Theresa Smith's Blog

Peak District, Mercia, AD 910: a young girl, Freda works hard to avoid her father’s temper, while longing for his approval. She loves foraging in the woods and hearthside stories of heroes. Secretly she thinks in poetry and dreams of one day being able to write; her quills are grass stalks and sticks, her parchment the sky, the earth, her skin. But Freda’s world is at war, and when her village is decimated in a savage raid and her father goes missing, Freda must find the strength to survive.

Taken in by the church, her only options are a life of servitude or prayer. But the cunning bishop sees an opportunity. As well as teaching Freda to write, he uses her survival as evidence of a miracle so as to attract pilgrims who bring wealth. As Freda chafes against the bishop’s increasing control, she develops a friendship with the Mercian leader Ethelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, who shows her what it is to lead as a woman in a world that worships warrior kings.

Soon Freda must choose. Does she remain the powerless, subservient quill whose fate lies in the hands of another, or does she fight for the right to create – and write – her own story?

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Australia

Released March 2025

Set in the Early Middle Ages, By Her Hand is the debut novel by Marion Taffe. I’ve seen this novel popping up quite a bit online and I was interested in reading it as my tastes regarding historical fiction have vastly changed in recent years. I used to be more of a modern history enthusiast, but recent reads, Rapture comes to mind, has seen me reaching further back through time for my historical fiction fix. But what really prompted me to read this one was the recent excellent review from my trusted bookish friend, Tracey from Carpe Librum, which you can read for yourself here.

I both listened to and read By Her Hand, and I can highly recommend the audiobook, it was narrated beautifully and also had the sidebar bonus of pronouncing the names and places correctly, which I was not doing right when reading it myself! This novel is a richly researched story, and I was impressed by both the world building and the character development. Lushly written and immersive in scope, By Her Hand was such a gorgeous read, I found myself lingering over the passages and taking far longer to read it than I normally would have.

I highly recommend this one for lovers of well researched and richly rendered historical fiction. Perfect for fans of Rapture, Hamnet, and The Book of Colours.

A gripping, haunting work about the reverberations of a serial killer’s crimes in the lives of everyday people.

In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged with a series of brutal murders of backpackers along a highway. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims’ families, but its impact travels even further – into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes.

Highway 13 takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much more: through the investigation of the aftermath of this violence across time and place, from the killer’s home town in country Australia to the tropical Far North, and to Texas and Rome, McFarlane presents an unforgettable, entrancing exploration of the way stories are told and spread, and at what cost.

From the acclaimed author of The Sun Walks Down and The Night Guest comes a captivating account of loss and fear, and their extended echoes in individual lives.

Published by Allen & Unwin

Released 2024

Highway 13 is a collection of twelve stories that are all connected in six degrees of separation fashion to the crimes of a serial killer, a fictionalised Ivan Milat, whose real-life crimes have been immortalised as the ‘Backpacker Murders’, here in Australia. This is not my usual sort of read, but sometimes a book gets so much attention and wins so many awards, that I am drawn to read out of my comfort zone.

‘I had some sense, then, of the energy she must have expended every minute of every day, sustaining the myth of herself.’

I really enjoyed the way Fiona McFarlane writes and am keen to read one of her novels at some stage. If you’ve read either of them, please do throw me a recommendation on which one to dive into. What I enjoyed most about these stories is that they were not about the killer, nor were they about the murders specifically. What they were about was the ripple effect on others, and in some cases, this was quite removed, but each of the stories contained a moment of recognition, an impacting connection of some sort.

Out of the twelve stories, two I didn’t enjoy quite as much as the others, and this was down to the way in which they were written. One was a stream of consciousness inside the characters head, no punctuation, no line breaks, just all of his thoughts running wildly out of his head onto the page. Stylistically, I get it, but it was exhausting to read. The other was a podcast episode, so it was basically a transcript of the conversation between the two hosts. I just couldn’t get into that. Podcasts are for listening to, they don’t translate to the page, in my opinion, but again, stylistically, I get why it was in there. The final story in the collection was stunning, an incredible one to finish on.

I highly recommend Highway 13, it’s easy to read each story in one sitting and despite what each story is springboarding off of, they are not difficult to read. These are stories about people, places, and the effect one person’s atrocities can have on a myriad of lives.

