menu_open Columnists
Jen Webb

Jen Webb

The Conversation

We use cookies to provide some features and experiences in QOSHE

More information  .  Close

Sororicidal: this witty sisterhood novel knows children can be awful

Sororicidal: this witty sisterhood novel knows children can be awful

Beautiful and witty, Edwina Preston’s novel Sorocidal reveals an unnervingly precise understanding of the dark side of childhood.

01.05.2026 8

The Conversation

Jen Webb

Sororcidal: this witty sisterhood novel knows children can be awful

Sororcidal: this witty sisterhood novel knows children can be awful

Beautiful and witty, family novel Sorocidal reveals an unnervingly precise understanding of the dark side of childhood.

01.05.2026 10

The Conversation

Jen Webb

Words can’t save a life – but they can capture it. Debra Adelaide farewells friend Gabrielle Carey

Debra Adelaide’s new book, When I Am Sixty-Four, is a complex, devastating and often funny love letter to her friend, the late Gabrielle Carey.

26.03.2026 10

The Conversation

Jen Webb

‘Oh, the fog lying like a blanket over this sad town’: The Mushroom Tapes sees the humanity in an inhumane story

15.11.2025 10

Pearls and Irritations

Jen Webb

‘Oh, the fog lying like a blanket over this sad town’: The Mushroom Tapes sees the humanity in an inhumane story

Literary journalists Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein take us inside their conversations on the mushroom trial, writing and notorious...

10.11.2025 10

The Conversation

Jen Webb

Mythical, slippery, shapeshifting: Grief is the Thing With Feathers transforms tragedy into literature

Max Porter’s stories of people on the margins are told in fragments, flickering images, surprising swirls of language and wit.

25.07.2025 20

The Conversation

Jen Webb

‘Radical acceptance’: Yiyun Li lost both her sons to suicide. Her rigorous memoir reveals her as a very special writer

‘If an abyss is where I shall be for the rest of my life’, writes Yiyun Li, ‘the abyss is my habitat.’ Her book is a major contribution to...

19.06.2025 20

The Conversation

Jen Webb

In We Do Not Part, Han Kang faces unbearable historical traumas with sorrow and compassion

Han Kang’s characters have looked squarely at histories of state-sanctioned murder and carry the wounds of those histories.

25.02.2025 30

The Conversation

Jen Webb