Category: Europe

The Driftwood Girls

19/2/2021

Mark Douglas-Home: Michael Joseph $19.99

FOR 23 years Kate and Flora Tolmie have lived as orphans, left parentless in the UK when their mother Christina disappeared from a French ferry port. Now adults, the sisters have never truly recovered from the trauma.
At roughly the same time, in an apparently unrelated incident teenager Ruth Jones went missing in south-eastern England. When Jones vanished it was assumed she had run away from a dysfunctional homelife with her drunken father, Mikey. Days later, when her body washed ashore she was found to have drowned.
On the opposite side of the English Channel, in the Netherlands Sarah Allison and her neighbour Lotte Rouhof have ‘adopted’ itinerant artist Olaf Haugen and given him a creative space of his own in their coastal hamlet. Their community is idyllic but for one sad construction: a beach hut erected to commemorate the discovery of a dead girl on the other-wise postcard-perfect stretch of sand.
Three watery mysteries, each connected in its own way to the sea – and now a new question has been raised. A suitcase once owned by Christina Tolmie has resurfaced, picked up by an English beachcomber decades earlier but then forgotten until after his death.
Oceanographer Dr Cal McGill is determined to trace the luggage’s movements to determine where and when it entered the Channel. Using his understanding of currents, tides and winds, McGill is uncannily skilled at pinpointing the routes taken by individual items held captive by the waves – be they simple flotsam and jetsam or, in the most gruesome of circumstances, human corpses.
McGill can’t afford to turn down this potentially lucrative job, however much he might want to walk away from his unsettling line of business.
The fourth release in Douglas-Home’s Sea Detective series, The Driftwood Girl combines the suspense of criminal investigation with the nebulous balance of relationships strained by grief.

One by One

25/12/2020

Ruth Ware: Harvill Secker $32.99

CORPORATE retreats are divisive. People generally either love them or loathe them – but in the case of music-tech start-up Snoop’s week-long outing to an exclusive French Alps resort, the participants’ loathing is directed more at each other rather than at the bonding exercise itself.
The company’s co-founders, Eva and Topher, are openly feuding, one determined to accept a lucrative buy-out offer while the other is doggedly opposed to relinquishing control. The shareholder group is split exactly down the middle with a single vote still swinging, guaranteeing that the leaders’ time at Chalet Perce-Neige will be spent lobbying and/or bullying in an attempt to sway their former colleague’s decision. With a billion dollars at stake, neither side is going to concede defeat while ever there’s a chance of claiming former personal assistant Liz’s all-important support.
Chef Danny and hostess Erin are the only onsite staff, responsible for catering to their visitors’ every whim – and there are whims aplenty among these privileged millennials with their unfathomable job titles, demanding diets and haute couture skiwear. Not only do the Snoopers arrive with an extra person to be accommodated without warning but now the weather forecast is dire, derailing their plans to spend the first afternoon out skiing.
It’s a scenario that could easily turn murderous – figuratively, at least.
There’s nothing figurative about one woman’s sudden disappearance, however: one minute she’s there in their midst, right among them on the slope, and the next she’s gone. Trying to trace when and how she vanished is thrown further into chaos when an avalanche sweeps down the mountainside, cutting the party off from any chance of seeking help.
Alone, hungry, cold and at loggerheads – and with one of that morning’s breakfast companions now missing, presumed dead – the Snoop team members and their hosts are living an Agatha Christie-like nightmare.

Dark Tides

4/12/2020

Philippa Gregory: Simon & Schuster Australia $32.99

TWENTY-ONE years have elapsed since Alinor Reekie and her teenage daughter Alys left Foulmire in a hurry – both pregnant and both deeply in disgrace.
Alinor has never fully recovered from her very public near-drowning as a suspected witch at the hands of Foulmire’s elders. Plagued by poor health, in 1670 she is a frail impersonation of the woman she was during her time as a healer and midwife on the south coast of England.
Now the pair support themselves as wharfingers: mistresses of a ramshackle little warehouse on the River Thames on the eastern fringe of London. Their clients are the second-tier traders whose goods aren’t required to go directly to the government wharves closer to the city centre for official customs inspection.
Alinor’s son Rob has been working as a doctor in Venice and her brother Ned – the one-time ferrymaster at Foulmire – is making a fresh life for himself as a New World settler, having been forced to flee their hamlet after the king he had opposed was restored to the throne and embarked on a purge of all known adversaries.
Suddenly an inordinately attractive young Venetian woman arrives by ship in Southwark claiming to be Rob’s widow Livia, the Nobildonna da Ricci. Her husband, she says, has drowned in a lagoon in Venice, leaving her all alone with their newborn baby to raise. Her only remaining family are Alinor, Alys and Alys’s adult twins.
When the vivacious Livia crosses paths with a man from Alinor’s past, the aristocratic landholder Sir James Avery, her prospects start to look brighter – but her desires are the polar opposite of her inlaws’ wishes.
Dark Tides is the sequel to Tidelands, the novel that introduced the Reekies and James Avery (then a Catholic priest travelling under the assumed name ‘Summers’) during King Charles’ exile on the Isle of Wight.

