Tag: Book Review

Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss

1st May 2026
Books
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Cover photo of the book "Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray" by Anita Heiss
Cover photo of “Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray” by Anita Heiss

Overview

Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (2021) by Anita Heiss is a work of historical fiction set on Wiradyuri country in central New South Wales, Australia. The first Australian novel to be released with its title in the Wiradyuri language, it is based on true events surrounding the Great Flood of Gundagai in 1852, when the Murrumbidgee River broke its banks and devastated a town built too close to the water, despite the warnings of the local Wiradyuri people. The story follows Wagadhaany, a young Wiradyuri woman who survives the flood only to be uprooted from her family and country, forced to accompany the colonial Bradley family as they resettle in Wagga Wagga. Through her eyes, the novel explores what it means to be dispossessed of land and belonging, to carry the weight of colonial constraint in ordinary daily life, and to dream of a way back to country. A Guardian Australia reviewer described it as “a novel of the myopia and cruelty of ‘good’ intentions” and “a joyful love story, and a literary celebration of the Wiradyuri language, which is woven throughout.” It won the 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Prize for Indigenous Writing and was longlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize.

Book Review

There is a moment early in ‘Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray’ when the Murrumbidgee River rises, and rises, and does not stop. The year is 1852. The town of Gundagai — built, despite Wiradyuri warnings, too close to the water’s edge — is about to be taken. Anita Heiss gives us this disaster not as spectacle but as reckoning. The river was always going to do this. The Wiradyuri people knew. Nobody listened.

That is the note on which this novel opens, and it does not let you go.

‘Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray’ — the title is in Wiradyuri, and it was the first Australian novel published with its title in an Indigenous language on the cover — translates as River of Dreams. It is a historical novel set on Wiradyuri country in central New South Wales, and it follows Wagadhaany, a young Wiradyuri woman who survives the Gundagai flood of 1852 only to find herself uprooted from her family and her country, forced to accompany the colonial Bradley family as they relocate to Wagga Wagga. She did not choose to go. She was not asked.

This is the reality at the centre of the novel: the quiet, grinding violence of being owned. Not enslaved in the explicit legal sense, but owned in the way that mattered day to day — your labour presumed, your presence presumed, your future presumed. Wagadhaany moves through the Bradley household performing the duties expected of her, and Heiss renders this with a restraint that is more devastating than outrage would be. The dispossession is simply the texture of Wagadhaany’s life. She carries it the way you carry something you cannot put down.

What saves the novel from becoming purely a chronicle of loss is the community Heiss builds around her protagonist. Wagadhaany’s relationships — with her father Yarri (himself a historical figure, a hero of the Gundagai flood), with other Wiradyuri women, and eventually with the stockman Yindyamarra — are rendered with warmth and specificity. These are people who laugh, argue, grieve, and endure. The love story between Wagadhaany and Yindyamarra is unhurried and genuine, and it gives the novel its emotional counterweight.

The Wiradyuri language threaded through the text is not decorative. It grounds the reader in a world that existed before English arrived and continued, stubbornly, beneath colonial imposition. A glossary is provided, but I found myself reading without consulting it too often; the meaning comes through in context, which is surely the point. Language as country. Language as the thing that could not be entirely taken.

One small structural observation: the novel’s final third moves at a noticeably faster pace than what precedes it. Where the middle section lingers, appropriately, in the rhythms of Wagadhaany’s constrained daily life, the resolution feels compressed by comparison. A few threads that had been building are tied off quickly. It is a minor imbalance in an otherwise carefully paced work, and it did not diminish the ending so much as leave me wanting slightly more time in it.

I came to this book through my connection to Kangaroo Island and the broader Australian landscape — a place I have spent years trying to understand through a lens and a quiet attention to what is actually there. Reading Heiss, I was reminded that understanding a landscape always means understanding whose it is. Or was. Or, in a more honest reckoning, still is. The Murrumbidgee runs through this novel the way rivers run through everything — as boundary, as lifeline, as memory, as direction. Wagadhaany dreams along it. It is where she belongs.

There are books that give you information and books that give you understanding. 

