Reviews:
This is a witty, perceptive, poignant tale set in a remote country town in Western Australia. The characters are both quirky and believable, as is the ironically named and themed Sea Dog Hotel, full of maritime artefacts and an unlikely refugee from the dangers of the distant coast. The harshness of the Australian bush is tempered by the fortitude and compassion of the town’s inhabitants, as a search for happiness twists between tragedy, comedy and redemption.
Richard Regan 2018 Five stars Goodreads
Sea Dog Hotel is a symbolic look into tiny town life in the marginal scrub of Western Australia. It poses the questions, what is happiness, and how is it found by the strange and cursed Ruth and her beautiful but sour seed, Grace, who wash up in the equally cursed Nyacoppin. The town is as far from the ocean as it is from the capital. Ruth, searching for happiness buys the local pub, The Sea Dog, over the internet. The denizens who at first glance appear bizarre are slowly revealed to be warm and unique strugglers with lives as blighted as the newcomers. 'Sea Dog Hotel' walks into territory farmed by Stow, White, Winton and Carroll and sets up shop unscathed.
Tom Flood 2013
The Bookshop on Jacaranda Street
Meet the Budd-Doyles: a suburban family in shambles, and about to unravel further as Helen Budd-Doyle in one fell swoop destroys her bed, abandons the family home, and buys a second-hand bookshop from a man in a pub—leaving her bewildered junk-collecting husband Arnold to sort out his life. But he can't. Enter Gabriel, one of their sons, wreaking havoc as he pushes his father to sell off the accrued junk of a lifetime. Add a little sibling rivalry with his brother Vivian fresh home and licking his wounds from a life in the far north...and watch the fireworks on Jacaranda Street.
The Bookshop on Jacaranda Street is a brilliant black comedy by a unique new Australian voice, its world people by an extensive cast of misfits—eccentrics, innocents , cranks and pariahs—and driven by an inexorable urge to make order out of chaos.
“If only life was like a book…in that everything made sense and you know all will be resolved in the end. If only life was like a book so that, if you decided you didn’t like it, you take it back and get another one.”