Category: Australia

The Survivors

6/11/2020

Jane Harper: Macmillan Australia $32.99

KIERAN Elliott’s return to Evelyn Bay is confronting, challenging and confusing.
After years of living happily in Sydney – most recently with his girlfriend Mia and their baby daughter Audrey – Kieran is back in Tasmania to help his mother finish packing up a lifetime’s worth of everything that made the family’s house a home. Kieran’s father has advanced dementia and has been booked into a care facility, leaving Verity to prepare to face the future on her own.
Kieran’s reality is vastly different from that of his former schoolmates, almost all of whom have stayed in the area and feel absolutely no desire to leave. For most, little has changed in the time he’s spent away.
His best mate from childhood, Ash, is now dating their old friend Olivia, and the same neighbours stand chatting in the main street and cooing over “the Elliott boy’s” little Audrey.
The one exception is a new arrival, Bronte: a fine-art university student from Canberra who’s spending the holidays adding to her savings by working as a waitress in the bistro of the local pub. Bronte shares a cottage with Olivia – or, at least, she did.
Now her body has been found on the beach.
Even more distressingly, it appears she didn’t drown. Rather, the police are investigating an assumed homicide.
As their questioning escalates the case opens up wounds that are far from healed, causing Kieran, Ash and Olivia to revisit a hot and stormy summer an eternity ago that was both the best and the worst for all three then-teenagers and whose events have left permanent scars on the small community.
Regrets are replayed and recriminations swirl.
As more and more confidences are shattered, the group members starts to realise that their beliefs about the darkest period of their lives are not at all accurate.

The Wife and the Widow

10/4/2020

Christian White: Affirm Press $16.99

KATE Keddie’s husband John is missing.
Only hours earlier, with their daughter Mia, Kate waited for an excruciatingly long time in the arrivals area of Melbourne International Airport for a man who was not on his nominated flight home from a week-long conference in London that it has now emerged he was never even registered to attend.
Baffled and disillusioned, Kate is searching desperately for clues as to what, exactly, has been unfolding in John’s apparently parallel life for the past few months.
The situation isn’t helped by the fact John’s parents are behaving oddly. His father is bluntly critical of the marriage and his mother is claiming to have had a religious vision that confirms John is not yet dead.
Abby Gilpin’s husband is also absent – not physically, in Ray’s case, but certainly on an emotional level.
Abby is trapped in a numbingly mundane routine of restocking shelves and counting out change at the supermarket on Belport Island, a popular holiday hotspot off the southeastern coast of mainland Australia, accessible by ferry from the Bellarine Peninsula near Geelong. Belport’s off-season population is claustrophobically sparse compared to the hordes of high-season visitors who flood across the water to take up temporary residence in summer.
Ray has barely touched his wife in weeks – or is it months? Abby knows something feels off in their relationship but rather than raise the subject directly with Ray opts to bury herself in her other great passion: taxidermy.
The common denominator between the troubled couples is the island: John Keddie spent time there as a child but has been reluctant as an adult to make the most of the house he and Kate own in a quiet corner of this laid-back community.
Can the superficially blissful Keddies’ and the openly distant Gilpins’ lives somehow be intertwined?

White Horses

6/12/2019

Rachael Treasure: HarperCollins $32.99

SHARK attack or foul play: these are the two credible explanations for professional surfer Kai Kaahea’s disappearance off Pinrush Point – an event that prompts the international media and fellow surfers alike to join police in besieging this sliver of outback West Australian coastline.
Yet, one local is oblivious to the missing Kai’s apparent fame: drover Drift Wood, the only daughter of itinerant poetry-loving horseman Split and his late wife, who died in the same stretch of water when Drift was a child.
Having returned to the Widgenup district with a fresh mob of cattle for fattening, the Woods find themselves in the right place at the very worst possible time, their customarily quiet camp existence disrupted by a frenzied hunt for the young Hawaiian.
Unaccustomed to being surrounded by a throng of strangers and struggling to manage her father’s unpredictable, frequently drunken behaviour, Drift is relieved to find a friendly presence in the form of Constable Simon Swain. As a member of the investigating team, dependable Simon is a godsend for Drift and a potential lifesaver for Split.
Life has always been tough for Drift. With little spending money, no permanent home and almost no contact with people her own age for company, the 21-year-old is ill at ease socialising and struggles to accept Simon’s interest in her.
However, when Drift crosses paths with Sophia Gaier, the billionaire owner of The Planet, an enormous neighbouring station and conservation area, and Sophia’s community of workers, she finally begins to feel a sense of belonging and purpose.
Rachel Treasure’s innate connection to rural culture, understanding of livestock husbandry and ability to generate relatably flawed characters give this story a genuine warmth and authenticity in which the value of an entertaining, believable journey for the reader outweighs any expectation of a fairytale-happy conclusion.

