Australian Archives — Keeping Up With The Penguins

Burial Rites – Hannah Kent

October 6, 2026 / Sheree / 0 Comments

It can be tough to write fiction about real people and events – especially when the events in question occurred centuries ago, the people involved are long dead, and contemporaneous records are relatively limited. Hannah Kent really shot for the stars with her debut novel, Burial Rites, a historical crime drama set in Northern Iceland in 1929, based on the real execution of the convicted murderess Agnes Magnúsdóttir.

In both the book and real life, Agnes was condemned to death as an accessory to the murder of two men. Agnes was a housemaid, and one of the victims was her ‘master’ (the other being his houseguest). While she awaited execution, she was sent to live and work on the family farm of a District Officer – an informal ‘custodial holding’ arrangement for various bureaucratic reasons – and placed in the care of a young reverend.

All of this is firmly established in the historical record, and Kent uses that as the starting point around which she builds Burial Rites. She says in her author’s note that she wanted to portray Agnes more ambiguously than other historical records have done. Agnes is widely depicted as a Lady Macbeth-type figure, with a reputation for (as Kent herself puts it in Burial Rites) “a sharp tongue and loose skirts”, but Kent’s depiction delves more deeply into what could have possibly motivated her crimes – and, as such, engenders more sympathy.

Agnes’s story is revealed very gradually over the course of the novel (so gradually, in fact, that I often lost track of who was what to whom and where they were headed). She was hired along with another (much younger, and dumber) housekeeper to work for Natan Ketilsson, and eventually the two women conspired with Natan’s neighbour Friðrik Sigurðsson to rob and murder him, afterwards setting fire to his house in an ultimately futile effort to conceal their crimes. Of course, Kent encourages us to read between the lines of how and why this set of circumstances played out.

While Burial Rites moves slowly – undoubtedly too slowly for many readers’ tastes – and hopscotches across perspectives, I was impressed by Kent’s careful use of detail in depicting the characters. The example that sticks in my mind is the District Commissioner (the District Officer’s boss). He is described as being ‘repelled’ by the Icelandic peasants’ ‘hovels’, and he insists on his full title being used in conversation – immediately giving the distinct impression that he is a self-important arsehole.

That attention to detail expands beyond the characters, too, to the rhythms and realities of farm life across the seasons in 19th century Iceland. The prioritisation of food and warmth, the rigors of the seasonal workload, and the isolation and insularity of the region are all driving forces in Burial Rites. Kent also uses these tangible details to imply commentary about class and wealth disparity, and the roles of women as both caretakers and scapegoats, without needing to hammer the reader over the head.

(There’s also quite a bit of animal slaughter, and one brief mention of an awful dog death, as well as the eventual reveal of the gruesome human murders – so beware if you’re particularly sensitive to any of that.)

Burial Rites is an intense read, and I’d imagine that its gradual pace and heavy reliance on Icelandic phrases and saga stories will be off-putting to some readers – but if you enjoyed Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, you’re in for a treat with this one.

Read Burial Rites on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Burial Rites:

“Perhaps the sources Kent used mentioned the affairs between characters and the hinted-at attraction between the priest and the condemned, but all the sex seemed trite in a world where people might not survive a snowstorm.” – Momof4girls
“frankly, I’d rather have been beheaded than read another page.” – L Bellamy
“Schadenfreudeans rejoice – this one’s for you!” – The archaeologist
“Burial Rites reaks of stink, blood, and death. The pace is that of slow hot piss.” – Desert Studio Art Co.

The Dressmakers Of Yarrandarrah Prison - Meredith Jaffe - Keeping Up With The Penguins

The Dressmakers Of Yarrandarah Prison – Meredith Jaffe

July 21, 2026 / Sheree / 0 Comments

Meredith Jaffe’s inspiration for The Dressmakers Of Yarrandarrah Prison was a real-life prison program running in the UK. Fine Cell Work teaches incarcerated men needlework and other sewing skills with the dual aims of teaching them skills that will improve their employment prospects upon release, and improving their mental health and social connections. Jaffe took this idea and ran with it: what if one of these prison sewing circles had to make a whole wedding dress?

