

This novella sees an American family transplanted to Australia, where they rent a palatial house that exerts a subtle pressure on them. It soon seems indispensable to hire a live-in housekeeper and child-minder. But she is not all she seems…......more

I really don't get all of the mediocre or negative reviews for this author. I find her to consistently be an exceptional modern-day novelist. Here she writes essentially a long short story that I consumed in a day. It involves Alice who, in 1971, moves with her Husband and two young daughters to Syd......more

A smoothly written, flowing narrative, but one is left wondering — what does this dream amount to? Is it the story of a house ("Chateau Deeds"), or a wife dealing with the demands of her husband's career, or is it about the different servants or "retainers" who are attached to the house or the family......more