Through Ice & Fire

18/10/2019

Sarah Laverick: Macmillan Australia $34.99

TWO things of note occur in Newcastle, near Sydney, in 1989: the city experiences a magnitude 5.6 earthquake that damages 50,000 buildings and cost $4 billion in repairs, and Australia’s first locally built Antarctic icebreaker, Aurora Australis, is launched.
It isn’t exactly an easy birth. Early in the process engineers at Carrington Slipways discover inconsistencies in plans supplied by renowned Finnish shipyard Wärtsilä Marine: ducts do not join up, services overlap, pipes are forced to compete for the same bulkhead space. With patience and ingenuity the team forges ahead – only to have production derailed again shortly thereafter when Wärtsilä enters bankruptcy.
Despite these hurdles Aurora Australis is completed on time in 1990 and delivered to operator P&O Polar on behalf of the Australian Government.
Fitted with 133 berths, it incorporates an array of laboratories, hull-mounted oceanographic sensors, a central data-logging system, a commercial-sized trawl net, finer sampling nets, a conference facility, a photographic darkroom and a surgery. It is the most sophisticated vessel ever used by the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition.
Its first voyage of significance is to Australia’s three stations on the edge of the continent itself (Casey, Mawson and Davis), combining on the brand-new ship both new personnel and new systems – a recipe for certain frustration if not complete disaster.
This is the start of a 30-year career during which Aurora Australis survives fires, besetment, breakdowns, a grounding, illness and injuries, and the failure of key pieces of scientific monitoring and recording equipment, all while making a priceless contribution to Antarctic research. Presented in biographical style, Through Ice & Fire records the highlights and lowlights of three decades of sailing in one of the world’s harshest environments and pays tribute to the people who populate the ship through until its retirement in Hobart at the end of the 2019–20 summer season.

The Burnt Country

20/9/2019

Joy Rhodes: Bantam Australia $32.99

LIFE should, by any measure, be returning to normal on Amiens, the vast finewool-producing property owned by Kate Dowd near Longhope in northern New South Wales.
Post-World War II peace has reigned for the past two years, rainfall has been generous across the region and Kate’s Merino flock is in the peak of health.
With temperatures rising, the 1947–48 summer is shaping up to be a productive one, with lush pasture blanketing the district and plenty of water in the Amiens dam.
‘Normal’ is an unfamiliar concept to Kate, however. As a mid-20-year-old woman trying to run a woolgrowing enterprise singlehandedly, she is an anomaly: an unconventional – indecent, even – upstart bucking the rules of societal decency by stepping out of the kitchen and into the world of not-so-secret men’s farming business.
The squattocracy of Longhope is appalled – not least of all because even Kate’s own husband seems to have tired of her antics. Now entrenched in the islands off New Guinea, Jack Dowd has walked out on his young wife, apparently, leaving her alone to face the shame of having failed at marriage.
Compounding Kate’s anguish, Luca Canali has returned to Longhope. An Italian ex-soldier who as a prisoner of war worked on Amiens three years earlier, Luca is a permanent reminder of a future she can never have: a future with a man she loves and who respects and cares for Kate in return, a kind and understanding, supportive soulmate who is proud of her efforts to keep her family legacy afloat.
Even within Kate’s household there is turmoil; her part-Aboriginal baby half-sister is in line to be snatched away by the authorities.
And now Kate is in the crosshairs of Longhope’s patriarchs yet again for carrying out fuel-reduction burns in her paddocks. What lunacy will this foolish woman come up with next?

Undara

30/8/2019

Annie Seaton: Mira $29.99

AFTER an agonising year of physical suffering and loss on the personal front, trawling a network of North Queensland lava tubes for unknown insect species is exactly the professional distraction Dr Emlyn Rees needs.
In fact, the chance to focus on this brand-new research is perhaps the one positive aspect of entomologist Emlyn’s life.
Heading a project team from a university in Brisbane she arrives at Hidden Valley – about five hours’ drive north-west of Townsville – on New Year’s Eve, intent on losing herself in the workload demanded by this pioneering underground survey.
The accommodation that’s been provided grudgingly by beef producer Travis Carlyle and his socially awkward brother Gavin is filthy, the heat and humidity in the build-up to the onset of the wet is sapping and Emlyn’s colleagues are several days’ drive away, still making their way north by road. It’s a lonely introduction to Hidden Valley but, in her debilitated, distressed state, the solitude suits Emlyn perfectly.
Little by little, however, as the wary standoffishness between Emlyn and Travis begins to ease, the two find common ground in their attraction to the spectacular tunnel system that underlies a good portion of the property. Progressing from fragile truce to respectful alliance and, in time, genuinely caring friendship, the connection grows stronger with every encounter.
And, with the appearance of Emlyn’s co-workers and the beginning of their inch by inch-by-inch subterranean treasure-hunt, the prospect of finding something truly momentous mounts. The outcome of their labours, it seems, might well have the power to influence more than one person’s future.
The second novel by Seaton, who with her husband now spends winters scouring Australia for potential story locations, Undara takes its name from the real-life Undara Volcanic National Park, to which the lure of exploring the remnants of a long-ago eruption draws thousands of visitors every year.

