Wabonga Press
  • WELCOME
  • OUR SERVICES
  • OUR PROJECTS
  • OUR CONTENT
  • CONTACT US

Elephant Dawn

29/7/2016

 
Picture
​Sharon Pincott: Allen & Unwin $32.99
 
IF THERE'S one animal that symbolises Africa more than any other, it’s the elephant, yet within our lifetime, researchers predict, the last wild herds of this species will most likely disappear.
One of the most vulnerable elephant populations is in Zimbabwe, a country whose chronic social, political and economic conflict relegates wildlife conservation to the bottom of the priority pile for desperate subsistence game poachers and greed-crazed government officials alike.
Undaunted, in 2001 elephant-lover Sharon Pincott gave up an executive IT career in Australia and moved from inner-city Brisbane to the sparsely populated wilds of Zimbabwe’s western bushland. There, she set out to observe and then name and catalogue the hundreds of individuals that make up the Presidential Elephants, a group of 17 extended families ranging over a mix of private and public land adjoining Hwange National Park.
Elephant Dawn documents Pincott’s experiences, from her frustrating struggle to obtain a Zimbabwean entry visa to her brushes with the scorpions, black mambas and baboons that from time to time made themselves comfortable in her native-style hut. Most of all, it describes the author’s attachment to the elephants –young or old, newborn or battle-scarred – that, despite the supposed protection extended to them by President Robert Mugabe, 15 years after Pincott first began to identify them continue to face bullets, snares and poison as their numbers dwindle.
Her story is both a personal record of one woman’s endeavours and a first-hand analysis of the factors that together triggered the most self-destructive period in Zimbabwe’s history.
Elephant Dawn summons laughter and tears, smiles and grimaces, anger and pride at the determination with which Pincott carries out her mission, funded through her own efforts and in the face of considerable – at times life-theatening – opposition from parochial Zimbabweans determined to see white residents expelled from the country.

The Dry

22/7/2016

 
Picture
Jane Harper: Macmillan Australia $32.99
 
FIRST came a dead rabbit, then a dead teenaged girl. Now, more than 20 years later, three more bodies have surfaced in Luke Hadler’s immediate orbit: wife Karen, son Billy and Hadler himself, each one killed outright by a shotgun blast.
Initially it appears to be the all-too-common collapse of a farmer pushed beyond his emotional limits by circumstance – on this occasion, the drought that has crippled the Hadler family’s corner of north-western Victoria. Crops are failing, livestock are being slaughtered and financially the district is destitute. Acceptance that the strain has overwhelmed Hadler is virtually unquestioned and widespread.
For three men, however, this theory is brittle. At the urging of Hadler’s disbelieving father, a federal police investigator – once the dead man’s childhood sidekick – takes an interest in the case, teaming up with the local sergeant to re-examine the scene and interview district residents.
The clues that emerge in the days that follow the group funeral, seeping out of the parched landscape almost as reluctantly as rain from the sky, set Aaron Falk, Greg Raco and Gerry Hadler on the path towards painstakingly scraping back the scabs from a series of festering community wounds.
Did Luke Hadler truly shoot Karen and Billy, and then himself? Or is some other, as-yet-unidentified killer lurking in Kiewarra?
A smattering of wayward foreign expressions aside – field, barn, parked up, the idea that a 200-acre farm is “pretty big” – British-Melburnian Jane Harper’s writing captures the dynamics of rural living with tenderness, empathy and an impressive depth of both understanding and detail rarely found in contemporary writing.
Even before the book was launched, screen rights to The Dry had been bought by Hollywood actor/producer Reese Witherspoon and her Australian business partner Bruna Panadrea; the novel itself will be released in the US, the UK and more than 20 foreign-language territories.