City of Spies

20/11/2020

Mara Timon: Zaffre $29.99

NATHALIE Lafontaine’s luck has just run out. A neighbour in Paris, offended by her rebuffing of his unwanted advances, has made a complaint against her to the occupying Germans and now she is being hunted by the dreaded Gestapo.
After a desperate flight south through the countryside she is fortunate to escape onto a fishing boat that delivers her to Spain. There she is received by the British Consul-General in Madrid as Elizabeth de Mornay, codename ‘Cécile’, a highly trained member of the Special Operations Executive who has been working behind enemy lines in France.
Rather than send her home to London, however, her superiors assign Elizabeth yet another alias and divert her to theoretically neutral Portugal. The Portuguese ruler, António de Oliveira Salazar, is maintaining a delicate balancing act, welcoming refugees from both sides of the war and maintaining regular contact with the Allied countries while hedging his bets by turning a blind eye to Axis actions within his own border.
In Lisbon Elizabeth emerges with a new identity: that of Solange Verin, a French widow in need of safe shelter far from the dangers of the Nazi occupation of her homeland. Her brief is to meld into the expat German community – a relatively easy assignment for an attractive 20-something woman guaranteed to catch the attention of any number of German intelligence officers.
Lisbon, she quickly finds, is a city in which watching one’s neighbours is an everyday obsession. People appear – and, all too often, disappear – suddenly and without explanation.
Everywhere she goes brunette Solange is being observed – so much so that with the help of a wig she disguises herself as blonde Veronica Sinclair on occasion in order to evade the bufos who constantly monitor her movements on behalf of various parties, some more or less friendly, some definitely not.
Under such close scrutiny, can she actually achieve anything worthwhile?

The Evening and the Morning

2/10/2020

Ken Follett: Macmillan $17.99 ebook

THERE’S a first time for everything, so the saying goes – and in the case of unfortunate Combe, the ‘first’ this season is its first Viking attack.
Although a terror of pillaging Norsemen has hung over the settlements of western England for many years, never before has Combe been targeted. Finally, however, in mid 997 the village’s luck runs out.
At 17 Edgar is already a fully grown man, the youngest of three brothers apprenticed to their master-boatbuilder father.
When the marauders arrive, he is away from his parents’ home, waiting desperately at dawn on the far shore of the bay for his beloved Sungifu to join him. Edgar has constructed a sturdy wooden vessel to carry the young couple away together and can already imagine the happiness they will soon share. Today’s elopement will be the start of a new life for them both.
On the opposite side of the English Channel, the high-spirited Lady Ragnhild is ensconced safely inside Count Hubert and Countess Ginnilaug’s castle at Cherbourg.
Themselves the descendants of Viking conquerors, the Norman nobles are proud of their Norse heritage and feel no need to turn away the longships that visit their port en route to rich, undefended pastures nearby.
They are on friendly terms with the English at the same time and often welcome delegations led by clergymen.
As the fallout from the Viking plundering of Combe begins to solidify, the ruling families of the two communities are drawn closer together.
Wilwulf, ealdorman of Shiring, needs help. His coastline is being ravaged and Combe’s destruction has left its mark on his finances.
Gaining the co-operation of Cherbourg could be an important step towards stemming the flow of aggressors from the north but in order to forge an alliance he must be able to offer something to the Normans in return.

A Silent Death

10/1/2020

Peter May: Hachette Australia $19.99

SPAIN'S southeastern-most stretch of beaches is known with good reason as the ‘Costa del Crime’. Between Málaga and the Gibraltar border, resort towns dot the sandy coastline, sheltering tens of thousands of seasonal tourists and more than the occasional expat desperado.
For Cristina Sánchez, this reality is part of everyday policing in Marviña.
Yet, despite the presence of these uninvited gangsters within her community, Sánchez is not expecting that a standard callout will lead to an encounter with one of Europe’s most wanted men. The incident starts as a routine response to a simple break-in, but within minutes of arriving at an upmarket development, Sánchez is embroiled in a fatal shooting.
The victim is not an officer or even a suspect, however; rather, the body crumpled awkwardly on the cold tiled floor of the villa is that of a woman who has been living there – and the person holding the gun is her English partner Ian Templeton. Having mistaken his girlfriend for an intruder, Templeton has killed her in error.
An added complication soon emerges: the shooter, Templeton, does not actually exist. Instead, this attractive, charming foreigner is the alter ego of the UK’s number one fugitive, Jack Cleland, cocaine trafficker extraordinaire and police assassin.
At home in London, Scottish-born investigator John Mackenzie is assigned to the case. The National Crime Agency needs a specialist courier. Mackenzie’s mission is to fly to Spain and return later the same day with Cleland in custody.
For Mackenzie, the timing is dreadful: the aunt who raised him is due to be buried in Glasgow, his estranged wife is working to alienate him from his son and daughter, and nightmares about his late father’s death are robbing him of a solid night’s sleep.
Now, he’s being forced to play in-flight escort to some lowlife drug lord.