The Place on Dalhousie

24/5/2019

Melina Marchetta: Viking $32.99

ROSIE Gennaro and Jimmy Hailler first cross paths under the most unexpected of circumstances.
Sydneysider Rosie is in Central Queensland escaping the misery of her father’s sudden death and the realisation that his widow, her despised stepmother, is refusing to relinquish control of a house renovated years earlier by Rosie’s parents.
Jimmy is also serving a period in exile, unable to leave the Sunshine State to return to his own home in Sydney until a good-behaviour bond has been completed.
When pitching in to help a town besieged by flooding brings the pair together for a fortnight, they find comfort in each other.
Two years later, having rediscovered a mobile phone misplaced after he and Rosie parted, Jimmy retrieves 12 months’ worth of voicemail and is shocked to discover he has a son. Toto is living with Rosie at her old family home in Dalhousie Street, Haberfield – just a hop, skip and jump from the neighbourhood in which some of Jimmy’s closest friends live.
Now working as a FIFO miner Jimmy can afford to fly from Brisbane to Sydney to visit Toto and Rosie – but will he be welcome? Afraid of following his parents’ poor example and disappointing his child, he hesitates.
Rosie is struggling. Reliant on welfare payments to support herself and Toto she is confined to the upper level of her childhood residence.
The rooms downstairs are the domain of 40-something Martha, still grieving the loss of her mother and then her husband in too short a time-span. Attractive and lonely, Martha has caught the attention of former rugby league star Ewan Healy, however, a man with an equally complicated life.
The latest release from the queen of multi-generational, multicultural family fiction (most notably, Looking for Alibrandi), Dalhousie interweaves the perspectives of Australians from various cultural backgrounds in a touching tale of mixed messages and uncertainty.

Fled

19/4/2019

Meg Keneally: Echo Publishing $29.99

MORE than 231 years after Cornish highwaywoman and thief Mary Bryant arrived in Sydney Cove with the First Fleet, only the barest details of her life are known. In an age when full literacy was relatively rare, Bryant’s own words, thoughts and feelings were certainly not written down and nothing beyond the sketchiest facts of her crimes and sentence were documented officially.
In choosing to use Bryant as inspiration for the fictitious Jenny Trelawney-Gwyn, the heroine of her first solo novel, however, Meg Keneally has reprised one of early Australia’s most remarkable characters, fleshing out the skeleton of Trelawney’s experiences and achievements with exhaustive research into the circumstances of female transportees in the late 1700s.
When the death of her fisherman father leaves the teenaged Trelawney desperate to support a grief-stricken household, she takes up robbing lone travellers near her coastal village in Cornwall. Her work, though successful, is predictably short-lived; within months Trelawney is arrested, convicted and incarcerated on a rotting convict hulk, Dunkirk, in Plymouth harbour, where unscrupulous guards are ever-willing to take advantage of an attractive young woman’s desperation.
Pregnant and severely malnourished, she is transferred to the tall ship Charlotte and despatched to an as-yet-unestablished British colony on the far side of the world.
While Trelawney and her fellow convicts at first think conditions on board are unbearable, worse looms. Their disembarkation in Sydney is truly hellish as, back on dry land for the first time in years, they encounter a subsistence infinitely more foul than anything imagined in England, with starvation, brutality and abuse commonplace and the chances of a small child surviving to adulthood almost nil.
With only street cunning and grim determination in her favour, Trelawney must find a way to feed and defend not only herself but a daughter born at sea and, later, a tiny son.

The Mother-in-Law

22/2/2019

Sally Hepworth: Macmillan Australia $29.99

IT'S one thing, in a fit of long-simmering, spur-of-the-moment frustration, to wish one’s mother-in-law dead; it’s quite another to learn that it’s actually happened.
When Lucy first embarked on a relationship with workmate and now-husband Oliver Goodwin in suburban Melbourne a decade earlier she had dreams of forging a wonderfully close and warm connection with his mother. After all, Lucy had long been without a maternal influence of her own, having lived from the age of 13 with her widowed father.
What eventuated, however, was something more akin to a barely functional stand-off between the pair: a brittle tolerance of one another cobbled together by their mutual love of Ollie and, as time wore on, the young couple’s three children. While the rest of Ollie’s family welcomed Lucy into its midst immediately, Diana was coolly detached, showing none of the generosity and graciousness for which she was renowned throughout the community.
But now Diana Goodwin has been found dead – and despite initial suggestions that she may have been terminally ill, police detectives are investigating the incident as a case of homicide.
Who might have had reason to kill this wealthy matriarch: an apparently kind, caring grandmother whose life had been devoted to supporting newly arrived refugees through pregnancy and childbirth in an unfamiliar country?
Recollections of a very public spilling-over of animosity between Lucy and Diana in front of a roomful of witnesses quickly casts suspicion on Lucy – the one person known to have had a likely motive for her murder.
Told from the perspectives of three equally strong-minded, independent women – Lucy, Diana and Ollie’s sister Nellie – The Mother-in-Law explores the complex web of interplay that exists between disparate individuals and generations forced together by the one thing they have in common: Lucy’s husband, Diana’s son and Nellie’s brother.

