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Rushing Waters

20/1/2017

 
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Danielle Steel: Bamtam Press $32.99
 
NEW York has barely recovered from the second-costliest hurricane ever to strike the US. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc across Staten Island, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.
Now, just a couple of weeks short of five years later, it’s mid September 2017 and an equally intimidating storm front is moving in. This new threat, Ophelia, can’t possibly mirror Sandy’s destructiveness – or can it? Opinion is divided.
In London, businessman Charles and interior designer Ellen board the same transatlantic flight, each heading for a few days in the Big Apple to mix business with the pleasure of family reunions.
Charles’s two daughters have been in the city for the past 12 months with their mother, Gina, a model who left the marriage without warning to live with her American fashion-photographer lover, taking the girls with her.
For Ellen it will be a welcome homecoming. A native New Yorker, she has spent the past decade in London with her British husband, George.
In New York, Ellen’s mother, architect Grace, is determined to remain at home in Tribeca, a district of lower Manhattan fronting the Hudson River. Unlike her nearest neighbour, best-selling author Bob, Grace is convinced there will be no repeat of the flooding that ensued when Sandy struck.
University classmates Ben and Peter have also vowed to stay put rather than follow the authorities’ evacuation order – at least in part because they see riding out a hurricane as an adventure challenge.
Fellow student Anna, on the other hand, has already fled to her parents’ home in an uptown neighbourhood well clear of danger.
As Ophelia approaches, emergency room doctor Juliette fears the worst. Having worked non-stop through Sandy, she knows well how severe the fallout from a natural disaster of this magnitude can be.
Who will survive, with whose help, and with what consequences?

Why Did You Lie?

13/1/2017

 
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​Yrsa Sigurdardóttir: Hachette Australia $32.99
 
IT IS deep winter in Iceland: a bleak, gloomy season when the region’s few hours of daylight are marred by unpredictable blizzards, roaring Arctic gales and impenetrable, all-enveloping fog.
Over the course of roughly a week in late January, in the south-west of the country a series of unexplained, grisly events unfolds.
Nói and Vala arrive home with son Tumi from a holiday in Florida to find the Americans with whom they’ve swapped houses have moved on from Reykjavík seemingly in a hurry and without leaving the family’s spare set of door keys behind.
Nína, a policewoman ostracised for daring to complain about a fellow officer, is punished by her superiors by being assigned a dreary, dirty administrative job in the station’s basement. At the same time, she is grieving the inevitable loss of her husband, investigative journalist Thröstur, who is lying brain-dead in hospital. Only a couple of weeks earlier Nína discovered Thröstur hanging from a beam in the couple’s garage.
Introverted photographer Helgi has been invited to accompany a work party winched in by helicopter to a lighthouse on the largest of the famous ‘Three Stacks’, a set of exposed sheer rock pillars jutting out of the Atlantic Ocean. His temporary companions, Heida, Ívar and Tóti, are abrupt and unwelcoming.
When deteriorating weather leaves them marooned on a surface area barely big enough to support a single-room structure, the four strangers become suspicious, distrusting, even paranoid. As they remain forced together with literally nowhere to go, dangerous tensions arise.
In the midst of it all are bodies: bodies floating, bodies dangling, bodies unaccounted for.
Adding to the confusion are cryptic messages, printed or scrawled, alleging some form of dishonesty.
Do these three apparently unrelated storylines somehow intersect? What could possibly link them – other than the shame of a long-shared lie?

The Princess Diarist

6/1/2017

 
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​Carrie Fisher: Bantam Press $34.99
 
MORE often than not the story of an affair lasting only a handful of months between two no-name actors 40 years earlier would remain unremarkable and untold; it would certainly not be material on which to base a potentially best-selling book.
Yet by the time Carrie Fisher rediscovered three diaries kept during the filming of Star Wars in 1976, she and co-star Harrison Ford had become known the world over for their portrayal of two of film’s most iconic characters: Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan, a displaced royal rebel fleeing the destruction of her beloved home planet, and Han Solo, a roguish smuggler-pilot turned would-be hero who finds distressed damsel Leia more than capable of saving herself.
Fisher’s notebooks resurfaced early last year, not long after her fourth on-screen incarnation as Princess Leia had premiered. The day had come, she decided, to reveal her short-lived infatuation on a film set far, far away with a then-34-year-old married co-star.
When the cameras started rolling on little-known director-screenwriter George Lucas’s low-budget project near London in 1976, Fisher was aged 19. She was already familiar with showbusiness, however, having grown up as the daughter of one of ‘old Hollywood’s’ most glamorous but ill-fated pairings: entertainers ‘cheating cad’ Eddie Fisher and ‘America’s sweetheart’ Debbie Reynolds.
Her revisiting of her big career break and what followed is wide-reaching, comprising entertaining yet sensitive musings on fame, hairbuns, metallic bikinis, unemployment, aging, relationships and, of course, Ford (a quiet, emotionally distant, stoney-faced man who smiled seldom, Fisher wrote, but always treated her well).
The Force deserted Fisher early last week, leaving this simultaneously hilarious, introspective and thoughtful memoir and one more yet-to-be-released Star Wars sequel as the final chapters of her substantial public legacy. Fisher herself narrated the audio version of Diarist in her distinctively raspy, expressive, at-times cackling voice.

    ' Books are treasure for the spirit and ​the soul. '​
    — VB 2020

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