The Body on the Beach

11/10/2019

Anna Johannsen: Thomas & Mercer $19.99

SINCE leaving Amrum, a laid-back island community off the north-west corner of mainland Germany, Lena Lorenzen has established an entirely new life for herself as a detective inspector based in Kiel.
Suddenly, an unforeseen return to Amrum looms, at once disrupting Lena’s comfortable big-city routine, providing temporary respite from an increasingly claustrophobic relationship with a colleague, and reuniting her with a former boyfriend, Erck, and her beloved Aunt Beke.
The director of a children’s home has died while relaxing late one evening in a beach chair on Amrum’s famous strip of snowy-white North Sea sand. The signs suggest heart attack as the likely cause, but his widow has requested an autopsy and the possibility of poisoning with a fast-acting and all-but-undetectable substance has been raised.
Lena has never been a favourite at the station in Kiel so the superintendent’s decision to appoint her to this investigation is somewhat baffling. Is she being set up to fail, she wonders.
As her partner Lena is assigned Detective Sergeant Johann Grassmann: a dedicated, passionate and lateral-thinking young man eager to make his mark on the case while earning his senior officer’s respect.
On Amrum the two encounter a confusing web of contradictory statements and unexplained gaps in the timeline. Not even the local police account of the body’s discovery is complete.
The more Lena and Johann compile evidence, the more apparent it becomes that Hein Bohlen was a far more complex character than those around him knew.
Having behaved unpredictably in the days immediately preceding his death, he could well have fallen foul of any number of people. Could someone in his circle have been provoked to kill him?
Originally published in German, The Body on the Beach is the first in a series of English-language Lena Lorenzen novels from Northern Friesland native Johannsen and New Zealand translator Lisa Reinhardt.

Beyond the Shadow of Night

16/8/2019

Ray Kingfisher: Amazon Publishing $27.99

BORN within days of each other in 1923, Mykhail Petrenko and Asher Kogan grow up as the best of mates, brothers by choice if not by blood.
Living in adjacent farmhouses near Dyovsta, Ukraine, their families labour together under the constant scrutiny of the Soviet authorities, producing crops to keep Russia’s masses fed.
Despite occasional famine and a lack of modern equipment it’s an idyllic childhood for two boys who like nothing more than spending afternoons sitting on a riverbank fishing for dinner.
As the 1930s wear on and antagonism towards Jews festers, however, Asher’s parents decide to sell their land and join relatives living in Poland. There, in Warsaw – a sophisticated, cosmopolitan metropolis with motorcars, apartments, factories and cafés – Asher discovers a lifestyle unimaginable to rural Ukrainians like Mikhail. With his father and older sisters earning wages, there’s money for clothing, toys and groceries – sometimes, even cakes.
Suddenly, though, several years’ worth of rumours become fact as Nazi forces swarm across the country’s western border and quickly overrun the ill-equipped Polish defence. Seeing aeroplanes for the first time, Asher finds himself directly in the path of repeated aerial bombing.
Mercifully, it’s short-lived. The initial attack over, the Kogans are allowed to settle back into their regular routine. Perhaps the Germans won’t prove to be nearly the ogres the Poles have feared.
Little do they know that within a matter of months every Jewish resident of Warsaw will be herded into a newly-walled ghetto in the centre of the city and Mykhail will be conscripted into the Red Army.
Fast-forward more than half a century and in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one half of the inseparable childhood friendship had been shot dead, one elderly man murdered at his own kitchen table by the other. What could possibly have transpired in the intervening decades to have prompted this?

The Lions' Torment

7/6/2019

Blanche d’Alpuget: Ventura $32.99

ON BOTH sides of the Narrow Sea that separates continental Europe and Britain, the 1160s are a tumultuous decade for the nobles who rule not only Normandy and England but also an enormous, sprawling region stretching all the way south around the Bay of Biscay to Spain.
Henry II, jointly Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and King of England, is supported on the throne by his siblings Hamelin the Merlin (an illegitimate half-brother) and Viscount William, the youngest of the late Count Geoffrey the Handsome and Matilda’s three sons. On the periphery hovers Thomas Becket, Chancellor of England, skilful financier and fawning sycophant – a man obsessed with Henry, fortune and fame in equal measure.
With so much land under its control, the Norman Plantagenet dynasty is feeling threatened. To the east French king Louis VII (whose ex-wife Eleanor is now married to Henry) is disgruntled by the Normans’ attack on the city of Toulouse; further north the Germans, under the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, are massing troops for a possible invasion; and in the Vatican Christianity is cannibalising itself as rival factions squabble over the legitimacy or otherwise of two opposing Popes.
England, too, is in political turmoil: the Archbishop of Canterbury is dying and the church is riddled with self-serving degenerates positioned beyond the reach of Henry’s secular laws.
From his base on the River Seine at Rouen, Henry reigns over one of the biggest kingdoms his world has ever known.
In a melee of beautiful, entitled men and powerful, rich women, the Plantagenets and their courtiers jostle for position and favour, surrounded by intrigue and espionage, lasciviousness and piety.
One of Australia’s most multi-faceted authors, Blanche d’Alpuget couples the exacting skills of biography and saga with the irreverence of pop-fiction to breathe life into characters who lived almost a millennium ago.

