Co-founders and editors:  Jean Bedford and Linda Funnell

Jean Bedford is a prizewinning novelist and short-story writer. She was Literary Editor of the National Times and has been a freelance and in-house publisher’s editor as well as a teacher of Creative Writing. She has been a judge for many local, state and national literary awards and prizes. She currently does freelance editing and manuscript consultancy.

Linda Funnell has worked as a publisher, editor and literary agent.  For ten years she was a publisher with HarperCollins, and had previously worked with Random House and Pan Macmillan. She is currently a freelance book editor and publishing consultant and has convened courses on digital publishing for authors, as well as teaching courses in publishing and editing. In November 2012 she became Chair of the New South Wales Writers’ Centre.

Guest contributor: Peter Corris. Creator of PI Cliff Hardy and known as ‘the Godfather of Australian crime fiction’, Peter writes ‘The Godfather’ column. He is married to Newtown Review of Books editor Jean Bedford.

The Newtown Review of Books reviews fiction – with special emphasis on crime fiction – memoir, biography, politics and true crime.

We aim to post new reviews regularly and create a searchable archive of all reviews.

We hope that if you like a review you might want to read the book. Newtown has lots of bookshops but we’ve provided links for some of our books to the Better Read Than Dead bookshop on King Street.  We’ve gone with Better Read Than Dead because when they opened 18 years ago Linda won a prize in their raffle. And Jean spends far too much money in there every week. If you do buy something via our links to BRTD, you’ll get 10% off the RRP. You might also like to check out their Club Read program.

But you might prefer to borrow a copy rather than buy, so we’ve also provided links to the Newtown Library.

We also hope you will comment on reviews – whether you agree or disagree. And we’d love to get your comments on the site, too. You can contact us via the link in our Contacts page.

Please note that copyright in all reviews and articles is retained by the author of the individual review or article.

If you would like to quote from something published in the Newtown Review of Books please credit the author of the review and the Newtown Review of Books. Including a link to the original article would make us even happier.

Thanks to Ellen Kronen for invaluable assistance with the design of this site.  If you would like to see all the wonderful things Ellen can do, visit her website here.

Because we’d like to one day pay our contributors, we have signed up to run advertisements on the NRB site to try to earn some money. If you see an ad that you think is offensive or inappropriate, please let us know at nrbooks@ymail.com