The protagonist of The Dressmakers Of Yarrandarrah Prison, Derek, is a 51-year-old maths teacher, serving seven years in the titular institution for embezzling funds from a golf club to cover the costs of his gambling addiction. He is effectively estranged from everyone he knew before his sentence began; he writes letters to his daughter and his father every week, but has never received a reply. When his ex-sister-in-law shows up for a visit, she comes bearing big news: his daughter is getting married, before Derek’s time is up.

Even though he won’t be able to walk her down the aisle, Derek is determined to find a way to “be there” for his daughter on her big day. Mulling over the problem with fellow members of the prison sewing group (‘BackTackers’), he stumbles across a solution. Together, they’ll make her a spectacular wedding dress.

With the help of Jane (the volunteer who leads BackTackers), they adapt a pattern, gather the materials, and guess at the measurements. The motley group of hardened criminals spend their precious recreation hours sewing seams, covering buttons, and embroidering forget-me-knots. But will they be able to get the dress to Derek’s daughter in time? Will she even want to wear it?

The Dressmakers Of Yarrandarah Prison predominantly focuses on Derek, but Jaffe occasionally zooms in on his daughter or the sewing teacher. These random shifts in focus do expand the story, but can feel briefly bewildering for the reader. Other than these sudden jumps, the prose flows well. Jaffe also does a great job of rounding out the incarcerated characters without shaving off their edges. The prisoners aren’t all heart-of-gold wrongfully-convicted types, nor are they all psychopathic monsters; all of them are imprisoned for good reason, but all of them are three-dimensional.

That said, The Dressmakers Of Yarrandarrah Prison does occasionally feel like a (very) thinly veiled polemic. Jaffe really hammers home the point that prison programs need adequate funding. In case the ‘BackTackers’ and their mission to make a wedding dress wasn’t enough, there’s a significant subplot about funding for the prison library, too. It’s an important issue, and one that’s interesting to address in fiction, but perhaps should have been handled with more subtlety.

On the whole, The Dressmakers Of Yarrandarrah Prison is an uplifting read in an unlikely setting, and probably a bit of an eye-opener for anyone of the “lock ’em up and throw away the key” persuasion.

Read The Dressmakers Of Yarrandarrah Prison on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

Emotional Female – Yumiko Kadota

June 23, 2026 / Sheree / 0 Comments

In her note to the reader at the beginning of Emotional Female, Yumiko Kadota describes herself as a “recovering doctor”. This book is her insider’s account of her time as a hospital registrar, a woman seeking a career in the male-dominated field of plastic surgery. She thought she was going to be the Australian version of Christina Yang from Grey’s Anatomy; instead, she found herself burnt out and broken down in a public health system where bullying and overwork run rife.

Emotional Female is a bit unfocused in the early chapters. The chronological recounting of details and anecdotes from Kadota’s early life make it feel more like an autobiography than a memoir, and often led me to wonder why an editor hadn’t sat her down to have a stern word about the reader’s expectations of the genre. I picked up this book to read about the trials and tribulations of working in the public health system – did I really need to know the results of Kadota’s primary school sports carnival?

Kadota comes off as a deeply earnest person in her account, reminding me of every single privately educated resume-packing School Captain I’ve ever met – whether or not that’s endearing will differ for each reader. She remains bright eyed and bushy tailed all the way through her medical studies, determined to chart a course whereby she becomes both wildly successful and broadly well-liked.

Of course, the wheels come off (as they must, else Emotional Female wouldn’t really have a story). By the time she becomes a plastic surgery registrar, Kadota is already a bit worn down by the stresses of the job. Then, she is thrown head-first into a punishing roster, working stretches of eleven, fourteen, and even twenty-plus days straight. Multiple phone calls throughout the night meant she couldn’t even find rest and respite in her own home. “My body was a machine on stand-by at all times,” she reflects (page 306).