How will you ever know how the story ends, if you let the story go?

Noah Cork has just published the scoop of a lifetime: the white-hot true crime book of the cold-blooded killer who slipped an unfolding murder mystery into his mailbox. But if this is his moment of triumph, then why is the tin roof being ripped from the walls of his reality? Why are skeletons standing upright in his closet? Why do people want to run him over in the street? And why does his wife keep writing a cryptic message across the bathroom mirror? As a severe storm cell heads towards Brisbane, Noah is hurtling headfirst into a swirling storm of secrets. He must now cling for dear life to the only story that ever really mattered. He must hold on to the truth. He must hold on to the story. He must hold on to love.

Dark, gritty, hilarious and unexpected, Gravity Let Me Go is Trent Dalton’s deeply personal exploration of marriage and ambition; truth-telling and truth-omitting; self-deception and self-preservation. It’s a novel about the stories we want to tell the world and those we shouldn’t, and how the stories we keep locked away are so often the stories that come to define us.

It’s the story of a murder.

It’s the story of a marriage.

It’s the story of a lifetime.

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Australia

Released September 2025

Gravity Let Me Go is the much hyped and media saturated latest release of Queensland’s own home-grown boy wonder, Trent Dalton. We love him here. We love him so much he’s stitched into the very identity of Queensland, a state that has now been immortalised by the stroke of his pen and a television series adaptation of his phenomenally successful first novel, Boy Swallows Universe. Queensland, specifically Brisbane, is a location he returns to over and over. Lola in the Mirror was set in the heart of Brisbane, and he’s done it again, with Gravity Let Me Go set in a fictionalised Brisbane suburb that could be any number of Brisbane suburbs – I’m quite sure the ‘which suburb is it’ game will be played at many a book club discussion about this book. In fact, it’s already kicked off in my own book club chat group. But do we love Trent Dalton so much that we can forgive him a bad book? For me, Lola in the Mirror was fairly average, and I still remained true. But this, Gravity Let Me Go, well, this might be one of the stupidest books I’ve ever read.

Initially, when we meet Noah Cork, he has just released a true crime book inside six months, in fact, the book has been released while the police investigation is still ongoing. His life is somewhat chaotic: he’s been working non-stop on this book that was born out of a clue left in his letterbox, barely scraping by financially as a freelance journalist whose leads have all dried up on account of a story he wrote which well and truly burnt all of his bridges, he’s arguing with his wife every night, his daughters are teenagers (that’s enough in itself), and he’s seeing things, hearing things, kind of losing it, and something is really wrong with one of his testicles. Are you tired yet? The writing is at once very snappy and busy, chaotic like Noah himself. Introspection intermingled with dialogue make this a book you have to pay close attention to.

For a good part of the story, Dalton seems to circle around the morality of true crime reporting. True crime is big business, entertainment wise. Just go to the main menu of any streaming service and you can take your pick of documentaries and podcasts. True crime is a steady presence in the non-fiction lists, worldwide. I found this an interesting angle and was intrigued on where Dalton was going to go with this. There are sections in the narrative where he digs deep and highlights how dehumanising true crime reporting can be. “I used to see her looking down on me before she kissed me goodnight. Now all I see are her bones.” This, flung at him by the daughter of the victim whose murder he has based his book upon. And even with this though, our sympathies are tugged away from us by the portrayal of the victim’s family: the husband is a cheating alcoholic, the son a satanic meth head, the daughter is mentally unstable. It’s like, how sad, this woman has been murdered, but it’s okay to muckrake her life and spread it out for all to see because her family are a bunch of weirdos anyway. It felt like the moral objections that Dalton was raising were only being done so his character could form a rebuttal. Journalism is full of ethical landmines, I know this, it was my first career, and I was initially thrilled at seeing it poked at in this way. I had listened to an interview prior to the release of the book where Dalton spoke about these themes, but this was not to be the main topic of the book.

