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Falling

25/11/2016

 
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​Jane Green: Macmillan $29.99
 
EMMA Montague isn’t looking for a boyfriend, and she certainly isn’t looking for a ready-made school-aged son.
Yet in the process of renting an unfashionably dated beachfront cottage in sleepy Westport, Connecticut, she finds herself tempted by the possibility of reaching out towards both.
After years of living the high-life in lower Manhattan, where she shone in the cut-throat world of professional finance, English expat Emma is seeking a few months of downtime as she unwinds and reboots courtesy of a generous severance package. Her days of wheeling and dealing behind her (for now, at any rate) she wonders if she might make a future for herself as an interior designer – something she’s always dreamt of trying.
Emma’s handsome landlord and next-door neighbour Dominic is an unexpected bonus of her decision to trade the New York lifestyle for the slower pace of a small town where everyone is connected.
Cheerful, outgoing Dominic could well be just the right match for quiet, shy Emma, and his six-year-old son, Jesse, seems to agree – initially, at least. However, accepting a new woman as part of Dominic’s world is not easy for Jesse, who has never had to share his affection or welcome anyone else into their household.
The situation becomes even more complicated when Jesse’s mother – the woman who vanished six years earlier without a single word of farewell – reappears suddenly in Westport. Has she come back to reclaim not only her child but his father as well?
Emma is distraught, torn between wanting to stand her ground and defend their relationship and needing to protect herself from what she assumes will be inevitable heartbreak.
What starts out as a traditional love story is made memorable by its generous side helping of unpredictability, warmth and insight and an emotionally charged climax that’s completely unexpected.

Blackout

18/11/2016

 
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Ragnar Jónasson: Orenda Books £8.99
 
ICELAND is reeling. Still struggling in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, the country has been struck by a second, equally unexpected blow: the 2010 volcanic eruption and subsequent rumblings of Eyjafjallajökull. An ash cloud is enveloping Reykjavík, polluting the city’s air.
And now a third headline-worthy event has occurred: the gruesome discovery of a body on a building site in the Skagafjörður region fronting the Norwegian Sea. A construction contractor has been beaten to death.
Responsibility for investigating falls to the local police team headed up by two men linked by the shared sadness of relationship breakdowns – Tómas and his protégé, one-time theology student Ari Thór – and their colleague Hlynur, an officer with a haunting secret of his own. Ari Thór’s former girlfriend, Kristín, is now a doctor in Akureyri; Tómas’s wife has moved even further afield, to Reykjavík, and shows no desire to return to the village isolation of remote Siglufjörður.
The capital is home, too, to Ísrún, a psychologist turned TV reporter who immediately bluffs the newsroom chief into allowing her to cover the sensational murder case.
Ari Thór’s questioning leads to an interview with Nóra, a divorcee who travelled the world for much of her adult life before being grounded by the loss of her savings in the economic implosion. Nóra was the murder victim’s landlady, apparently unaware that in a sports bag in his bedroom he kept the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash – cash for which his three tunnel-drilling associates cannot account.
Blackout is the intriguing third book in Jónasson’s Dark Iceland crime series of Nordic noir featuring detective Ari Thór and set in and around real-life Siglufjörður, a one-time herring-fishing port and Iceland’s northernmost town. The two previous offerings, Snowblind and Nightblind, were both Amazon Kindle bestsellers in Australia.

A Distant Journey

11/11/2016

 
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Di Morrissey: Pan Macmillan $34.99
 
COLLEGE student Cindy is nursing a broken heart for the first time. Rather than propose as expected, her boyfriend of two years has just prioritised Harvard law school ahead of their relationship, leaving Cindy mortified and alone, the only unattached member of her southern California group of friends.
Her solution? Filling her days with the company of a visiting Australian grazier creates an exciting distraction – but when after only a week of mid-summer bliss Murray Parnell is due to return to his family’s property, Cindy realises she does not want to lose him. Instead, on impulse, she agrees to go with him as his bride and the pair marry in a hastily arranged Las Vegas ceremony.
Young, idealistic and swept up by the romanticism of an imagined life abroad, Cindy is barely out of her teens when she arrives at Kingsley Downs, an apparently prosperous sheep station on the plain that stretches between Deniliquin and Hay. The landscape is dry, but any similarity to Palm Springs ends there; the Parnells’ sun-bleached, bare, dusty paddocks could hardly be more different from the celebrity-studded, mountain-ringed desert hideaway in which Cindy has been living with her aunts and cousin.
In the Riverina her only real company is her father-in-law’s housekeeper, a mother-hen figure who does her best to settle Murray’s new wife into her role as a budding country matron.
Mr Parnell senior is less welcoming. Barely speaking to Cindy, he makes his disapproval of her obvious.
He is not without his reasons, however. Behind the gruff behaviour lurks a shocking mystery – one Cindy soon recognises and becomes determined to solve. Despite her best intentions, however, unforeseen consequences unfold and soon the Parnells’ future is in jeopardy.
In her 25th year as one of Australia’s leading novelists, Di Morrissey interprets the essence of rural Australia perfectly.

The Malice of Waves

4/11/2016

 
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Mark Douglas-Home: Penguin $32.99
 
A 10-YER-OLD boy is missing, a family is grieving and a tiny, isolated community on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean is being torn apart by suspicion and blame.
Five years ago Max Wheeler disappeared while having an overnight camping adventure alone on Priest’s Island, a speck of private land only a few hundred metres from where his father and three sisters slept securely on their yacht. No trace of Max has so far been found and the police investigation has turned cool, if not entirely cold, yet David Wheeler is certain his son was murdered.
In search of an explanation, ‘sea detective’ Cal McGill has set his sights on mapping the likely route of a body left to ride the fierce currents of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. His methods are innovative and extreme: Cal’s research is conducted using the carcass of a pet pig of roughly Max’s size.
On neighbouring Eilean Dubh (Black Island), Bella MacLeod runs the Deep Blue tearoom and plays surrogate mother to her orphaned niece, Catriona. Bella does not believe a local resident killed the boy; she has sympathy for the Wheelers but is exasperated by their insistence on holding an annual memorial service on the anniversary of his supposed death.
At the other end of Britain, Stanley Pryke’s wife, Linda, is also tormented. Her husband has been deceiving her. The couple has moved house once already in attempt to leave Stanley’s unsavoury predilection behind. Now it seems he’s reverted to type.
Are the disparate lives somehow connected – the Wheelers’, Bella’s and the Prykes’? Do they together hold the key to solving the mystery of Max’s fate? Can Cal’s experiments reveal a link between all three?
Douglas-Home interweaves smalltown insecurities, secrets, loyalties and grudges to perfection against the backdrop of a spectacularly rugged part of the world.

    ' 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.
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