The Forgotten Children

8/2/2019

Isabella Muir: Outset Publishing $29.50

LOSING an unborn child and having her boyfriend propose marriage within the same few days is more emotional upheaval than Emily Carpenter can handle.
Emily’s fresh wave of mourning reopens painful memories of a previous pregnancy and a tiny boy entrusted to the care of nuns 20 years earlier. Back then, as a 16-year-old schoolgirl she had no choice in the matter, the decision made without consultation by her conservative parents.
Now grieving all over again, Emily – an outwardly successful author – flees her home in Brighton, England, and in a single day drives until she runs out of road. There, on the western edge of Britain, in the island of Anglesea, Wales, she settles into a rented cottage in a village where her days are filled with taking long walks with her dog Ralph and teaching reading. It’s an opportunity for a new beginning, albeit temporarily, free from constant reminders of the ways in which her life has stalled.
After a series of stilted chats with a stranger on a clifftop, however, she realises the time has come to stop running and instead address her regrets and frustrations in person.
As Emily begins to pursue the truth about her surrendered son her research uncovers a trail of circumstances she could never have imagined. Not only is he no longer in the Brighton area but it seems children from the facility in which he had been living were among those sent to the far side of the world as part of a decades-long program to relocate unwanted British youngsters to Commonwealth countries including Australia. No records survive, leaving Emily with few options for tracing his whereabouts.
Whether she will now be able, so many years later, to make her peace with those events (and with her own mother’s role in them) is uncertain.

The Year of the Farmer

7/12/2018

Rosalie Ham: Picador Australia $32.99

NORMALLY there’s nothing even vaguely amusing about irrigation cutbacks, drought-crippled farms, disintegrating communities, dog-mauled livestock and neighbours fighting not only each other but in some cases even themselves.
Rosalie Ham can add a wickedly satirical twist to any storyline, however, generating wry smiles and sly sniggers with her caricatures of stereotypically flawed individuals who under any other circumstance would be irretrievably irksome.
Take, for instance, Ham’s cross-section of residents in a fictitious Riverina town whose once-robust river is now barely flowing.
Mitch and his wife Mandy are at odds, hurried into marriage by an imagined pregnancy after Mitch’s high-school sweetheart, Neralie, decided to broaden her horizons – and love-life – by moving to Sydney.
Lana and Jasey, on the other hand, share the same boyfriend: Kevin. It’s an unconventional arrangement that gives the gossips plenty of inspiration, but as far as these best friends are concerned, having half of Kevin is preferable to having all of any one of the area’s supposedly eligible men. They have a point.
So dire is the outlook that when a new water authority representative sweeps onto the scene in his cycling lycra, legs shaved and receding hairline combed over, it’s not only the young singles who suddenly develop a taste for break-of-dawn power-exercising.
But Stacey’s mission is more about retrieving water – and in so doing padding his commission-based takehome pay – than winning female hearts. His partners in the plan, Glenys and Cyril, are the scourge of the district, shunned for controlling the river’s flow either too tightly or not nearly tightly enough, depending on where individual priorities lie.
At the heart of it all is an overarching mystery: who now owns local pub? It’s been sold, they all know, and renovations are in progress, but what will this mean for their one remaining reliable watering hole?

The Lost Man

9/11/2018

Jane Harper: Macmillan Australia $32.99

LIFE is tough in the isolation of Queensland’s Channel Country – particularly for a single farmer trying to make a go of it almost entirely on his own.
As a social outcast Nathan Bright knows the predicament all too well. Nathan has spent the past decade ostracised by his neighbours and former friends for a split-second error of judgement he will never manage to undo, banished from the local pub, the general store and every form of community gathering.
Few people are surprised, then, when they hear one of Liz Bright’s boys has been found dead in a remote, arid paddock, having left the security and supplies of his vehicle to wander out into the sun-baked savannah seemingly by choice.
It does shock listeners, however, that the dehydrated corpse is that not of Nathan but his brother Cameron: two years younger and happily married with two healthy daughters, in charge of the family’s station and seemingly beloved by everyone within a thousand-kilometre radius of tiny Balamara.
Distraught, Cameron’s widow cannot accept that her husband would have willingly done such a reckless thing. He had grown up on the property; he understood perfectly the danger of exposing a human body to the Outback’s searing mid-summer heat.
Now it’s up to Nathan and his teenaged son – visiting for a few days from Brisbane, where Xander lives with his mother after his parents’ agonising divorce – to unravel for the benefit of the survivors the hows and whys of Cameron’s gruesome death.
While this is not an Aaron Falk police thriller, fans of Jane Harper’s writing with a memory for detail (or those who reread The Dry before picking up this third novel) might recognise an unexpected link in this story of regret and atonement to Falk’s Kiewarra, a tiny Wimmera town crippled by a toxic blend of distrust and drought.

