Alert: Bitten by AI or an impersonator!
August 29, 2026
Image from Nadine Sh at Pexels I received an email today from a writer, enquiring if I had contacted him regarding a feature post on my blog. He was very happy to have been offered this, as you’d imagine. For writers, it’s lovely when people express interest in our work.
Sadly I’m certain this was a scam and likely an AI one at that.
The ‘tell’ was the email address purporting to belong to the impersonator: denisenewtonwrites@gmail.com.
That is NOT my email address.
The really tricky thing is, the email referenced this man’s book in a meaningful way, with an attachment with thoughtful questions for him to answer for a supposed blog post about him and his work.
It also linked to MY blog site!With AI on the scene, scams are increasingly sophisticated and hard to detect.
So please, if you receive an email supposedly from me, check the sender address. If it is the one above, it’s not from me.
Be on the lookout for similar scams. They are on the rise.
And big thanks to Michael for alerting me to the impersonator.From the depths of the archives to the depths of despair: What dry, dusty documents can tell us.
Whenever I visit the NSW State Archives reading room, I am struck by how much tragedy is held there.
Tragedy; along with despair, adventure, love, jealousy, suspicion, joy, hope and madness. Just to mention a few. The quiet, carpeted room with its wide tables, microfilm readers and helpful archivists contains evidence of almost every human experience and emotion I can think of.
On a recent afternoon spent poring over brittle papers retrieved for me by those helpful archivists from the vast collection held behind the scenes, I was again reminded of this. The stories of two people, in particular, were among the documents I was examining.
Probate pack documents of Jane Florence Tucker at Museums of History, State Records NSW. Photo by author, Aug 2026 To look at the selection of documents from the Probate Pack of a woman called Jane Florence Tucker (above), you might imagine they tell us nothing more than what Jane owned at the time of her death in 1915, and how her estate was dealth with afterwards. You might think that, but you’d be very wrong.
What I already knew, and what the documents refer to in a dispassionate way, is that Jane’s death was a tragedy of indescribable horror. She was brutally murdered by her estranged husband, along with her brother, who’d chosen the worst possible time to visit his sister, and was likewise killed in a fit of insane violence, the killer later sent to a ‘lunatic asylum’ (as mental institutions were called in this period). Heaping tragedy upon tragedy was that Jane’s teenage son, her only child, was forced by his father to watch this horror show.
You might now be wondering what does the manner of Jane’s death have to do with her subsequent probate documents?
Jane died intestate, without a will – not surprisingly as she was still a young woman and had probably not yet considered the need for one. So the Public Trustee stepped in to direct how her property (a cottage in Sydney’s inner-west suburb of Stanmore) should be disposed of.
Here’s the thing: lawyers for the Public Trustee had to apply to the courts for an answer to this question:
‘Was Jane’s killer entitled to a one-third share of her estate despite having been found guilty of her murder?’Quite a few of the dry documents in Jane’s probate folder were centred on this question. I was relieved to read that the answer to the case was ‘No’. This was before NSW had a Proceeds of Crime law barring criminals profiting from their misdeeds once found guilty. Fortunately the court relied on the common law principle of ‘the forfeiture rule’ which basically said the same thing.
So Jane’s traumatised son inherited what had been their family home. No doubt he never set foot in the cottage again. Several years later, when he turned twenty-one, he had the cottage put up for sale. At least his mother was able to leave her boy a financial legacy of sorts.
So, those documents that appeared to be about the legal arrangement for a deceased estate, told a much more tragic and difficult story once I began to read them.
The archives are full of such stories. The way people come into the world, who their parents and other family members are, how they are educated, the illnesses or accidents that befall them, crimes they may have committed, how they die and who inherits any wealth they accumulated – these are the building blocks of the records held in a typical public archive. Each of these documents speak of a lived experience of a person; each of those experiences resonate with the emotions attached to that event.
A second bundle of documents I examined at the archives that day were from an earlier period, the late 1850s and early 1860s. They were Insolvency files pertaining to a man named Charles, the eldest son of my 3 x great-grandfather Thomas. Charles had been left a handsome legacy by his father when Thomas died in 1858, including a life interest in a farm and cottage in the district now known as St Marys in Sydney’s west, and interest in numerous properties in Sydney’s growing, busy central district.