The Spanish Promise

17/5/2019

Karen Swan: Macmillan $29.99

WITH just over a week to spare before her wedding, London-based wealth counsellor Charlotte Fairfax barely flinches when a major bank seeks her help to resolve an awkward financial predicament in Spain.
A powerful client’s billionaire father, on the brink of losing his life to cancer and now crippled by a stroke at the age of 98, is moving to bequeath the entirety of his generations-old business portfolio to a mid-40s café worker in Madrid – a woman completely unknown to the aristocratic family and its advisors, giving rise to the assumption that she must be the latest in a line of mistresses. Mateo Mendoza is worried; if his papa, Carlos, succeeds in transferring his assets to this stranger, the prestigious Mendoza empire will cease to exist.
Charlotte’s mission is simple: fly in, convince this mysterious interloper to accept a million-euro payoff in return for relinquishing any further claim on Carlos and his estate, and fly out just as quickly, all in time to take pride of place at her rehearsal dinner and attend one final gown fitting over the weekend.
What should be a straightforward negotiation becomes infinitely more challenging, however, when ghosts from Charlotte’s younger days resurface.
The investigation into Carlos’s links to his apparently unwitting beneficiary soon begins to draw Charlotte ever-deeper into the Spanish heartland, leading away from the glamorous capital with its galleries and cocktail parties to Ronda, a spectacularly situated, white-washed village in the Andalusian countryside where the echoes of civil war atrocities still reverberate.
Will doing her professional utmost to preserve the Mendoza inheritance mean sacrificing more than Charlotte is prepared to give up on the personal front? As her supposedly routine assignment becomes more complicated with every passing hour, Charlotte finds herself questioning her own identity and values just as closely as the waitress’s.

The Last Days of the Romanov Dancers

15/3/2019

Kerri Turner: Harper Collins $29.99

WINTER is coming – and so, too, for the average citizen of Russia are the desperate privations that accompany full-blown war.
As German troops move into the empire’s westernmost provinces, however, life for the elite of Petrograd society remains virtually unchanged.
Petrograd – as St Petersburg has been officially retitled in a move to make the grand city appear more patriotically Russian – is the seat of power of Tsar Nikolai II and his family, an all-powerful royal dynasty that not only rules the country but also celebrates arts such as dance. To be a principal of the Romanovs’ Imperial Russian Ballet is the ultimate aim of fledgling danseurs such as Luka Zhirkov, whose father barely manages to support himself while working in a factory and whose brother is now fighting bitterly to keep the would-be invaders at bay.
As the closing months of 1914 unfold, Luka’s standing soars, buoyed at least in part by his association with prima ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska, who almost inexplicably draws the young corps member ever deeper into her acquaintanceship.
For the tempestuous Valentina Yershova, emerging quickly as a celebrity in her own right, a personal battle to rival that waged by Russia’s starving soldiers brews. Valentina has been traded by her original “protector” – one of the rich and influential older men who traditionally keep a young dancer as a mistress – and is now at the mercy of Maxim Sergeivich, a volatile and at-times cruel and calculating newspaper columnist who openly craves the approval of Tsarina Alexandra and her closest advisor (and reputed lover), “mad monk” Grigori Rasputin.
In this debut novel Sydney author and ballet teacher Kerri Turner weaves historic figures and events into an engrossing, unpredictable, heartrending story that fleshes out the circumstances in which Petrograd and its dancers find themselves as World War I closes in.

Vodka and Apple Juice

30/11/2018

Jay Martin: Fremantle Press, $27.99

JAY Martin is embarking on what appears to be every other Australian woman’s dream: spending three years as a lady of absolute leisure in northern Europe.
Accompanying husband Tom Armstrong on his diplomatic posting to Poland, Martin is at first excited by the promise of free time in which to explore their adoptive city, Warsaw, and its surrounding regions.
The novelty wears thin after only a few weeks, however, and in place of the initial wave of exoticism Martin feels herself quickly drowning under a tsunami of helplessness and rebellion as she struggles to read grocery labels, use public transport and make interpersonal connections in an entirely unfamiliar culture.
Her attempts to master a language of ‘ssshhhhhhes’ leave her mentally exhausted, and the sense of loss brought on by having stalled her own career as a senior political communicator in Canberra in order to travel with her husband leave Martin longing to reclaim the demands of full-time work with its structure and routine. The life of a non-working expatriate wife, it seems, is not the idyllic existence outsiders imagine it to be.
As Armstrong becomes increasingly ground down by his obligations to the embassy, Martin finally starts to regain her characteristic confidence, creating a role for herself as a freelance reporter and establishing a small but meaningful circle of loyal and engaging friends, both local and foreign.
In the process she explores areas of Poland few tourists visit, accepts that vegetarianism is an unfathomable concept to meat-loving pierogi traditionalists and develops a penchant for generous servings of vodka-spiked apple juice.
Yet, as the seasons tick slowly by and the emotional strain on her marriage intensifies, Martin begins to wonder whether she will ever settle comfortably into the apparently endless round of exhibition openings, cocktail parties, black-tie dinners and receptions for Australian government VIPs.