A Month of Sundays

3/8/2018

Liz Byrski: Macmillan Australia $32.99

KNOWING one another as Skype acquaintances with a shared passion for reading is one thing but what if, as four individuals meeting for the first time, they have nothing else in common?
For more than a decade Ros, Judy, Simone and Adele have been members of the same book club, yet to date their contact has been purely online.
Ros, a classical cellist, lives in inner-city Sydney. Judy runs a yarn and knitting supply shop in Mandurah, south of Perth. Simone teaches yoga in Hobart, and Adele has just retired from a corporate management role in Adelaide.
All four are single at a point in their lives when the likelihood of forming a romantic connection is little more than a laughably remote pipedream. Adele and Simone have one adult child each; Ros is widowed and Judy is divorced. Their social contact ranges from ‘limited’ down to ‘all but non-existent’.
Now Adele has proposed converting their one-Sunday-afternoon-a-month literary discussions into a house-sitting holiday in the Blue Mountains spanning several weeks.
On face value it seems to be a light-hearted opportunity for each woman to get to know three relative strangers as potential new friends.
Taking turns to choose books that reveal something about themselves, they will share a beautiful big home with comfortable communal spaces and plenty of quiet corners into which to retreat if they feel like enjoying some solitude.
What they don’t immediately consider, however, is that women of their age are complex, idiosyncratic, sometimes-headstrong individuals with emotional baggage, health complications and a fierce desire to defend their privacy.
Even before their opening meal together has ended, at least one has made up her mind to leave. Surely their adventure must be doomed?
As the Bendigo Writers Festival draws nearer this is the perfect warm-up act for anyone who enjoys trading recommendations with fellow readers.

The Red Coast

23/2/2018

Di Morrissey: Macmillan Australia $34.99

IN THE midst of preparations for Broome’s inaugural literary festival, the sudden appearance in town of a neighbour from her high school years in Sydney catches bookshop owner Jacqui Bouchard by surprise. What could Cameron North – a big-city east-coast lawyer – possibly be doing in the Kimberley?
At the same time, Jacqui is counting down to the scheduled arrival of her teenage son Jean-Luc from France, where he lives year-round with her former husband. Jean-Luc’s summers in Broome are an annual highlight for Jacqui, whose own parents are on the opposite side of the continent.
When her path crosses briefly with a visiting cameraman from Perth, Damien Sanderson, Jacqui’s personal life takes an interesting turn. Damien is the first man to have caught Jacqui’s attention since the dissolution of her marriage. Yet, being based in Perth he is not exactly the ideal partner for a businesswoman tethered firmly to the north-west corner of the country’s biggest state.
Distracting lonely Jacqui from her budding relationship with her fly-in fly-out date, Broome learns that a billionaire miner has plans for the region that quickly divide the isolated community into distinct ‘for’ and ‘against’ camps. While Indigenous leaders debate the financial and cultural merit of the proposal to mine a vast inland area and set up a bulk mineral port that has the potential to overshadow the famous Cable Beach, members of Broome’s multicultural population see either opportunity or loss, depending on their individual circumstances.
With disharmony and bitter divisions building, the looming festival is the one point of unity holding the fractured town together.
In The Red Coast Di Morrissey revisits a part of Australia first explored in two earlier novels, Tears of the Moon and Kimberley Sun, reawakening the story of Lily Barton and her highly successful pearl farm and rekindling interest in the extended Barton family.

Clear to the Horizon

9/2/2018

Dave Warner: Fremantle Press $29.99

FOR more than a year the attention of Perth law enforcers and residents alike has been focused on a single strip of bitumen running north–south through the heart of suburban Claremont: Bay View Terrace. From the vicinity of a nightclub there, Autostrada, three women have gone missing on separate occasions – vanished without a trace after reportedly beginning the late-night journey home alone.
As an ex-homicide detective turned private investigator from the north side of the city, former footballer Richard ‘Snowy’ Lane is called on by a mutual acquaintance to assist one of the families in its distress. The official search for their daughter and sister, Caitlin, appears to have stalled; might Lane perhaps discover something useful – no matter how seemingly minor – that the police have missed?
Inserting himself ever deeper into the case, Lane becomes a man obsessed with giving the O’Gradys the closure they crave. The chances of Caitlin being found alive are dimming yet still they cling onto the hope that eventually whatever remains of her might be returned to them.
Fast-forward 20 years and another Perth family is similarly anguished: a young mining heiress has not been heard from since she and her boyfriend refuelled their four-wheel-drive in Port Hedland before supposedly heading further north towards Broome.
When Lane is engaged by the Feisters to look into Ingrid’s whereabouts, a tenuous, almost-inexplicable link with the Claremont case begins to take shape.
Could it possibly be that the real killer of the Autostrada trio is resuming his murderous rampage after two decades of apparent hibernation? Lane has always suspected that the police were too hasty in their wrapping up of the disappearances.
Now back on the trail in the majestic Kimberley, Lane seizes the opportunity to search for the final piece of the Autostrada puzzle and in so doing soothe the O’Gradys’ pain.

Where the Murray River Runs

5/1/2018

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.

