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?