Yet within a year he was being declared insolvent and his property sequestered in order to pay his numerous debts. In colonial NSW this wasn’t an unusual occurence. Young men were frequently involved in speculation and property deals, buying, leasing, selling or mortgaging land. That’s how Thomas had made some of his wealth to begin with. But Charles had inherited his wealth so recently. Was he foolish with money? a gambler? or did he just make poor business and financial decisions?
However Charles ended up in Insolvency court, the folder I looked through contained incredible detail of his financial life: every creditor was obliged to complete an affadavit stating the money owed them, often including receipts with long lists of purchases made by Charles or his household, money loaned, and so on. This information is gold for a researcher: a granular level of detail of what Charles or his family bought: grocery items, farm equipment and livestock, fabric for making clothing, even liquor purchased at the local public house!
Debts owed by Charles to Saddler (left) and Grocer (right);
NSW State Records. Photos by author, Aug 2026There was also a lengthy document itemising the furniture and effects on Charles’ farm and in his home. I found this the saddest. Apart from the inevitable shame that the family must have felt at having their lives exposed publicly in this way, there were some very poignant details here.
Here’s one: Charles’ father Thomas had been a master cabinet maker in his younger years, before he took up farming. In his will, he had explicitly left two particular pieces of furniture to his eldest child, Charles: a chiffonier (a traditional wooden cabinet) and a writing desk. My guess is that both items were made by Thomas himself and held a special place in his heart. He wanted his first-born son to have them.
Looking at the household items in the Insolvency documents, I felt some sadness but no suprise to see both a chiffonier and writing desk on the list. I was glad that Thomas never knew that these prized pieces were likely to be sold cheaply to pay his son’s debts, and so soon after Thomas’ death.
The household items list showing Charles’ chiffonier and writing desk; Museums of History State Records of NSW. Photo by author, Aug 2026 It’s easy to dismiss old documents such as these. But they are a reminder that the lives of humans are made up of moments of joy and moments of despair. Many of which are recorded and carefully preserved in archives of one kind or another.
From the park to the depths of the sea: 4 new picture books
A mixed bag of new picture books from HarperCollins: a variety of topics, styles and themes to choose from.
Time to Go to the Park (by Emma Bowd & Leila Rudge) is the simplest in style. A wonderful fun-filled day at the park is explored in rhyming couplets and soft pastel or crayon pictures. Mum, a wheelchair user, and a cool Grandpa on a skateboard accompany a small girl to play in the sandpit, on the swings, observing butterflies and enjoying a picnic lunch. It doesn’t ask much of the reader/listener but the scenes depicted will be familiar to most little ones and they will enjoy the predictability of the rhymes.
It was published in April 2026.A Day Off School (by Oliver Jeffers & Kevin Waldron) has a tongue-in-cheek theme of ‘careful what you wish for.’ Herbie has the sniffles and to his delight, he is allowed to stay at home. All the things he plans to do! By lunchtime he’s ticked off his list and is feeling a bit…bored. Then comes a massive case of FOMO – what is he missing out on at school? What amazing adventures are his classmates having? Birthday cake? A pirate attack? What if aliens have landed? It’s a wry nod, both to a very familiar scenario of a day at home and to the vivid imagination of a small child left to his own devices.
Published June 2026.The Little Bird that Fell (by Bradley Trevor Greive & Gabriel Evans) is a retelling of the story of Penguin Bloom, which many Australian readers and movie watchers will know. Briefly, its the true story of how an injured magpie is cared for by an injured woman, and the healing that their relationship brings to both. In this case, the story is told from the perspective of the magpie chick. It’s a neat way to convey the experiences of being lost, hurt, and afraid, and the slow path to recovery, from a child’s point of view.