Sanctuary

17/11/2017

Judy Nunn: William Heinemann Australia $32.99

GEVAAR Island, 40 kilometres due west of tiny Shoalhaven on the West Australian coast, is an isolated, largely inhospitable place at the best of times. In the off season, when the fishermen whose huts are the only sign of civilisation among the rocks rarely leave port on the mainland, it’s entirely deserted.
Suddenly, the unplanned arrival of an Indonesian dinghy bearing nine battered, malnourished and dehydrated passengers breathes life into Gevaar’s cluster of colourful timber shacks with their neglected kitchen gardens and sparsely stocked cupboards.
The group comprises three couples, two single travellers and an energetic and resilient three-year-old boy for whom scrambling ashore on this remote outpost is the start of an exciting adventure.
One woman looks and sounds British; to those who aren’t familiar with the region, the rest could be from anywhere in the Middle East. In fact, they are citizens of five separate countries – Egypt, Iran, Syria, Kurdish Iraq and Afghanistan – with three religions and communicate in a mix of local languages linked together loosely by a blend of classical Arabic and somewhat rusty English.
All eight adults are hiding something: the triggers that prompted them to flee their homelands, their fears, their ambitions, their true identities.
At first glance the island is a haven for the bedraggled survivors, yet even as they settle into their makeshift community they begin to question what Australia’s reaction will be once their presence is discovered. Will this reportedly open and laid-back nation half a world away from their points of origin really welcome their impromptu appearance, as they’ve been assured it will, or will their uninvited occupation of Gevaar draw the ire of yet another set of hostile government officials?
Sanctuary’s author, actor-turned-bestselling-writer Judy Nunn, will be in Victoria to deliver a series of readings from her new novel in Gippsland next week.

Just Another Week in Suburbia

10/11/2017

Les Zig: Pantera Press $29.99

ONE week. Seven days. Surely change can’t happen so quickly as to completely overturn someone’s sedate, settled life in such a short time span – or can it?
High school English teacher Casper Gray enjoys the type of steady contentment his still-single childhood mate Luke covets. Blissfully ensconced in the suburbs, Casper is about to celebrate his seventh wedding anniversary with Jane, who works in IT.
Both have steady jobs, close friends and supportive colleagues.
Their tenacious little terrier, Wallace, seems equally satisfied with his routine of digging up the backyard by day and snuggling on the sofa with his master and mistress after dark.
To date the only significant challenge faced by the couple is their struggle to have a baby, and even this will be overcome, they’re certain, once they have managed to save for a course of IVF treatment.
Admittedly, their neighbours can be odd at times: boorish Vic, with his thug-like demeanour, and exquisite Chloe, who on occasion just might be a little friendlier than is necessary towards the married man next door.
The vice-principal of Casper’s school, Stuart, is also a disagreeable character, with his exacting expectations and officious, condescending attitude.
In general, however, the Grays are as happy together as Casper imagines it’s possible for any pair of people to be.
Then it happens: an accidental stumble in the middle of the night results in the contents of Jane’s handbag being scattered across the floor. Along with the usual makeup, keys and purse, something entirely unexpected is revealed.
Is Casper right to suspect his wife of harbouring a gigantic secret, or is paranoia leading him down a dangerous path from which there may be no return?
Melbourne author Les Zig chronicles the ensuing week’s events at a compelling pace complemented by dark humour and a touch of cheekiness.

Force of Nature

3/11/2017

Jane Harper: Macmillan Australia $32.99

CORPORATE retreat. It’s a term almost guaranteed to set off a shiver of fear in all but the most upwardly mobile, single-mindedly ambitious go-getting employee.
For accounting clerk Beth McKenzie few things could be less inviting than the prospect of spending four days ‘team building’ in the remote upper reaches of Gippsland with colleagues from BaileyTennants – among them, her twin sister Bree.
Also taking part in the five-woman, five-man orienteering survival exercise is one of Beth’s least favourite managers, Alice Russell, who at the age of 45 rules through intimidation.
Despite her apparently unwavering commitment to the firm, Alice has no desire to be there, either; her attention is several hundred kilometres away, split between a domestic crisis in the suburbs and an ultimatum delivered by the Australian Federal Police.
With tensions already simmering, the two groups set off in mid-winter into the Giralang Ranges, three hours’ drive east of Melbourne – but when the women emerge four days later, cold, hungry, wet and limping, Alice is no longer with them.
Hasn’t she made her own way back to the agreed pickup point, her fellow walkers ask the men. She’s not actually lost or, worse, injured, alone in the bush with dusk descending, is she? Unpopular though Alice is, nobody at BaileyTennants really wishes her ill – surely not.
As Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives on the scene he’s barely recovered from a life-threatening event of his own on the opposite side of the state. Accompanied by investigative partner Carmen Cooper, Falk is as desperate as anyone to find the missing accountant – but his motivation is not purely concern for her personal safety.
This second instalment in Melbourne journalist-author Jane Harper’s ‘Aaron Falk’ series is a fitting sequel to her debut novel, The Dry, adroitly juggling two parallel timelines as the disappearance and its aftermath unfold side by side.

