Kate Evans

There's a scene in a football game and suddenly you realise you've been lulled in, in a way.

And then suddenly this horrible heated atmosphere comes in and it just turns...

But, you know, she does it really, really well because, you know, obviously the temptation is to, you know, with this is to sort of bring the hammer out and just sort of bang, bang.

But she doesn't.

And I think it's all the more powerful because she does it that way.

I did.

I think it's, you know, it could be an American tradition in a way because he's not someone that I've read, but, you know, like Thomas Pynchon and these sort of writers often have, I think, silly names.

They ring alarm bells in my head when I'm reading them because I can't take the book as seriously.

But these names in this book, and because Strout does it so well,

That didn't bother me.

And I found these names exotic and good, very American, but they didn't tip into silliness.

And so I found all of that fine.

The Boundless Deep by Richard Holmes, which is a biography of Alfred Tennyson, the 19th century English poet.

He's looking at the early career of Tennyson up to about 1850 when Tennyson's 40, almost 50.

You know, Tennyson is a poet whose, probably his reputation has gone down quite a lot over the last 50 years.

50, 60 years, but he sort of resurrects the early Tennyson, not the poet laureate of empire that he becomes in the latter half of the 19th century, but it's the young man at Cambridge writing his early poetry who's a far more radical person than what he turns in to be.

So it's concentrating on early Tennyson as a poet, and at the same time, and this is something that Holmes has done a lot over the last 20 years, is wind in scientifically

discovery through botany astronomy the invention of the telescope the invention of the microscope and how this brought into this crisis of god and man in the early part of the 19th century and how it affected the poets he's a really good writer he's he's light he doesn't get bogged down and he's really good on literary criticism and looking into he knows the poets really well

Well, I recommend David Maloof's Jono.

It has a special resonance with me because he was a Brisbane author.