Published September 2026.Through the Darkening Sea (by Claire Saxby & Peter Cheong) is my favourite amongst these four books, because of the beauty of its language and the rich collage illustrations. It tells of a whale who dies and falls to the ocean depths, on the way passing the wondrous life that inhabit different levels of the sea. While the tale of sea life and death is simple, the text is lyrical and evocative. I love to read books that introduce younger readers to the beauty of language and the ways in which it can invite imagination and excitement. Here is an example from the book:
Past swarms of migrating krill,
past flit-and-skitter schools of silvery lightfish
and threaded chains of see-through salps.Published April 2026.
Thanks to HarperCollins Children’s Books for copies of these books to review.
Another library treasure: ‘Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen’ by Alice Loxton
Have you ever gazed at a picture (or better still, stood in the doorway) of a mediaeval cathedral and wondered “‘How on earth…? How did architects, carpenters and masons design and build such soaring, improbable, beautiful structures…and all without a computer, power tool or motorised crane in sight?
I remember staring up at the awesome Lincoln Cathedral and thinking just that. It’s a truly memorable place, but now I wish I could have read Alice Loxton’s book before I visited, as I missed several interesting historical features there.
Loxton is a British historian, writer and presenter whose latest book Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen begins in Lincolnshire, where (in 1290, more than 700 years ago) a little-remembered English queen, Eleanor of Castile, died. In his grief, her husband King Edward I commissioned a series of memorial crosses, to be constructed at each of the places where her body lay on its long journey south to her final resting place in London’s Westminster Abbey.
Of the original twelve, only three still stand, though there are plaques to commemorate the original positions of many of the others. They were works of great beauty, cutting-edge design, a demonstration of a man’s love for his dead wife and created to ensure that she lived on in the collective memory of his kingdom.
Loxton decided to walk the same journey, from Lincoln to London, and write a book about the experience.
The result is a charming, entertaining and informative mix of travel writing, historical narrative and a fascinating hodge-podge of historical tid-bits.
She writes of Queen Eleanor, her life and achievements, saying Today, she’d be winning prizes for Women in Business, photographed in a no-nonsense power suit surrounded by her brood of children. She’d write books like ‘How Women Really Can Have it All.’ Really, a mediaeval queen up there with her better-known namesake Eleanor of Aquitaine, and a woman whose life story shows that women (even so long ago) were far from sidenotes to the story of their husband, father or sons. p11
She also delves into topics including mediaeval death and burial customs; churches and cathedrals and that question of how they were built; money and coins and how they were authorised and made; a history of Jewish people in England; bell ringing; the history of forks (yes, the cutlery kind); how Charing Cross in London got its name (yes, it was the site of an Eleanor Cross); the role of pilgrimage across the ages.
Loxton’s walk is itself a pilgrimage of sorts. She did much of it alone though segments were shared with family or friends. Along the way she met and talked to the kinds of people any pilgrim might have encountered in the thirteenth century: inn-keepers, artisans, shop keepers, religious folk…all of whom shared their knowledge and enthusiasms with her. It’s a picture of a generous country with glimpses of life from long ago. Her own approach is to savour the experiences, mentally (if not physically) slow down and notice all the hidden clues to England of long ago.
Already, it was becoming clear: if you simply take the time to look, our landscape is dotted with these forgotten memorials to the endeavours and sufferings of generations past.
Eleanor p78Eleanor is another of those library treasures I write about sometimes. I was browsing the ‘new books’ display at my local library and this book was face-out on the shelf. I picked it up, thinking it was a story of Eleanor of Aquitaine (a more famous mediaeval queen) but was taken by its premise of walking and retracing such a long-ago journey. I was richly rewarded with an interesting and entertaining read.
And here is a quote that Loxton (I think quite correctly) describes as among the most romantic words ever written; by Edward I about his wife:…whom in life we dearly cherished and in death we cannot cease to love.
Eleanor was published 2025 by Macmillan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan.
A woman’s view: ‘Elizabeth Macarthur’ by Michelle Scott Tucker
If John Macarthur (1767-1834) is known as ‘Father of the Australian Wool Industry’, why is his wife Elizabeth (1766-1850) not known as its ‘Mother’? After all, she spent over a decade managing the family’s extensive farming concerns, while her husband was back in England dealing with both business and legal matters. During that time she dealt with convict workers, monitored the sheep breeding program the couple had instituted at Parramatta and Camden, plus kept the household affairs in order, including caring for their six children.
