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​Ghosts of the Past

26/7/2019

 
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Tony Park: Macmillan Australia $32.99
 
EDWARD Presgrave’s name has never been familiar to his fellow Australians but that could change quickly once readers start talking about Tony Park’s 17th novel, Ghosts of the Past.
Known for his love of southern Africa’s diverse landscapes and cultures, in his latest release Park combines a penchant for constructing adventure-rich storylines with an interest in military heritage.
In Ghosts, newly unemployed Sydneysider Nick Eatwell decides on a whim to travel to South Africa in the footsteps of a previously unknown great-great-uncle, Sergeant Cyril Blake – a young man accused of having tortured and murdered a prisoner before being executed in German South West Africa almost a century before it was reborn as modern-day Namibia.
A volunteer who served with the mounted British unit Steinaecker’s Horse during the Anglo-Boer War, Blake has been identified by an investigative journalist in Cape Town as a key player in an intriguing and dramatic search for Afrikaner President Paul Kruger’s vanished fortune: millions of dollars worth of solid gold bars.
Within hours of arriving in Kruger National Park, however, Eatwell has his safari cabin burgled and realises that both his family-historian aunt and a former colleague who’s assisting with document translation could also be potential targets. Clearly someone has a vested interest in staying several paces ahead of Eatwell in his attempts to retrace Blake’s movements across the continent.
As he strives to unravel the details of his relative’s time both in the army and later as a horse-trader, Eatwell must weigh up who can be trusted and who might want him and his contacts dead.
The character Blake is based closely on the real-life Presgrave, an Australian soldier who fought with British Empire forces in South Africa and eventually became embroiled in the slaughter of Nama tribespeople under German rule across the border in South West Africa.

​Glass Woman

19/7/2019

 
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Caroline Lea: Michael Joseph $29.99
 
IN DEEPLY religious 1686 it doesn’t take much to raise the suspicions of fearful Icelanders.
Simply being literate is enough to see a woman branded a witch and sentenced to die in the official drowning pool at Thingvellir, where Iceland’s parliament meets in summer; being caught reading runestones, mentioning the island’s troll-like huldufólk or referencing the old Icelandic sagas is punishable with even more brutal treatment.
After her bishop father dies, 25-year-old Rósa agrees in desperation to become the second wife of a stranger, Jón Eiríksson, the chieftain of a community many days’ ride to the northwest of her childhood home. After all, Jón will support her mother, Sigridúr, sparing the ailing widow an ordeal of starvation and freezing – the inevitable outcome for anyone without a provider to support them.
Jón’s original bride is dead, Rósa knows, overcome by a sudden fever, leaving him childless.
It will be Rósa’s duty to cook, clean, mend, spin, salt and dry, to help with farmwork and fishing, and to produce sons to carry on her husband’s legacy. Jón, for his part, will ensure Sigridúr receives a reliable supply of peat blocks and meat.
Although reluctant to leave her lifelong friend Páll, with no viable alternative Rósa arrives in the seaside settlement of Stykkishólmur willing to do her best not to displease her benefactor.
She quickly finds life is not as straightforward as she had hoped it would be, however.
Jón is absent from from before dawn until well after dusk day after day, leaving Rósa alone with orders not to speak to his subjects, and clearly prefers to spend time with his assistant, Pétur, rather than Rósa.
When mysterious noises and a feeling of being watched are added to the mix, Rósa’s nerves are soon every bit as fragile as the tiny glass figurine she keeps buried her pocket.

​The Bells of Old Tokyo

12/7/2019

 
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Anna Sherman: Picador $32.90
 
IN THE heyday of Edo, in the millennium preceding the ancient Japanese metropolis’s rebirth as modern-day Tokyo, an isolated, self-reliant society without clocks required an inventive means by which to mark the passing of time. Across the city a network of beautifully crafted bells filled that role, rung by hand to chime the most significant hours of every day.
Now long-since retired, those bells have in some cases disappeared entirely and in others largely been forgotten.
On a personal mission to locate the remaining examples, expatriate writer Sherman negotiates the sidestreets and alleyways of Tokyo’s suburbs. Her wanderings deviate far beyond the standard tourist route, delving into both physical and cultural aspects of Japanese life to reveal a side of Tokyo few visitors have either the privilege or a reason to encounter.
Sherman’s travels lead to a tiny coffee house where beans are roasted to order and the beverage is served in bowls, to the site of a former prison and execution ground, to an avenue of euphemistically named ‘love hotels’ where virtually any fantasy can be explored, and to museums and archives carefully maintained by passionate private collectors. Her journey passes through shrines and temples, bars and parks.
It also crosses periods of history, examining the Japanese calendar, the animal zodiac and a succession of shogunates.
In a region subjected over centuries to earthquakes, tidal waves, fire-storms and floods, Tokyo has been all but obliterated repeatedly – perhaps never more so than during World War II, when entire neighbourhoods of timber houses were razed in infernos ignited by aerial bombing.
Somehow, miraculously, several of the original bronze artefacts have survived.
Alongside these bells, the individuals who care for them are revealed to be national treasures themselves – the keepers of a tradition predating the arrival in the 1600s of European missionaries with their ingenious mechanical timepieces.

Crossings

5/7/2019

 
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Alex Landragin: Picador Australia $32.99 
 
HOW many Earthly lifetimes can a single human soul endure?
In its initial chapter readers meet one of the two hosts of Crossings as an aged version of the debauched and desperate 19th-century Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire.
Encased in a body riddled with syphilis, penniless and itinerant, the essence of Baudelaire has every reason to embrace the notion of transmigrating from this broken carapace to re-emerge with a new physical identity, ready to embark on a reinvigorated existence but with its amassed memories intact. Baudelaire’s is not the only figure to be inhabited over the course of roughly 150 years by this relater of tall tales, however; in fact, it is not even the first.
The unfolding of the novel also reveals a second shape-shifting storyteller, originating as Polynesian islander Alula at the time of isolated Oaeetee’s discovery by seafaring French explorers.
In the course of making its way from the mid Pacific Ocean to the literary heartland of Europe, this latter raconteur travels via idyllic Mauritius, the squalid port city of Marseille in France and a sugarcane plantation in the American Deep South. Changing gender en route, it pursues its former lover, Koahu, around the globe, campaigning desperately for an long-awaited emotional reunion.
Presented in three distinct yet complementary parts, Melbourne author Landragin’s manuscript weaves together disparate periods in history (including the two world wars), locations as diverse as steamy New Orleans, sophisticated Brussels and the French-Spanish border region of the Pyrenees, and a pair of narrators.
Perhaps most remarkably, it can be read in a choice of two ways: conventionally, from the first page of the book as it stands published through to the last, or through the eyes of a secondary character, Baroness Beattie Ellingham, following a sequence outlined in the introduction that delivers a unique storyline.

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

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    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.​

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