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Lycke

6/10/2017

 
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Mikaela Bley: Scribe $32.99
 
WHEN eight-year-old Lycke Höök vanishes from a neighbourhood tennis complex in Stockholm, Sweden, it’s not only members of the little girl’s immediate family who are traumatised.
For TV news crime reporter Ellen Tamm, Lycke’s unexplained disappearance unleashes still-ragged recollections of a terrifyingly similar upheaval in her own childhood two decades earlier.
Delivered to her regular Friday afternoon coaching session by her father’s new wife, Chloé, unaware that the lesson has been cancelled, Lycke is left standing alone outside the courts.
It’s a cold, wet late-May evening.
By the time mother Helena arrives two hours later to collect her daughter, Lycke is gone.
Initially, Stockholm’s police are reluctant to accept the situation as anything more than a disgruntled child having run away from an unhappy existence juggled between two combative households. Time that could be spent searching is frittered away, with few officers assigned to the case and even fewer approaching it seriously.
Reliving the agony of her parallel experience, Ellen steps in, channelling her professional research skills and intuition into the most important investigative story of her high-profile career.
Suspicion ricochets back and forth between Lycke’s estranged parents, emotionally distant stepmother and cocky tennis coach, Petter, a young man whose sexually threatening behaviour unnerves Ellen when he agrees to be interviewed.
As Ellen scrambles in desperation to analyse the dysfunctional Höök dynamic, searching for the slightest clue to Lycke’s whereabouts, her probing reveals a lonely, socially awkward introvert taunted by her schoolmates, neglected by Helena and Harald and resented by Chloé.
Her one friend and confidant is her nanny, Mona, a woman whose entire working life has been devoted to raising other people’s children but who is now within days of retiring from service. With time running out, will Mona’s final week as Lycke’s caregiver end in happiness or grief?

Deadline

16/12/2016

 
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Simon Bouda: New Holland $32.99
 
AUSRALIANS know Simon Bouda – right? We know his name, we know his face, we know his voice and we certainly know the tragedies he covers as one of the National Nine Network’s most experienced hard-news journalists.
But what, really, do we know of Bouda as a person – as a son, husband, father, colleague, friend?
In Bouda’s public life he is the man behind the story: the on-screen professional speaking impassively from the scene of a stabbing, an abduction, an explosion, a disaster.
His early days in the print media led Bouda to choose crime as his specialisation, exposing him to some of Australia’s most detestable offenders and enabling him to forge relationships with police contacts that have grown stronger with every passing decade.
In more than 30 years of journalism Bouda has covered kidnappings, mine collapses, bushfires, earthquakes, assassinations, East Timor’s independence referendum, the Boxing Day tsunami and the Thredbo landslide (after which he was invited to become survivor Stuart Diver’s biographer). He has been based in London and Sydney and filed reports from wherever news has broken, almost always with virtually no time to prepare: Jordan, Israel, Greece, Fiji, New Zealand, Pakistan, Turkey, Iraq.
Along the way he has been beaten with an umbrella by Pixie Skase in Mallorca, Spain, and cursed by paedophile Phillip Harold Bell for tracking the millionaire to his hideaway in South Africa.
In Deadline he delves behind these events and dozens more, revealing the emotional and ethical dilemmas faced by a working journalist: the decisions made, the consequences considered, the possibilities weighed up and the personal plans abandoned.
From his expedition to trace his late father’s final movements in Papua New Guinea to his fundraising for the Homicide Victims’ Support Group, Bouda’s off-camera adventures are recorded alongside his official assignments with absolute sincerity, bravery, humility and candour.

The Panama Papers

23/9/2016

 
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Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier: Oneworld Publications £12.99/$US17.99
 
“INTERESTED in data?” It’s February 2015 and in Germany investigative journalist Bastian Obermayer is presented with what quickly becomes the most daunting yet satisfying challenge of his media career.
Obermeyer is at home one evening when an email arrives from an anonymous correspondent. The writer has something intriguing to offer: records detailing the day-to-day interactions of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. “Mossfon” is one of the world’s most active shell-company providers, generating the link that enables individuals and organisations in closely regulated jurisdictions to “go offshore” in order to conceal their business dealings from former spouses and government authorities alike.
In the ensuing weeks, Obermeyer accepts via encrypted channels of some 11.5 million documents in the world’s biggest ever corporate data leak. More than 214,000 companies are identified and politicians including presidents, prime ministers and dictators are implicated. The names “Putin”, “Cameron”, “al-Assad” and “Gaddafi” surface time and again.
Obermayer is unable to handle this volume of information single-handedly. His solution? To draft in newspaper colleague Frederik Obermaier and expand the search for collaborators around the globe, seeking input from two Australian contacts. Firstly, the “Brothers Obermay/ier” (in reality, they are no relation) approach Irish-Australian Gerard Ryle, head of the International Consortium for Investigative Journalists in Washington DC, who agrees to help assemble a worldwide team to scrutinise the rapidly mounting landslide of material. With Ryle’s assistance they then gain access to Nuix Investigator, sophisticated Australian forensic search software.
Soon almost 400 journalists are dissecting the data, and on April 3 2016 the resulting reports are rolled out simultaneously. It is a tsunami of financial disclosure on a scale not previously imagined, let alone seen.
In another context this could be the storyline of a new Bond thriller but there is nothing fictitious about the so-called Panama Papers and the clandestine machinations they reveal.

Hack in a Flak Jacket

26/8/2016

 
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Peter Stefanovic: Hachette Australia $29.99

DEATH, disasters, destruction, disease: Peter Stefanovic has endured the worst imaginable circumstances in some of the world’s most dangerous places in the course of his employment as a television news journalist.
In a sensitive yet self-deprecatingly humorous professional memoir, Stefanovic recounts the highlights and lowlights of his eight years as a foreign correspondent for the Nine Network, based firstly in Los Angeles and later in London as he covered events across North America, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
Having followed his brother Karl into the media, the younger Stefanovic was posted overseas at the age of 26.
Among his earliest assignments were bunkering down in Texas as Hurricane Ike swept ashore and interviewing distraught fans on the day Michael Jackson died. In 2010 he was despatched to Haiti while the earthquake that killed at least 100,000 people was still reverberating.
From London he travelled to South Africa for the original trial of Oscar Pistorius, to Norway in the wake of a fundamentalist right-wing gunman’s murder spree, to France as the hunt for the Charlie Hebdo assassins was in progress and to Iraq for a meeting with an all-female militia unit behind ISIS lines.
Stefanovic takes readers for an edge-of-the-seat ride through the Arab Spring uprisings, the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship in Libya and the relentless warring that is characteristic of Gaza. He records the anguish and agony created by the carving up of Ukraine and describes the suffering wrought by the 2015 Nepalese earthquake.
On the surface the “flak jacket” of the book’s title is literal: the body armour Stefanovic wears while reporting from the frontline or shadowing rebel groups among bullets, tear gas and low-flying bombers. More deeply, however, it is a perfect metaphor for the subconscious emotional defences he erects in response to traumatic stress experienced repeatedly while at work.

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    Book reviews

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

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