No small feat, you would think.
Yet until recent years, her husband’s story has been the one taught in schools and told in history books.So I read Michelle Scott Tucker’s biography of this remarkable woman with pleasure and interest. Elizabeth arrived in NSW at a time when the fledgling colony was foundering, on the brink of starvation and failure. She was from a genteel and educated background in Devon, and wrote letters home to friends and family, many of which have survived and give a fascinating insight – a woman’s view – of the beginnings of what became Australia.
This was rare, as were women in those early years of NSW. The colony was heavily male-dominated and those (white) women who were here, were mostly convicts; few wrote letters to give insight into poorer women’s experiences of NSW in those times. Of course, Elizabeth’s own preoccupations tended to center on her own experiences: her family, her faith, her home and beloved garden, the farming concerns, the small settler social circles in which she mixed.
Though she lived at the time and in places where violence between white settlers and Aboriginal people was erupting, she seemed not to spend a lot of time reflecting on the reasons and ramifications of the conflict; nor did she appear to examine the reasons why a penal colony was needed by Britain in the first place. In this, she was not unusual.
She suffered her share of tragedies and setbacks: the death of her firstborn, a baby daughter, on the voyage to Sydney; the loss of other children later; facing those long periods managing on her own so far from home and family; dramas and difficulties affecting her adult children; and especially, watching the decline of her husband’s mental health. His behaviour became more erratic and volatile as he descended into full-blown mania and paranoia, which must have been excrutiating for her to witness.
A point of great interest to me personally was that the Macarthurs began their voyage aboard the ship Neptune – the very same convict transport ship that not one, but two of my own ancestors arrived on. True to form, John fought so bitterly with the ship’s master that they were transferred to another of the Second Fleet ships for the bulk of the journey. I’m pretty sure that the Macarthurs would not have laid eyes on either of my ancestors, both of whom (against all odds) survived the voyage below-decks on the ‘hell-ship’, as the Neptune was later dubbed.
Still, it makes for a fascinating ‘what if?’ scenario: an encounter between the gentrifed couple and the ragged, suffering convict men.
Scott Tucker’s book paints a vivid picture of a full life lived with dignity and verve. It is also a fascinating account of the world the Macarthurs inhabited: a fragile but growing colony ‘at the edge of the world’, as the book’s subtitle suggests.
Elizabeth Macarthur: A Life at the Edge of the World was published in 2018 by Text Publishing Australia.
What would you change? ‘Time and Time Again’ by Ben Elton
I have often fantasised about time travel. The idea of returning to the past is so intriguing: to be able to see, hear and experience this world as it was before my own time is an incredibly attractive thought. I would of course, go with a travel kit containing three essential items: a way of returning instantly to my own time; an extra large packet of paracetamol; and at least two full courses of antibiotics. There are things about the modern era I would not sacrifice even for the thrill of travelling through time.
Ben Elton’s time-travel novel allowed me to indulge this fantasy for while. An enjoyable read which, while mostly light in tone, deals with some darker themes as well. It also poses very thought-provoking questions, summarised on the book’s front cover:
If you had one chance to change history…
Where would you go?
What would you do?
Who would you kill?Hugh Stanton, the novel’s protagonist, has been tasked with exactly this: to return to June 1914 and carry out two actions that will prevent the outbreak of World War I. In doing so, the mission’s designers believe he will also prevent many of the other human-created catastrophes of the twentieth century which followed the Great War, including the Second World War.
Sounds simple, right? Perhaps not ‘easy’ but surely, preventing the consequences of the first World War (such as the rise of fascism in a weakened Germany) will mean the world would not propelled onto the second one?
Hugh is a skilled operative, ex-military, educated, with compassion but ruthless when required…There are some hiccups but he does succeed…
…and that’s when the totally unforseen consequences of fiddling with time and past events roar to life.
The novel is a mix of speculative fiction, thriller, and historical fiction, …peopled by some ‘real life’ historical figures and events, all with intriguing twists.