The Man from Talalaivka

20/10/2017

Olga Chaplin: Green Olive Press $33.95

WHEN Anglo-Australians think of World War II battle zones, the natural tendency is to list only those in which our own servicemen fought: Southeast Asia, the Pacific, North Africa, Western Europe. The unimaginable destruction that occurred as Hitler’s army swept across Eastern Europe is overlooked.
For a generation of immigrant Australians, however, the realities of life before and during that ‘other’ conflict were transported along with their meagre belongings when they fled to an adopted country on the opposite side of the world.
Olga Chaplin’s parents were among the many thousands of displaced Ukrainians who managed to regroup sufficiently to forge a contented, prosperous future in Australia. Her beautifully worded, fictionalised account of their experience has the ability to warm a reader’s heart one minute and summon tears the next.
The story of Petro ‘Peter’ Pospile opens in December 1929 in Talalaivka, a tiny administrative town in far-northern Ukraine.
Following the death of Russia’s socialist dictator Lenin, control has been seized by totalitarian tyrant Stalin. Stalin is pillaging Ukraine’s rich black-soil farmland, confiscating its produce to feed Russians while millions of Ukrainians starve.
A veterinarian, Peter is considered marginally more useful than the typical local worker, yet not even this can save his family from horrendous suffering under Stalinist rule.
After more than a decade of deprivation, he accepts the arrival of German soldiers in June 1941 as just one more chapter of a never-ending ordeal. He cannot foresee that he and Evdokia will soon be sent to labour camps in Germany, Peter to fight Allied-bomb blazes in Berlin and Wilhelmshaven and his wife to manufacture munitions on an assembly line.
Eventually peace is declared but the couple’s long-entrenched distress is not easily banished: as homeless, stateless refugees, they continue to fear the Soviets’ reach and struggle to create a stable new existence for themselves.

The Woolgrower's Companion

15/9/2017

Joy Rhoades: Penguin $32.99

LONGHOPE in January 1945 is a district largely devoid of men. Anyone fit enough to fight is doing so, called away to defend their king and country against the Axis powers.
Five years of war have stripped the remote northern New South Wales farming community of its traditional workforce.
Kate Dowd’s husband Jack – a serviceman she met and married quickly when he was sent to Longhope to rest a wounded hand – is among them, based at an army training centre in Sydney as he prepares new waves of young recruits for dispatch overseas.
In place of the patriotic local soldiers the government has offered the services of a group of prisoners of war: Italians captured in North Africa and locked away in rural Australia. Kate’s father Ralph – a mentally broken World War I veteran who named his property ‘Amiens’ after the famous battleground in France – is assigned two such workers: cheeky, hot-headed Vittorio and the considerably more serious but disdainful Luca. Language, customs and politics separate Kate and her father from these strangers, yet if ‘Amiens’ is to survive, together they must somehow find a way to fend off the looming double threat of bankruptcy and drought.
As Ralph’s mind drifts ever further from the present day, Kate must assume responsibility for running the entire operation, guided in her decision-making by two long-serving farmhands and The Woolgrower’s Companion, a how-to book for novice pastoralists.
Bucking social convention, the lonely young wife has little choice but to educate herself almost overnight in bookkeeping, animal husbandry and workplace management.
Drawing on her own upbringing in western Queensland and the recollections of her grandmother – a fifth-generation grazier – Rhoades presents a snapshot of the views, beliefs and prejudices that coloured mid-20th-century society and shaped the attitudes of middle-class Anglo-Australians towards Aboriginal people, European immigrants, domestic and sexual violence, and gender rights.

Pachyderm

11/8/2017

Hugh McGinlay: Threekookaburras $29.95

FINDING an intelligent, attractive, available man in Melbourne isn’t easy, as crime-scene-investigator-turned-milliner Catherine Kint well knows. Finding an intelligent, attractive, available man who won’t, the morning after their first night together, allow himself to be mauled by a pack of African wild dogs is even harder.
Just when hatmaker extraordinaire and now-unofficial sleuth Catherine’s luck seems to have taken a turn for the better, brand-new love interest Beau Hacska is dragged barely alive from an enclosure at Melbourne Zoo, where he works as a keeper.
It’s not the first time Beau has had an unfortunate up-close encounter with wildlife of the open-plains variety; his primary claim to international infamy is as the man whose head was once buried inside an elephant.
Before having his run-in with the dogs Beau had enlisted Catherine to look into a sudden death at the zoo in a bid to clear himself of alleged culpability. With Beau now immobilised in hospital she turns to her best friend and favourite gin-pouring barman, Boris Shakhovsky, for backup.
The pair have already had considerable crime-solving success together, having woven their way through the alleyways of Brunswick in the interests of apprehending a murderer in local author Hugh McGinlay’s first novel, Jinx.
The plot of Pachyderm, McGinlay’s follow-up, is equally intriguing in characteristically off-beat, irreverent style. Believably flawed characters, cosily familiar inner-city locations and sassy, tongue-in-cheek, boisterous wit keep the chapters humming along to a satisfying and unexpected conclusion.
Catherine, Boris and Beau share centre stage with an eclectic cast: a slightly doddery visiting British documentary-maker and naturalist, a detestable bully with a prominent role in state politics, a bothersome millinery client who senses trouble before it strikes, a female laundromat customer with a penchant for pink-dyed men’s clothing, a flirty stranger who whistles openly on a train, and meerkats, lions and reptiles aplenty.

