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To Know My Crime

28/4/2017

 
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Fiona Capp: 4th Estate $29.99
 
NED has done the unthinkable: squandered his severely disabled sister’s entire insurance payout. It was an investment that should have supported Angela for the rest of her life, challenging though that existence is, but now the funds are gone – swallowed up by a childhood friend whose financial wheeling and dealing with other people’s money was cut dramatically short when the GFC struck.
Desperate to avoid having to confess his stupidity, Ned stumbles onto an alternative: extortion. After witnessing an off-the-books meeting between a well-known state politician and an even more prominent property developer in a clifftop mansion on ‘Millionaires’ Walk’, Portsea, he realises he’s become privy to something neither man can afford to have publicised.
With the help of his girlfriend, Angela’s carer Mai, Ned drafts an anonymous note demanding payment for his silence.
The plan looks like unravelling, however, when the two men come face to face in a bizarre coincidence. Will the savvy political survivor recognise Ned’s unease and suspect him of being part of the blackmail plot?
Meanwhile, unaware of her brother’s predicament, psychologist Angela is struggling with a dilemma of her own: how to manage the sudden and unwelcome reappearance of the alcoholic ex-husband who might well have been behind the fall down a flight of stairs that caused her quadriplegia. Her recollection of the night she fell is hazy. Could the man she chose to marry – the hometown football star, adored by everyone around them – really have done something like that?
As the group members’ paths become ever-more intertwined, the black and white of moral decision-making merges into waves of grey, revealing strengths and flaws in every one of the six key characters.
Set in affluent beachside Portsea – the Mornington Peninsula’s equivalent of Positano or Saint-Tropez – this novel weaves together the concepts of tragedy, hope, accountability and consequence.

All Fall Down

21/4/2017

 
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Cassandra Austin: Penguin $29.99
 
AS IF a typical tiny country town doesn’t have enough social divisions separating its people, now Mulukuk’s only bridge has collapsed, severing the sole physical link that once connected the dusty opal-mining community’s geographically separated northern and southern halves.
Affected worst of all by the bridge’s disintegration is Janice, a young mother whose car plummeted into the chasm that runs through the centre of Mululuk when the bitumen beneath her gave way late one night. Now, battered, bruised and barely alive after spending weeks in a coma, Janice has been released from hospital and is back in the house she shares with husband Craig and baby Flora.
The mystery of why the structure fell apart preoccupies the locals. Conspiracy theories are rife.
Plans to break an official ban on using the original bridge’s hastily built replacement are fomented and a protest march is arranged as residents demand the new stretch of roadway be opened.
It’s into the midst of this chaos that teenager Rachel arrives, despatched from faraway Melbourne to the outback by her family to spend time in the care of her uncle Frank, more commonly known to Mulukuk as its priest, Father Nott.
Mulukuk’s characters are as unpredictable as the dugout-riddled countryside in which they live: huffing puffing, bustling organiser Gussy; alcohol-soaked vagabond Charlie, back unexpectedly to visit from Alice Springs; insurance investigator Richard – an unwelcome intruder swirling like an abandoned takeaway coffee cup through the lonely red-crusted streets and unsettling those around him with his intrusive questioning. But in Rachel’s eyes, there’s only one who matters: Shane, a tough, irresistibly handsome 20-something miner who introduces himself as Janice’s estranged brother.
As Mululuk struggles to piece itself back together, how many secrets will be exposed, grubbed – much like opals – out of the grimy, clinging, rust-coloured grit by a mix of perseverance and luck?

Road No Good

13/4/2017

 
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Bridget Isichei: Finch $29.99
 
WHEN a well-travelled, energetic young middle-class New Zealander arrives in Luganville, Vanuatu, she sees immediately that it’s more than merely her street – the literally named Road No Good – that’s in need of improvement.
Deployed to the country’s second-biggest population centre to help support preschool teachers on Espiritu Santo island, ‘Missus Bridget’ discovers a hierarchy in which the kindhearted, patient women who take on delivering early education to Vanuatu’s next generation are considered lower in importance than even domestic pigs.
From her base in a town where having a telephone line to her breeze-block apartment reactivated takes several months and the only internet access is through a single café, Bridget Isichei begins visiting far-flung community preschools via a time-consuming and frustrating combination of road, river and walking-path jungle travel.
Her task is to develop a reliable system by which the standard of preschool teaching on Santo can be strengthened and the status of the occupation raised in the eyes of the public.
She uncovers a millennia-old culture centred around communal village living, shaped by an absolute belief in black magic overlaid heavily with relatively recent Christian church-going.
The preschool teachers – all women, many of whom speak only the local dialect of pidgin English, Bislama, and are technically illiterate – are passionately proud of their work but readily accept that theirs is not a respected career. Because they do not hold any form of qualification, they are looked down on socially, poorly resourced and chronically underpaid.
As genuine friendships form, Isichei is enveloped in Melanesian family life and becomes fluent in Bislama, enabling her to communicate freely with her new colleagues.
She tells with sensitivity, humour, respect, discretion and love the story of the teachers’ achievements, disappointments and unquestioning acceptance of circumstances unimagined in developed countries and of her own learnings and realisations along the way.

The Ice Lands

7/4/2017

 
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Steinar Bragi: Macmillan $29.99
 
IT HAS all the makings of a leisurely couple of weeks of sightseeing by day and sipping wine around a campfire at dusk – either that or a tension-filled nightmare in which four 30-somethings snap and snarl at each other as the ceaseless forced proximity sets tempers alight.
When two couples – Hrafn and Vigdís, and Egill and Anna – set out from Reykjavík for a driving adventure through the Icelandic highlands, each is looking forward to spending time with his or her partner and friends but is also already nursing their own highly personal and unsettling concerns.
The GFC has left their country crippled, due in no small part to the short-sighted, self-serving actions of lawyers like Egill and futures-trading businessmen like Hrafn – two greedily ambitious young men with a love of living an adrenaline- and drug-fuelled life on the edge.
Although outwardly more settled, their girlfriends – psychologist Vigdís and journalist Anna – are also deeply troubled, not least of all by doubts about their current relationships.
Week one of the journey has passed relatively smoothly, but as the foursome presses on late one night, hungry, exhausted and desperately seeking shelter from a ferocious volcanic sandstorm, their luck expires. Suddenly, with visibility close to zero, their vehicle strikes something immense.
Stranded in an unmapped, supposedly uninhabited wasteland, the group begins to experience a series of increasingly bizarre scenarios.
How can a farming couple in the middle of nowhere eke out an existence without livestock? Why are two supposedly wild Arctic foxes lurking alarmingly close to a homestead?
As resentment and distrust escalate, can the four city-dwellers find a way of escaping what has become a truly terrifying rural ordeal?
Author Steinar Bragi seamlessly blends reality and paranoia, actuality and imagination to create a novel that has been described to perfection as Iceland’s Twin Peaks.

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