Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s witty, ‘effervescent’ debut novel follows a Sylvia-Plath-loving young Malaysian-Australian writer’s journey to ‘the heart of empire’ in the UK.
A new biography of Jean Rhys, the Dominican-born author of Wide Sargasso Sea, pays close attention to her origins – but stops short of examining the colonial relations central to her story.
Kate Grenville suggests we read Elizabeth Macarthur’s letters as ‘a wonderful piece of fiction, sustained over sixty years’. They were exercises in doubleness, concealment, and delicious irony.