The Shape of Us

30/6/2017

Lisa Ireland: Macmillan Australia $29.99

FOUR women, one challenge: to lose unwanted weight.
In all four cases obesity is an issue – but is it the root of the quartet’s problems or merely a scapegoat, deftly deflecting attention away from the truly dysfunctional aspects of unhappy lives?
While pregnant, Kat ate for two and then some, in the process accumulating a layer of padding that her body now, almost two years after daughter Ami’s birth, refuses to shed. Her boyfriend seems not to have noticed – then again, Josh hasn’t noticed much at all about Kat in recent months.
Cupcake chef Jewels and husband Matt have a pregnancy-related complication of a slightly different kind: being obese is compromising Jewels’ fertility. Although neither is dissatisfied with her appearance in its own right, their desperation to conceive is putting pressure on Jewels to downsize.
Isolated from family members and friends in her native London and left alone for ever-longer periods as her girlfriend pursues a high-flying career, Ellie has found companionship in food. Alone in a foreign country and with her professional aspirations as an art curator stagnating, she consoles herself by eating badly.
For GP and mother-of-three Mezz, being the ‘fat’ doctor in a small rural practice is mortifying. Surely her patients are judging her, she tells herself, just as the ponytailed women at the school gate seem to do as they eye off the father of her boys, the still-handsome Sean.
All four are adamant that they want to trim down yet before they can begin to make progress they must first acknowledge and then overcome the psychological hang-ups that are white-anting their efforts.
After meeting in an online weightloss forum and exchanging increasingly detailed revelations about their existences in Canberra, Melbourne, western Victoria and North Coast NSW, will Kat, Jewels, Ellie and Mezz become each other’s best supporters of worst saboteurs?

The Unmourned

16/6/2017

Thomas and Meg Keneally: Penguin $32.99

IF THERE'S one thing even more engrossing than a carefully researched historical novel with the name ‘Thomas Keneally’ on the cover, it’s one crafted by Keneally in partnership with his daughter Meg.
One of Australia’s most prolific and successful authors, Keneally senior has covered the country’s heritage extensively in both fact and fiction throughout a half-century-long professional writing career.
His imagined storylines set against real-life locations and happenings are particularly intriguing – and that trend continues with the release of the Keneally father-daughter team’s follow-up book together, The Unmourned.
A second instalment in a series begun last year with former convicts Hugh Llewellyn Monsarrat and Hannah Mulrooney as its main protagonists, this new release sees the pair embark on a fresh crime-solving endeavour in the early decades of colonial New South Wales.
Monsarrat, having been granted a ticket of leave for his work in solving a murder in the penal settlement at Port Macquarie, has relocated to Parramatta, where he is employed by day as a clerk to the NSW Governor’s right-hand man.
His skill as an investigator has not been forgotten, however, and when the superintendent of the infamous Parramatta Female Factory is stabbed to death, Monsarrat is called on to go scouting for the perpetrator.
The obvious suspect is one of the prison’s hardened inmates, Irish rebel Grace O’Leary – a woman whose hatred of the now-dead Robert Church has long been common knowledge. Few among the colony’s authoritative figures would oppose having O’Leary hanged for the crime yet Monsarrat and Mulrooney are determined to see due process followed, even if that means drawing the displeasure of some of the town’s most influential individuals.
Are they being duped by a guilty O’Leary, or will an as-yet-unknown attacker be identified as the true killer of a cruel, conniving tyrant who few upstanding citizens have felt any compulsion to mourn?

Mrs Kelly

26/5/2017

Grantlee Kieza: ABC Books $39.99

ELLEN Quinn is barely 18 years of age when she falls under the spell of emancipated convict John ‘Red’ Kelly, 30. Ellen’s family have been in Australia for almost a decade, having emigrated from the northern tip of Ireland as free settlers shortly before the Potato Famine swept across their homeland.
Despite his earlier thievery, Red has behaved impeccably since being transported to Tasmania and later relocating to the foothills of the Great Dividing Range north of Melbourne, where works for Ellen’s parents. Although James Quinn is dubious, when his eldest daughter reveals she is pregnant she is allowed to marry.
So begins the adult life of Ellen Kelly: the one-time raven-haired, carefree, horse-loving girl from County Antrim who as a middle-aged matron and mother of 12 children will gain infamy – “the notorious Mrs Kelly”, as she will be dubbed by Victoria’s assistant police commissioner.
It is Ellen’s first-born son, Edward, who becomes the ‘man’ of the household when Red – slowly embittered by years of struggling to earn a legitimate living – slips back into his petty-criminal ways and then dies. At 11, young Ned is ill-prepared to fill his father’s shoes but has little choice in the matter; in 19th-century Greta every slab hut needs a male figurehead.
Behind the scenes Ellen rules, however. Illiterate, she signs both her marriage certificates with a simple “X”, yet when her family’s reputation is questioned she speaks up loudly, proudly and stridently, on occasion defending her increasingly wayward boys in court and in one particularly impassioned incident crushing a policeman’s helmet with a baking paddle as he attempts to arrest her third son, teenaged Dan.
In the end, Ellen outlives more than half of her offspring as a tough, determined, desperate pioneer in one of the harshest periods of Australia’s history.

<<Previous

' 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.