In amongst the chaos of how we meet Noah, his wife Rita stops speaking after accompanying their youngest daughter on a school excursion. No explanation, nothing happened, she just stops talking. Doctors diagnose selective mutism and joke that she’s giving Noah a silent f*ck you. Except it persists. Rita speaks to no one, not her daughters, her parents, neighbours, no one. She supposedly has a job three days a week, so I suppose she just turned up to work and said nothing as well, although Dalton doesn’t go into that. This storyline bothered me. A lot. We hear so much about what an amazing, special person Rita is. She’s the best mother, she’s there for all the neighbours, she’s a brilliant wife. But we learn all this about her from the other characters. All we get, in the present time with Rita, is a woman who is refusing to speak, which in turn is causing emotional damage to her daughters, the youngest of which develops a separation anxiety and refuses to go to school. Refusing to speak to someone you are married to because you’ve had enough of his obsession with chasing the story is not a building block for empathy. It’s a form of abuse, a toxic power play within a relationship, and to extend that to children was a plotline I couldn’t get behind. This may have affected my overall reading experience in the end, because this is something I have strong feelings about and a zero tolerance for.

Ultimately, Gravity Let Me Go was not the book for me. I still wouldn’t be able to tell you what it was really about, plot wise. I didn’t like Noah, particularly once he divulged what he had done to his parents’ marriage as a thirteen-year-old budding journalist. If anything, that served the purpose of showing him as a true hack, beyond redemption. Is this a crime story with a dash of Twin Peaks? A fantasy about storms and a superwoman? Or is it a good old fashioned love story? Dalton keeps reiterating that it is a story about marriage. I don’t know. It’s a bit of everything but not enough of one true thing to hold it together. This book just made me tired, to be honest, and I was glad to finally reach the end of it.

‘While I was giving birth to Lucy, my husband, Alessandro, was lying in bed with my sister Isabel.‘

And thus, Inés Camargo – the youngest daughter of an Italian nobleman and a Colombian poet – begins to speak in a bitter, sweet voice. 

Against the backdrop of early twentieth-century Colombia, where the Catholic Church exercises total control over women, Orange Wine weaves an unforgettable story of sisterhood, love, passion, and betrayal. Isolated in a society that opposes her desires, Inés struggles with her identity as a mother, artist, sister, lover, and woman. Her choices are stark: accept her duty to her family or embark on a sensuous journey of self-discovery. Each path will cost her – or those she loves – something dear. 

Mirroring the alchemical process of turning oranges into wine, Inés must create a new life from a bitter pith, pressing sweetness from life’s agonies as she struggles toward artistic freedom and feminine awakening. 

Published by NewSouth Books

Released 1 October 2025

Orange Wine is a novel inspired by the author’s grandparents. She doesn’t go into too much detail about which parts, other than the orange wine, but ultimately, this is a novel, and I’m going to review it as such, rather than as a family memoir. The story starts strong and with the premise of being a complicated family saga. One sister has run off with the other sister’s husband while she is in labour. There are five girls in total in this family, and they each have their allies within the sisterhood. Each possess individual talents, some are more beautiful than others, some are smarter, some are crueller, some have more compassion. I was ready for a rollicking family drama with all the trimmings. And in some ways, it delivers, but in others, I was left wanting.

Esperanza Hope Snyder writes beautifully, in terms of her love prose and her ability to capture the essence of the landscape and society of early 20th century Columbia, and later in the novel, parts of Italy, Spain, and France. Her ability to evoke passion was sublime, and she is a published poet, so this was evident in the sweeping passages about love and romance. I think where this novel really fell short for me was in the plot, it just seemed underdeveloped for the scope she had set in place from the outset. Much time was given to the domestic frivolities of Inez’s relationships, and not enough given to her creative pursuits that would ultimately lead to her freedom and ability to fully embrace the life she was seeking. I think, what was missing, is the yearning that should have been present, particularly through the times of loss and heartache, but I remained separated from this, held at arm’s length by the author.

‘The passion I felt for Regulo came upon me so suddenly, I did not know how to adjust to it. For the first time, I understood what it felt like to learn a foreign language and one day discover that the world is somehow different and richer because of a new vocabulary to describe the self and those around it.’

There was a lovely easter egg in the final chapters where Inez and Regulo befriend by chance an American writer in Madrid who is clearly Ernest Hemmingway, despite remaining unnamed. I found that a little bit of a redemption at the end of what was largely a lacklustre read.

Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.

Continuing on with this series of short stories by Faber, this week I’ve read two more during my lunch breaks at work.