It left me with an impulse to rewatch some Star Trek episodes – you know, the ones where they go on about ‘time-space continuum’ and the ‘Prime Directive’?
I also had a feeling that no matter which bit of time we might choose to adjust if we could, it’s humans that we really can’t change – and that given our natures, humans will continue to create catastrophes for ourselves, no matter what.
I can’t say much more about the plot without giving spoilers. I will say that if you know a bit of modern history and like books that ask ‘What if?’ you’ll enjoy Time and Time Again.
It was published in 2014 by Penguin Random House.
Excavating a childhood: ‘The Framing’ by Fernanda Dahlstrom
For the first couple of chapters of this memoir, I felt like I was in the centre of an archaeological dig, surrounded by bits of rock and shards of broken pottery, none of which fitted together. The narrative jumps forwards and backwards in time, it is peopled by characters I found hard to sort out with odd nicknames or pseudonyms. None of it made sense.
I almost gave up. But I persevered and I am very glad I did.
I realised that, deliberately or not, the author has told the story of her remarkable, fraught childhood in a way that reflects its chaotic, mixed up nature. Through her writing, she has excavated her early life and especially the relationship with her mother, bit by bit, memory by memory, rather like an archaeological dig. What she found was often a jumbled mess…reaching clarity in adulthood as she worked through the memories, slowly dealing with the legacy of those early years.
By any measure, her trajectory was startling. Her mother Margaret was charged with multiple offences to do with fraud, theft, burglary and even stalking (of Judith Durham of The Seekers), but steadfastly maintained her innocence, insisting that she had been framed by police with a vendetta against her.
So Fernanda spent much of her childhood on the run, moving between states, cities, towns.
Super-bright, she was reading philosophers and literary novels in primary school. She began university study in her mid-teens. She spent chunks of time in boarding houses, living with foster families, even looking after herself in an isolated rural house her mother had built. She organised her own travel by plane, taxis and trains to see her mother during her periods of incarceration.
All this, while believing her mother was innocent and a victim of ‘the system.’
What struck me as especially sad was the chasm that opened up with family members – including grandparents – who could have stepped in to provide a loving, more stable environment for a child.
Her narrative did two things for me. I felt enormous admiration for young Fernanda, for her fierce loyalty to her mother and her resourceful approach to the many challenging situations she found herself in. She certainly presents an argument against the somewhat over-protected bubbles that children tend to live in nowdays, at least in wealthy Western countries.
I also felt enormous sadness for the little girl growing up without the guardrails and stability that we might assume are the birthright of every child.
This excavation of a childhood makes for a gripping narrative that raises many deep questions about who we trust and why; about how the systems set up to protect the vulnerable can harm as well as help; and about how each of us must decide for ourselves the value of our own experience and the things we are told about our past.
The Framing was published in 2026 by Melbourne University Press.
My thanks to the author for a copy of the book to review.Time is a river…’There are Rivers in the Sky’ by Elif Shafak
This is a hard book to pin down. It’s part historical novel, part call to action for the survival of Earth’s rivers and waterways. It’s definitely a saga, incorporating several timelines and character arcs. There’s a little bit of magical realism, a dollop of science, plus social commentary, poetry and philosophy. It took me a few chapters to fully engage with it, but once I did I was hooked.
It begins in ancient Mesopotamia in the fabled city of Nenevah, with an educated and cultured, but ruthlessly cruel ruler, who is entranced by the legendary poem The Epic of Gilgamesh. As a single raindrop from an approaching storm falls into his hair, he commands that his former mentor and teacher be put to an agonising death for supposed treason against him. The raindrop ascends into the sky where it will bide its time, ‘waiting to return to this troubled earth again…and again. Water remembers. It is humans who forget.’ (p18)
These are the themes that are woven into the book’s several storylines; they dance around each other before coming together in its final pages: the essential nature of water to Earth and those who live here; the power of story, of poetry and language; the choices that humans make in our time on the planet.
There is Arthur, a boy born into poverty and mud on the banks of the Thames in 1840, who goes on to encounter the ancient clay tablets of Mesopotamia held in the British Museum and learns to decipher their strange cuneiform writing, stumbling across segments of the Gilgamesh poem as he does so.
