Japanese School Dubai students present silk scarf to UAE Olympic delegation for Tokyo Olympics 2021 msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
All s fair in love, war and fiction
We’re sorry, this service is currently unavailable. Please try again later.
Dismiss
By Helen Elliott
Normal text size
Canongate, $29.99
Should I be reviewing these two novels? As the “I” here is older, white, middle-class, female and Australian, reading these novels is a procession of tiny derailments. But, there is this: I wasn’t always all of the above. Life is aspirational and transitional and reading is one way into mapping both. If I hadn’t read the entire oeuvre of Mikhail Sholokhov when I was a 14-year-old outer suburban schoolgirl my life would have been different. Sholokhov’s cossacks were nothing less than dynamite to a girlish mind at that particular time. I understood maybe half of it?