Red Storm series

27/7/2018

James Rosone and Miranda Watson: Kindle ebooks – Battlefield Ukraine $6.50; Battlefield Korea $6.22; Battlefield Taiwan $6.55; Battlefield Pacific $6.43

AS 2017 draws to a close, Russian President Vladimir Petrov’s patience pays off.
Petrov has been biding his time, stealthily marking off the days, weeks and months until conditions are in perfect alignment for a strategic assault against the political thorn in his side: Ukraine. Now, with his forces primed with the latest in 21st-century weaponry and tactical know-how, Petrov makes his move.
Ukraine’s charismatic nationalist leader is one of the first targets, assassinated in a pre-emptive strike on the man most likely to stand against a Russian invasion.
Ukraine is not left entirely defenceless, however. At the United States’ urging, NATO troops flood in, and so ensues a bitter struggle for control of the entire eastern half of the country.
This is not the only territory being coveted by a neighbour. In Asia, China is eyeing off land directly to its south, including the Korean peninsula, Vietnam, Myanmar and its longstanding annoyance, independent Taiwan.
As the NATO allies stretch their resources across an increasingly broad front on two continents, the communist superpowers unite to unleash a brilliantly formulated covert offensive known as Operation Red Storm.
Against a backdrop of email hacking, electoral tampering, spiralling unemployment, social unrest and economies in collapse, immediately identifiable characters populate these novels: a vodka-swilling macho Russian oligarch; a fractured US administration of self-interested officials and corrupt double agents; a Chinese leadership intent on regaining pride eroded by the dissolution of its once-mighty empire; passionate service men and women on every side of the conflict.
The depth of military detail in these novels is particularly impressive.
The first four books cover events in Ukraine, Korea, Taiwan and the Pacific, focusing primarily on each theatre in turn but delivering sufficient crossover to maintain the overarching storyline in real-time.
The next instalment, Battlefield Russia, will be released in September.

Island of Secrets

23/3/2018

Patricia Wilson: Allen & Unwin $19.99

ANGELIKA Lambrakis knows only the sketchiest details of her heritage.
Raised as an only child in London, she has no memory of her father and has never met either set of grandparents. Single mother Poppy has rebuffed every attempt by her daughter to revisit the past – a past from which Calliope, as Poppy was then known, chose to escape 40 years earlier.
All Angie can be sure of is that her background is Greek.
Now, with her wedding day looming, she makes up her mind to defy Poppy’s wishes and search for information among the whitewashed villages of southern Crete.
Far from being welcomed, however, Angie immediately runs into a roadblock of unexplained, blatant hostility. Complete strangers flinch at the mention of Poppy’s maiden name, Kondulakis, and those along the way who appear to have some form of connection to the family are unnervingly evasive.
Angie’s confidence is shaken. Will yiayá and papu be pleased to meet their granddaughter at last, or will this elderly couple be every bit as standoffish as their fellow islanders seem to be?
She remains committed, however. Having flown halfway across Europe to find the missing pieces of her personal jigsaw puzzle, Angie is determined to continue probing until she succeeds in reuniting Poppy with her Cretan relatives.
Crete – particularly the area due west of Ierapetra – was the setting for some of the most brutal, bitter fighting of World War II in which Germans, Allies and resistance partisans hunted each other across spectacularly rugged hillsides and plateaux throughout the early 1940s.
Using as her setting Amiras and Viannos, traditional communities overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, author Patricia Wilson retraces the circumstances and consequences of a real-life Nazi atrocity through the eyes of the fictitious Lambrakis and Kondulakis families and their neighbours in a remote, mountainous corner of Europe’s southernmost region.

I’ll Keep You Safe

2/3/2018

Peter May: Riverrun $32.99

AN ACCUSATION of infidelity will forever more haunt Niamh Macfarlane as the last thing shouted at her late husband Ruairidh (‘Rory’) before he was killed in a car bombing in central Paris. With him in the vehicle at the time was his alleged lover, Russian clothing designer Irina Vetrov.
Niamh had first learned of the affair only a couple of days before Rory’s death, shattering the faith she had always had in the strength of their supposedly rock-solid combined personal and business partnership.
Now she is a widow, returning with his remains from France to the Isle of Lewis and Harris in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides.
It is there, in a tiny hamlet facing the wind-churned, brutal North Sea, that the Macfarlanes had established their own traditional cloth-weaving operation, Ranish Tweed. With their product keenly sought-after in the world of high fashion, Niamh and Rory had crafted for themselves a seemingly idyllic lifestyle based in a stunningly beautiful home on an isolated headland outside the tiny capital, Stornoway.
The one downside for the seemingly happy young couple had always been the barely contained antagonism keeping their two families apart. With Rory gone, Niamh is torn more than ever between her openly warring relatives and in-laws.
Against this backdrop of uncertainty, French detective Sylvie Braque arrives in Lewis and Harris to investigate the explosion for which Irina’s now-missing husband Georgy is being held provisionally responsible.
But is Georgy Vetrov really the only credible suspect? Could tensions either within the closely bonded island community or stemming from a commercial deal turned sour be behind Rory’s death instead?
In partnership with local police officer George Gunn, the Frenchwoman sets to work scrutinising every aspect of the Macfarlanes’ movements leading up to the killing – but despite its modest dimensions, Lewis and Harris is surprisingly adept at maintaining secrets.