‘Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray’ is firmly in the second category. It does not lecture. It does not explain the history so much as inhabit it. You come away knowing something about the Gundagai flood, about colonial New South Wales, about the Wiradyuri people — but more than that, you come away having spent time with a character whose inner life is fully realised, whose desires and griefs feel real, whose courage is not the capitalised kind but the quiet kind that gets a person through an ordinary week under extraordinary constraint.

It is the kind of book I want to press into people’s hands. I suspect I will.

Dr Anita Heiss AM is a member of the Wiradyuri nation of central New South Wales and one of Australia’s most prolific and well-known authors, publishing across genres including non-fiction, historical fiction, commercial fiction, and children’s fiction. She is a Professor of Communications at the University of Queensland, an Ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation and the GO Foundation, and Publisher at Large of Bundyi, an imprint of Simon & Schuster dedicated to cultivating First Nations talent. Across more than two decades of publishing, Heiss has been a consistent and outspoken advocate for the presence of First Nations voices in Australian letters.

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How to Meditate by Pema Chödrön

16th April 2026
Books
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Cover photo of the book "How To Meditate" by Pema Chödrön

Overview

How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind was first published in 2013 by Sounds True.

Written by Pema Chödrön, one of the most widely read Western teachers of Tibetan Buddhism, the book presents what she considers the essential foundations of a lifelong meditation practice. It is structured as a practical guide rather than a philosophical treatise, covering seated meditation technique, working with thoughts and emotions, and developing a sustainable relationship with one’s own mind.

The tone is accessible and direct, aimed at both complete beginners and those who have struggled to establish a consistent practice. The book draws on Chödrön’s decades of teaching experience within the Shambhala Buddhist tradition.

Book Review

I had read perhaps a dozen meditation books before this one. Maybe more — I stopped counting. Each of them explained the theory clearly enough. Sit. Breathe. Notice your thoughts. Let them pass. Return to the breath. The instructions were always the same, and I always understood them. Understanding was never the problem.

The problem was sitting down and actually doing it.

I can’t say exactly what was different about Pema Chödrön’s How to Meditate. That’s a slightly unsatisfying thing to admit in a review, but it’s the honest answer. Something in the way she writes about the mind — not as something to be managed or defeated, but as something to be befriended — shifted something in me. The subtitle is A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind, and that phrase, which could easily sound like a self-help cliché, turns out to be precisely what the book delivers.

What Chödrön does, and does well, is refuse to make meditation aspirational. There is no promise of transformation, no gradient of enlightenment to climb. Instead, she is remarkably frank about what meditation actually feels like, especially at the beginning. You sit down. Your mind immediately produces a shopping list, a grievance from three years ago, and a low-grade anxiety about something you said at a dinner party. You are supposed to be observing all of this with equanimity. You are, in fact, annoyed.

She calls this “the monkey mind,” and rather than suggesting you suppress it or wait for it to pass, she essentially says: this is the practice. The thoughts are not a sign that you’re doing it wrong. They are the material you’re working with. That reframe — so simple, so obvious once stated — is what finally made sitting still feel possible rather than an elaborate form of failure. (I wrote about my struggles with the monkey mind in this blog post.)

The book is structured as a progression: it begins with the basics of posture and breath, moves into working with thoughts and emotions, and gradually introduces more nuanced concepts such as compassion and openness. Chödrön’s background as a Tibetan Buddhist nun is present throughout, but she wears her tradition lightly. The terminology remains accessible, and the spiritual dimension never overwhelms the practical. This is a book you can use.

I do think the later chapters are somewhat less grounded than the first half. As the book moves from technique into broader ideas about the quality of awareness, it occasionally becomes more abstract in ways that felt harder to bring directly into practice. The early sections have an almost instructional clarity — sit here, do this, expect that — that gives way to something slightly more elusive. That’s not entirely a criticism; some of those concepts may simply require more time to settle. But the shift is noticeable.

What stayed with me most, though, was the gentleness of the approach. Not gentleness in the sense of being soft or avoiding difficulty — Chödrön is clear-eyed about how uncomfortable it can be to sit with one’s own mind — but in the sense of not making the whole enterprise feel like something you could fail at. And that, for me at least, was what all those previous books had inadvertently done. They had turned meditation into a test. This one turned it into a practice. The difference, it turns out, is enormous.

