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Best Books 2023

The Best Books of the Year: 2023

With Christmas less than a week away, at the AU we’ve got to the task of agonising and arguing over our end of year lists – best albums, best films, best games, and of course best books. The Books team have taken a look over the year’s releases and compiled a list of some of…

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Best Books 2022

The Best Books of the Year: 2022

2022 has been a great year for settling in with a good book and escaping the world outside. We’ve reached that part of the year where we all start agonising over our ‘lists’  –best albums, best films, and of course best books.  We in the Books team have looked back over the year’s releases and…

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Book Review: Forty Years on, Joy Williams’ The Changeling is finding a new audience

Changelings, or babies swapped with supernatural beings in their infancy, permeate the mythology of a number of cultures throughout Europe. Often, it was believed that fairies had taken the child and left one of their own behind- a sign of bad luck for the family. The idea of a changeling may have been used to…

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Book Review: David Crystal’s Sounds Appealing is a learned look at English pronunciation

When you stop and think about pronunciation it’s very easy to break into a verse of “You sing potato and I sing potahto.” The academic, linguist, author and broadcaster, David Crystal certainly appreciates this. He has after all released the informative and scholarly guide: Sounds Appealing: The Passionate Story of English Pronunciation. Over the years Crystal…

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Book Review: Mary Beard explores the ancient roots of modern misogyny in Women & Power: A Manifesto

Drawing on lectures delivered in 2014 and 2017, Women & Power: A Manifesto is a small, yet powerful exploration of the historical silencing of women in the public sphere. The Ancient Roman and Greek cultures we so often hold up as the basis for our democracies today were never particularly kind to the loud woman…

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