The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

12/1/2018

Lars Mytting: Hachette $32.99

IF THERE'S one dominant theme running through Edvard Hirifjell’s life it’s undoubtedly ‘blanks’: the gaping memory blanks that have always pockmarked his early-childhood recollections and now, unexpectedly, the solid timber blanks from which the highest-quality shotgun stocks are carved.
For 20-something years Edvard has known only a quiet, semi-reclusive existence on a potato farm in an agricultural hamlet near Lillehammer in southern Norway. When not tending the crop with his bestefar (grandfather) Sverre he fills his meagre free time with photography and fishing. He has few friends but is not particularly lonely.
Theirs is a typical rural lifestyle in all but one respect: Edvard is an orphan, having lost his parents in an unsolved incident almost 2000km removed from their property at Saksum when he was just a toddler.
When his home circumstances change suddenly Edvard begins a journey of yearning that stretches first to the wind-lashed Shetland Islands and then to the battlefields of northern France.
In treeless Shetland he unearths a clue that tantalises with its potential to explain the mystery of his father and mother’s deaths and at the same time raises the possibility of a family inheritance intertwined with a fabled stand of 16 centuries-old walnut trees warped by World War I combat into a near-priceless resource.
The young man who leaves behind the paddocks and sheds of Saksum to search for crucial pointers in Shetland soon finds himself heading south due, with the remnant woods of Authuille in the Somme as his ultimate destination.
Weaving together the carefully researched details of actual events and locations with an engaging imagined plot, this novel is rich with the history of two world wars and the intimacies of Nordic culture both in Norway itself and across the scattered former Viking settlements of modern-day Scotland’s most remote island group.

The Little Theatre by the Sea

8/12/2017

0 Comments

Rosanna Ley: Quercus $19.99

NEWLY graduated from design college but with no immediate job prospects, Faye Forrester is both surprised and delighted to receive an invitation to housesit for an old school friend and her Italian husband in Sardinia.
Perhaps a few days of visiting Charolotte and Fabio’s tiny fishing port on the west coast of the island is exactly what Faye needs as a buffer between three years of intense study in London and returning to the real world of working non-stop. The possibility of collaborating on a minor theatre restoration during her break in Deriu is an added lure.
Naturally, Faye assumes, there will be tall, dark and handsome locals whose mission is to charm the visiting Englishwoman; she is determined to brush aside all such advances as nothing more than mere Latin opportunism.
What she does not expect, however, is to meet a boatbuilder who captures her interest. The moody Alessandro Rinaldi may be a co-owner of Deriu’s derelict entertainment centrepiece with his sister, Marisa, but that’s as much as Faye wants to know about this apparently complicated man.
What she really needs is some straightforward rest and relaxation and a professional credit on her as-yet-blank résumé.
The building itself is magnificent, if severely neglected: a once-grand focal point of the village dating from the early 1800s and beloved by residents. Abandoned after the deaths of the Rinaldis’ mother, actress Sofia, and father, businessman Bruno, it is desperately run-down – exactly the type of rejuvenation project any newly qualified interior designer would eagerly embrace.
Back home in England, meanwhile, Faye’s parents, Adrian and Molly, are facing challenges of their own as they struggle to accept that over the decades they have drifted away from each other and now have few interests in common.
Which relationships will founder, and which will go from strength to strength?

0 Comments

The Templars' Last Secret

27/10/2017

Martin Walker: Hachette Australia $32.99

TUCKED away in the southwestern corner of France is one of the world’s most impressive collections of prehistoric art. The départment of Dordogne is known in international circles for a trio of drawcards: more than 1500 castles, abundant black truffles and the 600-plus irreplaceable Paleolithic paintings that line the Cave of Lascaux.
Within the Dordogne, Périgord is a normally sleepy, peaceful region, but in 21st-century France, extremist violence can flare without warning. Now, it seems, the Vézère Valley is being targeted – in a fictitious sense, at least.
The 10th release in Martin Walker’s ‘Bruno’ series opens with soldier-turned-village-police-chief Bruno Courrèges preparing to host the wedding in St Denis of two archaeologists.
The drafting of his speech must fit around his official duties, but in small-town rural France, policing is more often a matter of gently guiding delinquent teenagers back into the classroom than of investigating life-or-death cross-border crime.
For Bruno, the working week preceding his friends’ nuptials turns out to be an exception, however.
When the body of an unfamiliar woman is found sprawled at the foot of the once-grand Château de Commarque, with its Templar connections, it is apparent that her death was no accident. Unsuccessful attempts to identify the victim at first frustrate Bruno and his fellow law enforcers, then drive them to explore far beyond their usual boundaries – all the way to Israel and North Africa.
The trail of evidence they assemble spans thousands of years of Vézère history, beginning with the creation of the valley’s priceless artworks and extending through the Middle Ages, when knights returning from the Crusades were rumoured to have secreted their legendary treasure somewhere within the chateau.
Accompanied by his trusty basset hound Balzac, Bruno knows that for this tiny community, time to solve the mysterious killing – and in so doing stave off an infinitely bigger attack – is running out.

