Literary Reviews by Karen Viggers for THE CANBERRA TIMES

Wildflowers by Peggy Frew review - Family love, stretched thin by addiction, still persists

Review: In The Islands, debut author Emily Brugman explores the lives of Finnish migrant families in the 1950s

Unimaginable hardships amid stunning beauty

Claire Thomas' The Performance is a masterful work about the inner lives of women

A new collection of essays by acclaimed Australian writers shows there is plenty of reason for both hope and despair in 2020

Charlotte Wood's masterful new novel, The Weekend, tackles friendship and ageing

The Last Lighthouse Keeper, by retired lightkeeper John Cook, is an unflinching look at the lighthouse life

An Unusual Boy is a sympathetic portrait of family life with a child on the autism spectrum

In The Asparagus Wars, Carol Major charts the life and loss of her daughter through illness - a battleground with many layers

Review: Set in a forgotten leper colony, The Coast is a celebration of humanity

The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane review - this is a careful, clever story told with a masterful hand

Believe In Me: Lucy Neave's novel is an insightful exploration of what it is to be a mother.

In Fury, Kathryn Heyman tells the story of her recover from abuse, and asks some difficult questions about how women are treated today

A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing is a raw and telling glimpse into the world of a child prodigy

In Desire Lines, Felicity Volk tells the story of a decades-long love affair

Suzanne Leal brings to life the fallout of the Holocaust in The Deceptions

Victoria Hannan's debut Kokomo is a thoughtful novel of family relationships and secrets

Alison Booth's The Painting deftly explores the migration experience in her art-theft mystery

Review: Marion Halligan's Word's For Lucy is a rich gift of a book

Jesustown by Paul Daley review - Getting underneath a white-washed story of Australia's challenging history

Evie Wyld's The Bass Rock is a novel that speaks perfectly to our post-MeToo era

In The Luminous Solution, author Charlotte Wood examines a decade's worth of her own writing and creativity

Emily Maguire's Love Objects is about the baggage we carry from the past, and what it becomes in the present

Favel Parrett's new novel, There Was Still Love, is beautifully layered and complex

In Paris Savages, Katherine Johnson revisits the disturbing history of Indigenous Australians who were placed on show in European museums

Tea Obreht's second novel Inland is an epic western woven with superstition.