The stress of the workload is exacerbated by the litany of microaggressions that Kadota faces as a young Asian woman in a system built by old white men. She is frequently mistaken for a nurse, or called by the name of her Asian colleague. She is told she is too confident, and too emotional. She is turned away by patients who insist on seeing a white doctor. She is sexually harassed by senior colleagues and mentors.

Despite the implicit – and even explicit, at times – pressure from her superiors to simply push through, Kadota pulls the rip cord on her medical career when she finds herself fantasising about self-harm as a way of guaranteeing herself an unimpeachable break from work (after all, she can’t be expected to perform delicate microsurgery with injured hands). She resigns, and spends over a year trying to recuperate physically and mentally. She writes a blog post about her experience that garners traction, eventually becoming Emotional Female.

Kadota’s story is deeply troubling for anyone who needs access to health care (so, all of us) or cares about workers’ rights (which should be all of us, too). That said, I think Kadota missed an opportunity to reflect on how this toxic work environment came about and the pressures placed on previous generations of surgeons that filtered down to her own experience. There’s a particular scene where she becomes upset with an intern for disturbing her at 3AM with a non-urgent question. It immediately brought to mind for me an earlier scene where Kadota, as an intern herself, was scolded by a vascular registrar for calling at midnight to ask a question. It seemed to me an obvious parallel, and a gateway to talk about the faulty foundations of the public health system that has failed so many – but Kadota quickly moved on with her own story, and left that aspect unexamined.

On the whole, Emotional Female feels a bit bloated, occasionally sliding into cliche and sometimes skipping over the broader implications of Kadota’s experiences. It might have been a more powerful read with a rigorous edit that brought her experiences as a registrar into clearer focus from the start, and some guidance about connecting one’s lived experience to the historical and social context. That said, it’s still an important and timely subject, and future doctors will no doubt benefit from Kadota standing up for herself and publicly sharing her experience.

Read Emotional Female on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

Those Other Women – Nicola Moriarty

June 9, 2026 / Sheree / 0 Comments

Those Other Women begins with every childfree-by-choice woman’s nightmare: Poppy’s husband decides that he does want children after all, and announces that he’s been having an affair with her clucky (now-former) best friend. Poppy is left high and dry, starting over in her mid-30s while her (now-ex) husband starts a new life filled with baby showers and playdates.

In her search for a new best friend, Poppy finds Annalise, a likeminded firecracker from her office. Together, they decide to start a Facebook group, an alternative to the ever-popular always-growing “Mums Online Paramatta” (which neither of them can join in their search for community as they are, very deliberately and determinedly, non-Mums). They call their new group “Non-Mums Online Paramatta”, just to make it absolutely clear. It’s a direct equivalent, with drinks meet-ups and requests for advice, just for women who have no interest in having children and don’t need to book a babysitter for a night out.

This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship and a period of rejuvenation in Poppy’s life – but that would make Those Other Women a really boring book. Instead, Moriarty takes us into a suburban jungle of rival factions and unintended consequences.

Poppy has a few too many drinks one night after seeing photos of her ex-husband and ex-best-friend with their newborn. In a blind rage, she posts a challenge to her new Facebook friends: call out the Mum privilege they see in the world around them, and demand equal consideration for non-Mums. By the time Poppy has slept it off, the challenge has taken on a life of its own, and women with prams are being verbally abused in cafes.

All the while, there is an impostor in the group. One of the members of Non-Mums Online Paramatta is, in fact, a mum. She’s infiltrated the group to see what’s being said about her and her Mum friends (and maybe just temporarily escape her life of dirty nappies and constant interruptions). Is it Frankie, Poppy and Annalise’s co-worker who is constantly leaving early to pick her kids up from school? Is it Carla, the member who asked a few too many nosy questions at the last drinks meet up? Is it Lucy, Frankie’s too-good-to-be-true sister, the Perfect Mum? Or is it someone even closer to Poppy, someone who is keeping a dark secret?