Some brief thoughts on each:

Mrs Fox by Sarah Hall – This one was unexpectedly odd in the direction it moved, yet strangely compelling. I’m still not sure what to make of it. Not much to offer on this one – sorry!

Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom by Sylvia Plath – What an interesting little read. A young woman boards a train, unknowingly, to a place where she is to lose her soul. Her only saving grace is a demonstration of will. This is quite a short story, but the themes are deep, and if you consider what’s gone on off page – why would her parents book her a ticket on such a journey? What comes next after the great escape? – there’s a lot to turn over in your mind. Published for the first time in its original form. My first Plath! At long last!!

On the twelfth day of her hunger strike, Maggy is unable to tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined. That’s true of what brought her here too: was she IRA, or did she just take risks for the sake of a friend?

Julia O’Faolain paints a portrait of young Irish girls and their unseverable connection, showing solidarity in places politics cannot reach.

Published by Faber

Released March 2019

I’m finding this series of Faber Stories addictive for fitting into busy days or for reading at times when my mind is travelling at a different speed to my body.

Today’s little gem is Daughters of Passion by Julia O’Faolain, a new to me author. This story is a political tale about a young woman in an English prison, hunger striking for political status, after murdering a detective with an IRA bomb in London.

As she resists the attempts to feed her, she reflects on her childhood as an orphan, being brought up in a convent, her friendships with the two women pivotal to her current situation, and the way in which some paths are accidentally inevitable.

‘Brought up by nuns, she had lost her faith, found another, fought for it and been imprisoned.’

I liked this story and enjoyed O’Faolain’s writing style. This is the type of story that I’d like to read expanded out into a novel, I was definitely left wanting from this one, which I’ve come to see as the benchmark for a great short story.

An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court.

She’s drawn into simmering personal dramas. Her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage.

Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim’s sister.

And she’s pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes.

She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life.

Published by Penguin Books Australia

Released August 2022

After reading and being impressed by Audition, I was keen to read more by Katie Kitamura, and I’m certain I heard about Intimacies via Julia Gillard’s bookclub, where it was highly praised. I’m here to heap more praise upon it now, because this novel is brilliant.

Set in The Hague, our protagonist is a translator at the International Criminal Court. The title of the novel encompasses the essence of the story so perfectly. Within the court, the role of a translator is pivotal, as the majority of those on trial do not speak the language of the court, or even of their defence lawyers. The translator becomes their ears, and their voice, creating an intimacy between the two that is incredibly important and also, given the nature of the crimes that are tried at the International Court, incredibly harrowing.

I found this a fascinating exploration of a career I’d not given much thought to, but its importance, globally, cannot be understated. The story also pokes a bit at the International Criminal Court as a prop for Western Imperialism. The themes are big, but the story itself is, as the title suggests, intimate. I loved this one and I’m looking forward to reading all of Katie Kitamura’s backlist. She is a force.

Nonfiction winner of the Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize for 2025

Documenting the damaging role of anxiety in our lives is hardly new, but Touched takes us inside the destabilising riot of a three-day panic attack with such insight, honesty and humour that the perspective we gain is revelatory and overwhelmingly hopeful. This book has a wonderful breadth of understanding—of the author’s own crazily complex family, of the wider issue of anxiety across society, and of her own voyage as a highly competent yet vulnerable being in a worryingly unhinged world.

Published by Finlay Lloyd Publications

Released October 2025

Beloved for her fiction, Touched is Kim Kelly as we have never read before. This little powerhouse of a memoir is at once raw and entirely relatable. With stark and humorous honesty, Kim takes us by the hand and allows us to step inside her mind, at a time when it is at its most chaotic. Kim has always been a word weaver to me, and in writing about herself, here, she is mesmerising. I devoured this book in one sitting and then sat for almost just as long again contemplating it.