The Toymaker

15/7/2016

 
Picture
Liam Pieper: Penguin $29.99
 
SHADES: shades of truth, shades of virtue, shades of evil – shades in all their incarnations run as a central theme through The Toymaker.
Juxtaposing the horrors of World War II’s Auschwitz death camp with matter-of-fact 21st-century consumerism in outer Melbourne, novelist Liam Pieper weaves together the experiences of contemporary toy manufacturer Adam and his grandfather, Holocaust survivor Arkady.
A Russian medical student interned in Czechoslovakia for being homosexual, Arkady is singled out soon after his arrival at Auschwitz to assist in SS physician Josef Mengele’s “scientific research” program. There, he both suffers and inflicts previously unimaginable cruelty, compromising his personal integrity and ethics in order to stay alive. At the same time, he reprises a craft learned back home in Russia: the craft of handcarving wooden toys.
More than 70 years later Adam continues the Kulakov family tradition – a tradition not only of toymaking but also of navigating somewhat clumsily around inconvenient personal and business principles. A spontaneous vow to be “the kind of quick-thinking alpha male who can seduce strange women when the opportunity arises, but doesn’t” is quickly abandoned; Adam pursues human and commercial conquests with equal zeal.
This novel might have the word “toy” in its title but that is definitely where any association with lightness and frivolity ends. Hauntingly dark and enthralling, Pieper’s storytelling spans the gamut of situations guaranteed to provoke extreme emotions, switching deftly between marital infidelity and third-world labour exploitation as subject matter, with workers in one scene sacrificed to a modern-day inferno that echoes the horror of the gruesome Auschwitz furnaces.
In The Toymaker – his first novel and third book – Pieper illustrates perfectly that no single person is ever entirely either good or bad – that within every human being lies a confusion of positive and negative behaviours, beliefs and traits.

For Love of Country

1/7/2016

 
Picture
Anthony Hill: Penguin $35.00
 
WHEN a story opens with an account of gassing on the battlefields of western France it’s a safe bet the ensuing chapters will also be gritty, honest and rooted in raw reality. So it is with For Love of Country, the latest military-inspired work of non-fiction by Anthony Hill.
Hill records the experiences of Walter Eddison, British by birth but a man who, caught in the right place at the wrong time, finds himself enlisting in the Australian Light Horse. When Eddison – on a fact-finding visit to northern NSW, where he hopes to invest – initially hesitates to sign up, a local comments that he doesn’t know how he’d feel about owning land in a country he wasn’t prepared to defend.
The conversation takes place in September 1914; by year’s end Eddison is sailing back towards Europe, this time with a Rising Sun badge pinning up the brim of his new slouch hat.
Sent to Gallipoli, he is eventually one of the final few ANZACs evacuated in the covert withdrawal of 92,000 men over 11 nights without the loss of a single life.
From Turkey he is redirected via Egypt to France.
After the war he moves with wife Marion and three children to Australia, taking up a soldier-settlement block on the outskirts of fledgling Canberra.
There he discovers that he must unlearn almost everything he thinks he knows about farming; practices that shone on 32 hectares in England are woefully inadequate when applied to 10 times that area of unimproved Southern Hemisphere “pasture”.
Despite this, the Eddisons survive, and by 1939 it’s the turn of Walter and Marion’s sons to enlist – and so continues the family’s struggle.
Coincidentally, Young Digger – Hill’s biography of an unidentified orphan who wanders into an Australian airmen’s mess in Germany on Christmas Day 1918 – has just been re-released as an updated paperback.

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

    ​​

    Book reviews

    WABONGA Press produces an original book review every Friday. Books are chosen from among the latest English-language fiction and non-fiction releases in Australia and internationally.
    Each 300-word review is accompanied by a high-resolution cover image.
    All are available for licensing to print media in selected regions.​For less than the cost of one takeaway cup of coffee each week, a publication can make use of this service to access a new review every seven days, backed by a written guarantee that the same content will not be licensed for use by any direct competitor.
    Please contact Wabonga's publisher, Rosalea Ryan, to discuss how this service can be tailored to your newspaper or magazine.​

    Picture

    Categories

    All
    Adventure
    Africa
    Antarctica
    Arctic
    Asia
    Atlantic
    Australia
    Author – Australian
    Biography
    British Isles
    Caribbean
    Christmas
    Crime
    Easter
    Entertainment
    Europe
    Fiction
    Finance
    Food
    History
    Humour
    Journalism
    Maritime
    Middle East
    Nature
    New Year
    Non-fiction
    North America
    Pacific
    Pandemic
    Relationships
    Romance
    Scandinavia
    South America
    Sport
    Sub-continent
    Suspense
    Travel
    War

    Archive

    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015

Picture