The prose isn’t fancy, and the exposition is occasionally a bit heavy-handed, but even so Those Other Women is a strangely addictive read. There’s mysteries and fake identities and hidden motivations all knotted up together, and Moriarty does a good job of teasing them all out.

It does get a bit silly towards the end though, with the denouement coming at a charity gala fundraiser. Just picturing a group of middle-aged women in cocktail attire on a yacht, sailing around Darling Harbour, fighting about who said what in which Facebook group made me cringe.

I think Those Other Women will, surprisingly, ultimately appeal more to mothers than to childfree women. The overall message seems to be “women need to support each other more and judge each other less” – but it’s the women without children who are explicitly taught this, while there’s no equivalent narrative consequences or reminders for Mums to support (and not judge) their childfree comrades.

Read Those Other Women on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Those Other Women:

“This book gives women a bad name. Boring, insignificant drivell about two different facebook groups.” – PrettyTeaSets
“If you like lots of drama and rude people you’ll enjoy it.” – BAG79

The Spare Room – Helen Garner

May 26, 2026 / Sheree / 0 Comments

I’m particularly partial to Helen Garner’s nonfiction, but that doesn’t mean I object to picking up one of her novels now and then. The next to reach the top of my to-read stack is The Spare Room.

The story is set over the course of three weeks, and narrated by a middle-aged woman named Helen (yes, the narrator has the same name as the author, she leaned into the skid on the writing-what-you-know bit, more on that in a second). It begins with her preparing her spare room for the arrival of her friend Nicola. Nicola is flying down from Sydney to stay with Helen for the duration of her “alternative treatment” for metastatic bowel cancer.

The Spare Room is a short novel, but it contains multitudes – as with all of Garner’s work. Narrator-Helen watches as Nicola forks over money, time, and energy to a bunch of quacks who promise to cure her terminal cancer with vitamin C and cupping. Nicola’s condition worsens despite these “treatments”, and Narrator-Helen quickly goes from generous hostess to live-in palliative care nurse.

Garner beautifully renders the frustration of tongue-biting as you watch a loved one act against their own interests (and get ripped off, to boot). Narrator-Helen wants to shake some sense into Nicola, and comes close a few times, but equally she’s desperate to support and love a long-time friend through the end stages of a terrible illness. It’s an impossible tightrope to walk. What makes The Spare Room a particularly interesting take – possibly unique – is its square focus on Narrator-Helen’s experience. Nicola’s point-of-view – as the person who is actually dying – doesn’t get a single moment.

Even with the tough subject matter, Garner still manages to make me chuckle – from Narrator-Helen’s incredulity at the suggestion of coffee enemas, to her desperation to reassure a real GP that she’s not like Nicola, she’s sensible.

The Spare Room is ostensibly fiction but, as I alluded to above, there’s undeniable authenticity in the account. The novel draws heavily on Garner’s real experiences caring for her friend Jenya Osborne in the last days of her life (and that’s not the only parallel between her life and Narrator-Helen’s, either).

It’s a short book, and it’s compulsively readable, so you’ll likely be able to knock it over in a single sitting (as I did). I highly recommend it for a rainy evening where you’re feeling pensive and you want to read a masterful work of close-to-the-bone fiction.

Read The Spare Room on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of The Spare Room:

“So she is sick but that doesn’t give one an excuse to carry on the way she does.” – Lisa
“I am not saying the sick friend does not have her annoying qualities but I tend to give people dying and fighting for everyday the benefit of the doubt and cut them a little slack!” – Jaime Flynn
“Helen Garner is a very good writer. “The Spare Room” reeks of plausibility.” – Andrew Desmond