‘Everyone’s experience is different, every attack is unique. But what is certain is that anxiety is an expert in ambush. You can be feeling great, on top of the wonderful world, and it’ll rip right into you, as if it is made of spite.’

~~~~

‘Because that’s what we are. Here and not here at the same time. And maybe the only thing any of us truly needs to know is that, all the time, every moment, every breath, love is waiting. Just waiting for you to come around.’

I highly recommend this one and am unsurprised at it taking out the Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize for non-fiction this year.

Thanks to the publisher for the copy.

A rich historical novel about the aftermath of betrayal, from the Booker prize-winner.

Isabel Osmond, a spirited, intelligent young heiress, flees to London after being betrayed by her husband, to be with her beloved cousin Ralph on his deathbed. After a sombre, silent existence at her husband’s Roman palazzo, Isabel’s daring escape to London reawakens her youthful quest for freedom and independence, as old suitors resurface and loyal friends remind her of happier times.

But soon Isabel must decide whether to return to Rome to face up to the web of deceit in which she has become entangled, or to strike out on her own once more.

Published by Penguin Australia

Released 2017

Mrs Osmond is a sequel to Henry James’s legendary classic, The Portrait of a Lady. In this novel, John Banville has given us a continuation of Isabel’s story and a more satisfying ending than what we were left with in Portrait.

Banville is a gifted writer, for in Mrs Osmond, he assumes the writing style of Henry James with such a likeness, this feels not only like a genuine sequel, but also like one that was written in the same era as the original. It reads like a classic in every way.

‘It interested Isabel to note how roundabout yet inescapable were the ways by which guilt led to betray itself, and that often it was the care the guilty ones took to avoid acknowledging or even alluding to their wrong-doing that was the unmistakable sign of their culpability.’

I enjoyed this and was more than satisfied with the journey Banville takes Isabel Osmond on. I always felt Isabel got a rough deal with a sad ending, so it was rewarding to see Banville bequeath upon her some steel in her spine and a promising future.

Where this one fell down for me is that I feel Banville wrote it too much for readers who haven’t read The Portrait of a Lady. It was at times repetitive, backstory from Portrait woven in for context, but I found it often distracting, this backwards viewing within a present scene. So, in saying that, it’s not necessary to have read The Portrait of a Lady in order to read this.

‘It occurs to me to wonder, Mrs Osmond, if I have underestimated you, all along.’

I bought this one as a new release back in 2017, and it’s been sitting on my shelf waiting to be read for all that time. Here’s to #oldreleases and never being too late to the party.

An Italian family, sizable, with its routines and rituals, crazes, pet phrases, and stories, doubtful, comical, indispensable, comes to life in the pages of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon. Giuseppe Levi, the father, is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking—when he isn’t provoked into angry remonstration by someone misspeaking or misbehaving or wearing the wrong thing. Giuseppe is Jewish, married to Lidia, a Catholic, though neither is religious; they live in the industrial city of Turin where, as the years pass, their children find ways of their own to medicine, marriage, literature, politics. It is all very ordinary, except that the background to the story is Mussolini’s Italy in its steady downward descent to race law and world war. The Levis are, among other things, unshakeable anti-fascists. That will complicate their lives.

Family Lexicon is about a family and language—and about storytelling not only as a form of survival but also as an instrument of deception and domination. The book takes the shape of a novel, yet everything is true. 

Originally published in 1963. The novel won the Strega Prize in 1963.

‘The places, events and people in this book are real. I haven’t invented a thing, and each time I found myself slipping into my long-held habits as a novelist and made something up, I was quickly compelled to destroy the invention. The names are also real. In the writing of this book I felt such a profound intolerance for any fiction, I couldn’t bring myself to change the real names which seemed to me indissoluble from the real people. Perhaps someone will be unhappy to find themselves so, with his or her first and last name in a book. To this I have nothing to say.‘

This is one of the most enjoyable audiobooks I’ve listened to in ages. Natalia Ginzberg’s classic work of auto-fiction was brought to life splendidly.

This is a deceptively simple story of the daily life of an Italian family, their habits, their quirks, their outrages, and the way in which they communicate to each other through their endearments and insults – their family lexicon.

But this seemingly simple family life unfolds against a backdrop of fascism, and for this mixed Jewish/Catholic family of active anti-fascists, daily life is far from simple. Ginzberg writes in a way though where life and death walk hand in hand along a pathway of chaos and tragedy. In one moment, you are laughing at a family absurdity. In the next, she steals your breath with a stunning moment of loss.

Ginzberg is a brilliant writer, and this is a masterpiece. I highly recommend the audiobook, but I will be getting a copy to read also, as I know this is one story I will be wanting to return to.