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.

Defectors

4/8/2017

Joseph Kanon: Simon & Schuster $39.99

VNUKOVO VIP airport, 1961: New York-based publisher Simon Weeks has just touched down in the United Soviet Socialist Republic, granted permission by the KGB to pay a brief visit to his brother and sister-in-law in Moscow, where the once-mainstream American couple now lives by choice behind Cold War enemy lines.
This is no simple family reunion, however. Simon’s sibling is the notorious US defector Frank Weeks, a one-time CIA man turned traitor in the eyes of his government who for the past decade has been operating in exile against his homeland.
Former State Department analyst Simon has been sent on assignment to Moscow, representing the literary company that will publish Frank’s sensational memoir, My Secret Life.
The rekindling of the relationship is something that only months earlier neither could have foreseen. Travel between the two countries is rare; the USSR is wary of admitting foreigners and the US, in turn, frowns on its citizens venturing anywhere near the Soviet bloc.
Simon has been welcomed at Frank’s instigation. The KGB, for which Frank is engaged in intelligence, sees the release of his tell-all manuscript as a public relations coup – the ultimate piece of propaganda confirming to the US public that one of its own has seen the error of his liberal Western ways and embraced Communism as the epitomy of government.
It’s a fraught situation, both politically and from a personal perspective. Simon has not forgotten Frank’s decision to vanish completely one night, taking with him a bank of knowledge amassed over years of casual brotherly lunches as the Weeks boys traded tales from their respective government offices in Washington, DC.
But maybe, just maybe, this move is Frank’s attempt to signal a change of heart – to reach out for help. Are his spying days over? Is he hinting that he’s ready to head home at last?

One Italian Summer

28/7/2017

Pip Williams: Affirm Press $29.99

WHERE better to experience small-acreage self-sufficiency first-hand than in Italy: a country famed for its sun-ripened produce, luscious artisanal cheeses, plump piquant smallgoods and hearty pastas and breads?
It’s this reasoning that motivates a family of four Australians to pack their bags as lightly as possible and head to the opposite side of the world in search of both skills and inspiration.
Having already relocated from suburban Sydney to a semi-rural block in the Adelaide Hills, Pip, Shannon, Aiden and Riley decide to take their quest for a tree-change one step further by spending several months learning the essentials of the trade as ‘woofers’ – Willing Workers on Organic Farms.
With housesitters in place and sons Aidan and Riley bribed with the promise of gelato every day, Pip and Shannon guide the little troupe through pre-dawn Rome before arriving at the first of four properties on which they will volunteer their labour in return for basic board: a remote bee-keeping operation near Rassina, Tuscany.
As their adventure progresses, woofing carries them to Zambone in Calabria (from where they have a spectacular view of volcanic Stromboli), Pianoro near Bologna in Emilia-Romagna and Cassole near Turin in Piedmont.
In between stints on-farm, the family detours to Sorrento and Positano on the glamorous Amalfi Coast; Mount Vesuvius near Naples, long overdue to erupt again; the millennia-old limestone cave-dwellings of Matera; walled Lucca, with its terracotta-and-stucco labyrinth; and wondrous, watery Venice, where the boys discover that even their hotel-room toilet has its own private canal view.
Along the way they are challenged physically by the demands of planting, weeding, pruning, constructing and conserving for hours in Italy’s fierce midsummer heat and emotionally by the realities of extracting a sustainable existence from relatively few resources and of living side by side for extended periods with hosts they barely know.

The German Girl

24/3/2017

Armando Lucas Correa: Simon & Schuster $29.99

BERLIN, 1939: With her blue eyes, blonde hair and smooth creamy skin, Hannah Rosenthal is the physical epitome of all that is truly German – in every way but one. Hannah’s parents, Max and Alma, are German Jews.
Even as an image of Hannah circulates on the cover of a Nazi propaganda magazine, held up as an example of the ultimate Aryan child, the terrified Rosenthals desperately plot their escape from a country that is making clear its contempt for the “impure”, the “stained”.
Seen through 12-year-old Hannah’s eyes, the events of Berlin’s infamous Crystal Night and its aftermath in 1938-39 leave no doubt that war in one form or another is inevitable. Although Max and Alma have retreated from society and now rarely go outside, they are nonetheless tormented, taunted by the tenants who rent parts of the family’s grand heritage building.
There is the slimmest glimmer of hope, however: a mysterious place called “Kuba” is accepting Jewish refugees.
New York, 2014: At the age of 12, Anna Rosen is a full-time carer for her reclusive mother, Ida, a woman who has barely managed to function since her husband Louis’ mysterious disappearance six months before Anna’s birth.
However, the unexpected arrival of an envelope from Havana breathes fresh life into the pair’s existence. Filled with new-found energy, Ida agrees to take Anna to Cuba in search of her father’s only other relative.
While the Rosenthal/Rosen family is fictitious, the flight of Jews from Hamburg aboard SS St Louis did take place in May 1939 – for many, with disastrous consequences when the Cuban authorities suddenly rejected almost all of the ship’s exiled passengers. This little-known piece of history is rekindled beautifully through the experiences of two girls half a century apart but bonded by not only blood but a need to be their parents’ sole support.