I mentioned this book briefly in a post about the Medito app — which I’d been using as a companion to my morning practice — but it deserved more than a paragraph. If you’ve tried meditation before and found yourself drifting away after a week, or if you’ve read the instructions a hundred times and still feel like you’re missing something, this is the book I’d hand you.

Pema Chödrön (b. 1936) is an American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun and one of the most widely read Western teachers of Tibetan Buddhism. She is the author of numerous books, including When Things Fall Apart and The Places That Scare You, and served as a senior teacher at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, Canada.

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My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk

5th March 2026
Books
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Cover of the book My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk

Overview

My Name Is Red (1998, English translation 2001) by Orhan Pamuk is a postmodern murder mystery set in 16th-century Istanbul. A miniaturist working on a secret manuscript commissioned by the Sultan is found dead, and the investigation into his murder pulls the reader deep into the world of Ottoman illuminated art — and into a collision between two ways of seeing: the symbolic, God-centred traditions of Islamic painting, and the individual perspective of European realism arriving from Venice. The story is told through a chorus of voices: artists, apprentices, a woman navigating love and survival, and — in a move that is playfully unsettling — inanimate objects, including a tree, a coin, and the colour red itself.

Book Review

I picked up My Name Is Red because of the painting. I’m not sure what I expected, but I wasn’t prepared for how deeply it would speak to me as a photographer.

The novel is built around a question that sounds deceptively simple: what does it mean to see? The Ottoman miniaturists who populate Pamuk’s Istanbul do not paint what their eyes see; they paint what God sees — the world as it truly is, not as it appears from a single vantage point. A horse is not painted as one particular horse standing in one particular light. It is painted as the idea of a horse, the truest possible horse. To paint from life, from your own eyes, from your own position in the world — as the Venetian masters do — is, in this tradition, a kind of arrogance. To say: I see this, is to say: my sight matters.

I kept stopping to think about that. Every time I raise my camera, I am doing exactly what the Sultan’s miniaturists were forbidden to do. I am choosing a position, a moment, a light. I am insisting that this particular kangaroo, in this particular golden-hour glow, seen from this particular angle, is worth preserving. It is an intensely individual act. My Name Is Redmade me aware of that in a way I had never quite articulated before.

The murder at the heart of the story gives the novel its propulsive energy, but it is really a frame for something more layered: an exploration of what happens when an artistic tradition begins to fracture. The miniaturists in the Sultan’s workshop are anxious, competitive, devoted, and frightened. One of them has killed to protect a style of seeing. Whether that style is worth protecting — whether any tradition is — is the question Pamuk leaves beautifully open.

The voice I loved most was red itself. The chapter in which the colour narrates its own existence — its capacity to hold passion and violence and beauty simultaneously — is one of the most extraordinary things I’ve read in a long time. Light does something similar in photography: a single shift in colour temperature changes everything, not just aesthetically but emotionally. Red at dawn and red at dusk are not the same red. Pamuk knows this, and he gives it language.

The love story between Black and Shekure is handled with the same layered intelligence. It is tender and complicated and refuses easy resolution. Shekure is one of the most fully realised characters I’ve encountered in historical fiction — pragmatic, guarded, genuinely uncertain, and never reducible to her circumstances.

Pamuk’s Istanbul is vivid without being picturesque. The cold, the smell of the streets, the candlelit workshops, the weight of snow on the Golden Horn — these details accumulate until the city feels entirely real, and the collision happening within it — between two visions of the world — feels entirely urgent.

Erdağ Göknar‘s translation deserves its own quiet round of applause. The prose breathes.

If you have any interest in art, in the act of making images, in what it means to be caught between tradition and change — read this book. It will stay with you. It stayed with me for weeks, surfacing unexpectedly every time I looked through my viewfinder and chose a frame.

Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952) is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic, and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Erdağ Göknar is a Turkish-American scholar, literary translator, and poet. He is an Associate Professor of Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University

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