There is Narin, a child of the Yazidi sect living alongside the ancient Tigris River in 2014, who travels with her Grandmother to visit their spiritual homeland, only to be plunged into persecution and war.
And there is Zaleekhah, a young woman who moves into a houseboat on the Thames in London in 2018, nursing a broken heart from a failed marriage, along with old hurts from a childhood tragedy. She is a hydrologist, studying the health and behaviour of rivers around the world.
What these three disparate people have in common is the centrality of water to their fates. Rivers, and two in particular – the Tigris and the Thames – feature throughout the novel. The lifestyles, customs, religious beliefs, legends and languages of those who have lived alongside these rivers across thousands of years, are referenced, giving a fascinating insight into topics that I had not known much about previously. This is done through stories – the lives and actions of three in particular, along with a wide cast of secondary characters.
There is some gorgeous writing throughout and so many notable passages that I had a great deal of trouble choosing just one to quote. Here is a beautiful metaphor that, I think, draws together some of the themes of this novel:
Time is a river that meanders, branching out into tributaries and rivulets, depositing sediments of stories along its shores in the hope that someday, someone, somewhere, will find them…
We carve our dreams into objects, large or small. The emotions we hold but fail to honour, we try to express through the things we create, trusting that they will outlive us when we are gone, trusting that they will carry something of us through the layers of time, like water seeping through rocks. It is our way of saying to the next generations, those we will never get to meet, ‘Remember us.’
There are Rivers in the Sky p456There are Rivers in the Sky was written by British Turkish novelist Elif Shafak and published in 2024 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK.
The human cost: ‘The Mushroom Tapes’ by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper & Sarah Krasnostein
The subtitle of this book sums up the authors’ intent: Conversations on a Triple-Murder Trial.
It’s not a blow-by-blow of the whole trial, nor of the crime itself. That sort of true-crime writing is not really my cup of tea, nor is it the kind of approach that the three authors are, rightly, famous for.
Rather, it’s a collaborative exploration of their personal responses to what they see, hear and think during this very famous trial in Victoria’s Gippsland region in 2025.
Especially, it is an examination of the very significant toll on those involved: the human side of the headlines, the speculation, the theories. The crime is only the first part of a process that affects every individual who is somehow connected to a trial like this.
I probably would not have been inclined to read this book, except that the three women who wrote it are authors whose previous works I have admired. They tackle their subjects with respect, humility and a very honest vulnerability. These qualities are reflected in this, a collection of conversations they had together while driving and from to the small town where the trial was held, and in between hearing days.
The result is not a forensic examination of the evidence, or the legal arguments, so much as how all of this made them feel – about the accused, about the victims, about the residents of a little country town that will be forever changed. The legal teams, the journalists covering the trial. The families of the dead.
They debate long and hard about their reasons for wanting to attend and write about this particular trial. Are they, in the end, like those who see it as an opportunity to make a quick buck from a book, podcast or film? Are they just curious sticky-beaks wanting a vicarious glimpse into unimaginable trauma? They share their thoughts about those reasons; here is part of their answer:
Helen: Basically what we’re doing is bearing witness…We’re bearing witness to a rent in the social fabric and how the law is going to deal with it.
Sarah: You can do two things with [evidence in a trial]. You can digest it into content that people come to ogle out of shadenfreude, or you can say ‘Oh God, I know that feeling…I know what shame is, and I know what rage is,and I know what it is to be islolated and desperate.’
ebook pp 23-24 of 249Of course mushrooms feature throughout, death cap mushrooms being the medium by which the killer delivered the poison to her victims. The authors muse on the ways in which mushrooms could be seen as metaphors: for indications of personality, relationships, intent. This book also had me thinking about fungi in general and its place in our environment.
I love the way these women write, and I loved ‘hearing’ their voices throughout this book: unadorned, unedited, honest.