The Woman on the Stairs

3/3/2017

Bernhard Schlink: Orion Publishing Co $29.99

IN THE midst of a tug-of-war for possession, a portrait goes missing, spirited away in the heat of a bitter custody battle between the subject’s husband and her painter-turned-lover in 1970s Frankfurt.
The situation is complex: enchanting Irene Adler is the wife of powerful industrialist Peter Gundlach yet in recent times has been living with Karl Schwind, an artist, having left her marriage to pursue an affair.
Both men are equally determined to claim not only the canvas but also Adler as theirs, and a stalemate ensues.
Watching from the sidelines is another contender: the warring men’s naïve but dependable young lawyer (and the story’s unnamed narrator), who has developed an overpowering attraction of his own to the beautiful blonde model.
Each sees Adler as his ideal female incarnation: trophy, muse, damsel in distress.
Unaware of a third man’s interest, Gundlach and Schwind finally decide to settle the outcome of their dispute behind closed doors, with the husband offering to exchange his two-dimensional artwork for its living, breathing star attraction: the ‘woman on the stairs’.
However, neither is able to enjoy victory: within minutes of the handover having been completed, both Adler and the portrait disappear abruptly.
Although her immediate whereabouts are unknown, all three admirers are sure Adler is safe and well.
Decades pass before the first missing piece of the puzzle surfaces, and when it does reappear, the now-valuable painting is half a world away from Germany.
Incredibly, The Woman on the Stairs has been gifted by an anonymous donor to the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney – something the lawyer discovers to his disbelief while visiting Australia on business.
Does its presence mean that Adler, too, is somewhere nearby – if not in the city itself then perhaps hiding out discretely in the surrounding region?

The Art of Cycling

10/2/2017

Cadel Evans: ABC Books $49.99

SOME athletes have a fascinating story to tell but aren’t natural storytellers. Others can communicate beautifully but don’t necessarily have much out of the ordinary to share.
And then there’s Cadel Evans: son, father, friend, idol and almost certainly Australia’s greatest multi-discipline cyclist.
It seems hardly any time has passed since Evans – one of only two non-Europeans to have legitimately won the Tour de France – completed his final competitive ride: a race bearing his name along the Great Ocean Road. That was exactly two years ago this week.
In his third book, a retrospective of a 20-year professional cycling career, he lays bare his life tale, from receiving a beginner bicycle at the age of four to relaxing into retirement.
This is a genuine autobiography, written by Evans as a means of slowing down and refocusing his life after he stepped away from racing as a 38-year-old.
It records his earliest memories of childhood: moving from a predominantly Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory to rural NSW, then Plenty on the hilly, forested fringe of Melbourne. It was there that Evans, aged 14, became his own first coach, devising a rigid training regime, honing his diet and critiquing his performances day by day.
Evans reflects on twice winning the mountain bike world championship, contesting the most prestigious road cycling events – among them, the national tours of France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Germany, Poland, Oman and Australia – and attending four Olympic Games, and comments candidly on subjects ranging from injuries, chronic illness and exhaustion to interpersonal relationships, team politics and the deep-rooted drug-taking that disadvantages ‘clean’ competitors and mars his beloved sport.
He tells of taking inspiration from the Dalai Lama and Belgian cartoon adventurer Tintin, starting a family by adopting Ethiopian-born baby Robel and dividing his downtime between home-bases in Switzerland and Barwon Heads.

The Girl from Venice

3/2/2017

Martin Cruz Smith: Simon & Schuster $32.99

ONCE part of a fishing dynasty, Innocenzo now sails alone, one brother dead, drowned when strafed in an Allied air raid, the other dead to him as a result of having enticed Cenzo’s wife into an affair that ultimately cost the young woman her life.
To their mother, however, Cenzo is the least successful of the sons: a simple fisherman who refuses to do his patriotic war duty by joining Benito Mussolini’s Sons of the She-Wolf and to date has failed the family by finding excuses to delay marrying his widowed sister-in-law.
It doesn’t help his situation that the adulterous surviving brother, Giorgio, is a famous screen actor and airforce hero known as the face and voice of the Fascist party.
Cenzo’s life is further complicated when during a moonlit outing from his home in Pellestrina, a tiny breakwater community on the lagoon bordering Venice, he reels in more than merely fish. Manoeuvring silently through the marshes he is shocked to discover what he mistakes at first for a corpse, floating pale and sodden alongside his boat. In fact, the teenaged girl, Giulia, is very much alive – for the time-being, at least.
The lone escapee from a German attack on a community of Jews, Giulia is being stalked by a warship.
Her only hope of escaping lies with Cenzo.
With the end of World War II imminent and American forces likely to reach them within a matter of days, can he smuggle her to safety?
The pair’s cat-and-mouse travels take them from Pellestrina to Venice, then Salo, Mussolini’s seat of power and one of the final strongholds of the Italian military.
As Cenzo is forced to mingle with Salo’s glamorous diplomats and socialites, Giorgio’s treachery resurfaces.
Can the siblings set aside their rivalry for the sake of survival, or will the long-festering hatred lead to more tragedy?

<<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.