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Manhattan Beach

26/1/2018

 
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Jennifer Egan: Hachette $19.99
 
ANNA Kerrigan is intimately acquainted with the unconventional side of life.
Not only has Anna grown up in an all-female household in a rough-and-tumble area of Brooklyn with no man as its protector but her mother is a former Broadway chorus-line dancer, her younger sister is chronically disabled, her aunt is an aging alcoholic seductress whose looks are sagging and her now-absent father forged his way in the Great Depression by “running errands’ for one of New York City’s most notorious crime lords.
It’s hardly surprising that when Anna enters a workforce depleted by the demands of war she is not content to accept one of the menial conveyor-belt roles traditionally allotted to women.
Instead, Anna quickly sets her sights on becoming a Brooklyn Navy Yard maintenance diver – a position so elusive that far more men fail the rigorous training process than complete the life-threateningly dangerous and emotionally draining course.
Surviving in Brooklyn is a challenge for any young woman, let alone one employed on the waterfront. With her instructor manoeuvring openly against her and her classmates offering virtually no co-operation, let alone support, she appears to have little chance of succeeding.
Anna is single-minded in her determination to join the program, however, and equally set on investigating a wispy recollection from childhood that appears to link her late father, Eddie, with a handsome and charismatic New York club licensee and gang leader, Dexter Styles.
Her disregard for the social mores that reign in the 1940s pits Anna against not only conservative individuals within her own community but the broader New York hierarchy at large – a hierarchy that invariably favours men with influence or wealth over even the most resourceful and committed teenage girl.
Part family saga, part underworld thriller, Manhattan Beach delivers a masterfully imagined storyline fleshed out with intricate, factual historic detail.

The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

12/1/2018

 
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Lars Mytting: Hachette $32.99
 
IF THERE'S one dominant theme running through Edvard Hirifjell’s life it’s undoubtedly ‘blanks’: the gaping memory blanks that have always pockmarked his early-childhood recollections and now, unexpectedly, the solid timber blanks from which the highest-quality shotgun stocks are carved.
For 20-something years Edvard has known only a quiet, semi-reclusive existence on a potato farm in an agricultural hamlet near Lillehammer in southern Norway. When not tending the crop with his bestefar (grandfather) Sverre he fills his meagre free time with photography and fishing. He has few friends but is not particularly lonely.
Theirs is a typical rural lifestyle in all but one respect: Edvard is an orphan, having lost his parents in an unsolved incident almost 2000km removed from their property at Saksum when he was just a toddler.
When his home circumstances change suddenly Edvard begins a journey of yearning that stretches first to the wind-lashed Shetland Islands and then to the battlefields of northern France.
In treeless Shetland he unearths a clue that tantalises with its potential to explain the mystery of his father and mother’s deaths and at the same time raises the possibility of a family inheritance intertwined with a fabled stand of 16 centuries-old walnut trees warped by World War I combat into a near-priceless resource.
The young man who leaves behind the paddocks and sheds of Saksum to search for crucial pointers in Shetland soon finds himself heading south due, with the remnant woods of Authuille in the Somme as his ultimate destination.
Weaving together the carefully researched details of actual events and locations with an engaging imagined plot, this novel is rich with the history of two world wars and the intimacies of Nordic culture both in Norway itself and across the scattered former Viking settlements of modern-day Scotland’s most remote island group.

Where the Murray River Runs

5/1/2018

 
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Darry Fraser: Harlequin $22.49
 
BENDIGO in the mid-1890s is an inhospitable place for any unwed mother, let alone one whose predicament is the result of a single afternoon’s alcohol-fuelled indiscretion with someone else’s sweetheart. Complicating the situation further, the father – unaware of the pregnancy – has been driven off his parents’ struggling orchard by the need to earn an income and is now living many days’ travel away in the South Australian Riverland.
A frontier goldmining town it may be, but Bendigo is nevertheless a community with clear moral standards – standards that in Mary Bonner’s case motivate the desperate teenager to follow the only course of action likely to bring redemption and marry an older stranger who agrees to assume responsibility for the coming child.
When the marriage quickly turns sour, fearing that her new husband will kill her Mary bequeaths the as-yet-unborn baby to a former schoolmate, Linley Seymour, whose aunt CeeCee runs a clandestine refuge for abused and abandoned women.
Mary’s foresight proves to be well founded and within hours of his birth the tiny boy is lifted from his dead mother’s bruised and bloodied arms and delivered to Linley.
What Toby’s ill-tempered stepfather does not know initially is that the baby was not Mary’s only possession; with him goes a substantial family inheritance willed by the terrified young wife in trust to her son.
Once realisation strikes, Gareth Wilkin’s fury snowballs.
Rather than feel relieved to be shed of “the brat”, Wilkin allows his frenzied rage to set in motion a course of vengeance that will force Linley and CeeCee out of their home and endanger a series of lives, including that of Toby’s biological father.
With colonial Bendigo, Renmark and the thriving paddlesteamer port of Echuca as its backdrop, this novel explores domestic violence as it existed more than century ago.

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