The Mushroom Tapes is unlike any ‘true-crime’ book I’ve come across previously. In their exploration of this particular trial and the crime that brought it about, the authors have much to say about us all.The Mushroom Tapes was published by Text Publishing in 2025
A kind of gothic: ‘The Diamonds of Tilly Devine’ by Jackie French
One thing I most appreciate about profilic and best-selling Australian author Jackie French is that she is unafraid to explore darker themes in her work. Her books will at times touch on issues and events that some authors might steer away from, especially in books for children.
Her latest historical fiction for adults delves into some very dark topics indeed: Sydney’s ‘razor gangs’ of the 1930s; the desperation of the poor in the city’s slums; drugs; prostitution and trafficking of young women; corruption of all kinds; sadistic personalities.
The protagonist of The Diamonds of Tilly Devine is Connie, who is reeling from the death of the mother she’d nursed for seven years. Now left with only an old kitchen chair to her name, she is considering suicide.
Happily it moves on from there and Connie’s life trajectory does move upwards, but not before some very dark and difficult, almost gothic, experiences which serve to strengthen this compassionate young woman to a diamond-grade toughness.
The Tilly Devine of the title was a real historical figure, one of two rival gangland queens in Sydney during the 1920s and 30s. Speaking of tough: it was well known in her world of sly-grog shops, brothels and gambling clubs, that Tilly would shoot anyone who crossed her – or who mistreated her ‘girls.’ Especially the Diamonds – not sex-workers as such, but women groomed for a particular role. One she offers to Connie.
Connie makes mistakes, some with disastrous consequences, but she survives, eventually finding the home and family she’d longed for, along with an understanding of the things that really matter in this world. There’s a murder mystery and a gripping courtroom drama along the way, things I always enjoy in a novel.
This novel is chock-full of wonderful characters, richly drawn settings, and delicious food of the era (excepting the crumbed brains and roast mutton, neither of which appealed to this vegetarian.) But the scones, cakes, puddings and biscuits read like they’ve just come from the author’s kitchen, which they may well have done!
While this one is perhaps a little too gothic for my taste, Jackie French’s skill as a story-teller had me up reading at night, reluctant to put the book down before I’d finished the next chapter, then the next…
The Diamonds of Tilly Devine is published by HarperCollins in June 2026.
My thanks to the publishers and to NetGalley for an advance review copy.The sweetness of love (and oranges): ‘One Volcano and the Many Oranges’ by Khuanta Mahasay
The blurb for this lovely book, a debut by Australian author Khuanta Mahasay, includes this description:
An illustrated chapter book to share aloud with children ages 6 to 9, and with anyone who needs it, including grown-ups.This beautifully captures the theme and feel of the story.
The main character is Omar, who lives with his mum and grandma at the base of a spectacular volcano called Mount Tangy. Omar loves living here and helping his family grow oranges in their orchard. But he feels sad a lot of the time because his dad has died.
A special place Omar loves to visit is the spot on the mountain’s slopes where the family had scattered Dad’s ashes. Sometimes he cries a little bit when he sists there, but he feels lighter, too, gazing over the valley and his home, far below.
When the mayor announces a competition to see who among the local farmers can grow the sweetest oranges, everyone is very excited. Then, when Omar’s tears drop onto the orange tree he had planted with Dad years before, something very special and magical happens.
The day to choose the competition winner arrives and the whole town is there; excitement grows amid a festival atmosphere as the community comes together for the event. But Mount Tangy has other ideas and threatens to erupt. What can they do?
More magic – and some quick-thinking from Omar – help to save the town. In the process, Omar learns that it’s OK to feel sad, that we can keep those we love close to us with our memories, and that magic can take all shapes – and when it comes to oranges, all sizes, too.
It’s a sweet book, redolent with the scent of sticky oranges and the sourdough bread baked by Grandma. Warmth and love work their own magic to help Omar heal from his loss.
Short chapters and the gorgeous illustrations by Estelle Corke make this a perfect book for early readers who are ready for more text-rich books, or for reading aloud together.
One Volcano and the Many Oranges is published by the author in 2026.
It can be purchased on Amazon in both paperback and ebook formats here.
Disclosure: The author is a family member.
Readers of my blog will know that I champion children’s literature whenever I have the opportunity; this book is the first of what I’m sure will be many more books for kids that Ms Mahasay will produce.
