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Killing Monica

26/2/2016

Candace Bushnell: Little, Brown $29.99

SEX and the City rebooted this new novel is definitely not. That said, SATC and Lipstick Jungle author Candace Bushnell’s latest New York City saga is entertaining escapism into a world few mere mortals ever glimpse.
Central character Pandemonia James ‘PJ’ Wallis is (precisely like Bushnell herself) a writer of fantastical female fiction – phenomenally popular chick-lit that has enraptured the male movers and shakers of Hollywood. PJ’s on-paper creation, Monica, is America’s darling – a good-time, can-do, party-hard gal whose life is the envy of book-buyers by the million. Monica has it all: beauty, success, confidence, wealth and a blissful, apparently charmed Manhattan existence – and so too, by extension, has her alter ego PJ.
Being constantly compared with a too-good-to-be-true fictitious invention is not all it’s cracked up to be, however; after years of living in her imaginary heroine’s shadow, PJ has had more than enough of never quite measuring up. Other projects beckon, and the public’s relentless obsession with Monica is a roadblock PJ is desperate to clear.
Alas, breaking free of the Monica-mania isn’t as easy as typing “THE END”, she discovers to her horror, with a publisher, a studio and an entire country baying for further instalments of their idyllic dream girl. What will it take to spring an increasingly frustrated PJ out of her self-made Monica trap?
Readers expecting SATC’s Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda won’t find too many familiar faces in this revisiting of NYC’s cocktail-club scene, populated as it is with franchised versions of Samantha at her most outrageous surrounded by actors, publicists and a suitably oily celebrity chef. While Killing Monica lacks the witty repartee of the Bushnell-inspired HBO TV series, its plot takes all the kinks and dips of an Olympic diving routine before arriving at a genuinely unpredictable and satisfying – if perhaps slightly hurried – climax.

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Heat

19/2/2016

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Ranulph Fiennes: Simon & Schuster $32.99

WHAT a difference a handful of decades makes.
When Ranulph Fiennes began his career as a young soldier seconded from the British army to Oman, he found himself fighting with the Sultan’s forces to defend Muslims from Marxist rebels in the country’s southern-most province, Dhofar. In the mid 1960s, Russian-trained fighters flooding overland from Yemen were vehemently opposed to Islam – a far cry from the current generation of Yemeni terrorists with their pseudo-religious fanaticism.
From an isolated base at Salalah on the Indian Ocean coastline, Fiennes led foot patrols through the Arabian Desert – one of the world’s hottest, driest and deadliest wastelands. Also known as the Empty Quarter, this expanse abutting Saudi Arabia had to that point been little explored by Europeans, creating an opportunity for Fiennes to not only serve the Sultan but at the same time indulge his quest for adventure by setting out to search for a mythical ancient city known as Ubar. That Oman is today one of the region’s most politically stable, peaceful countries is due largely to that era.
His memories of those years, and of the challenges of an earlier hovercraft expedition up the Nile River from the Egyptian delta to Lake Victoria (along the way meeting dictator-to-be Idi Amin in Uganda), make up the bulk of Heat, Fiennes’ tribute to some of the world’s most inhospitable climates.
In full uniform Fiennes later trained in the sweltering equatorial jungle of Brunei and contemplated joining a British counter-insurgency force on the Afghanistan-India border; in civilian life he circumnavigated the planet and ran seven marathons on seven continents in a single week, including in Singapore.
Most recently, aged 71, he became the oldest Briton to complete an infamous 251-kilometre footrace through the Sahara Desert, shedding blood, sweat, tears and skin while raising £2 million for charity.

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Five Nights in Paris

12/2/2016

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John Baxter: Harper Perennial $24.99

SETTING out to write a fresh, engaging guide to Paris is not for the faint-hearted. Paris is, after all, the most visited city on Earth, and many of those visitors end up writing in one way or another about their experiences there.
Not easily deterred, Australian expat author John Baxter set himself exactly that challenge, informed in part by a quarter of a century of living the life of a Parisian local.
Sydney-born Baxter settled in Paris in 1990. With his French film-maker wife and their daughter, he has explored every one of its 20 districts – all distinct in culture and character and offering points of interest seldom seen by regular tourists.
Baxter’s eagerness to show off the city’s nocturnal side is a natural extension of his occasional role as a literary-walking-tour guide. Asked to devise an alternative to day rambles, he hit on the idea of leading newcomers down the famous boulevards and avenues and through the obscure backstreets and alleyways long after most foreigners have sat down to dinner and perhaps a cabaret show.
Five Nights in Paris: After Dark in the City of Light presents Paris at both its sparkling best and its seedy worst: lit up and ready to party, party, party with those in the know.
With chapters arranged around five sense-inspired themes (sound, taste, touch, scent and sight) Baxter invites readers into a real-life version of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris Hollywood success.
His lively narrative introduces characters as intriguing as they are unexpected, ranging from Surrealist painters, early 20th-century photographers and African-American jazz musicians to restaurant front-of-house staff and modern-day burlesque performers. Along the way he describes the X-rated activities of Paris’s bourgeois beneath the chestnut trees of the Bois de Boulogne parkland and identifies one-time brothels and opium dens among the city’s grand edifices.

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Rain Music

5/2/2016

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Di Morrissey: Pan Macmillan Australia $35.00

WHEN talented but enigmatic musician Ned Chisholm drops out of mainstream life and into the rainforested hinterland of Far North Queensland, declaring he’s unable to return home attend a ceremony in his late father’s honour, his younger sister is determined to find a way to change his mind. Leaving behind a job in tourism, a devoted fiancé and a recently widowed mother in fictitious Tennyson in Central Victoria, Bella takes a long-overdue break from her nine-to-five routine and on the spur of the moment flies to Cairns.
Ned is nowhere to be found, however – at least, not initially. Not deterred, Bella discovers that a loose trail of evidence leads four hours further up the road to Cooktown, where she at last locates not only the elusive Ned but also a cast of warm and welcoming long-term residents.
Despite tension over the imminent memorial event, the siblings spend a blissful few days reconnecting at an isolated and exotically beautiful bushland property. But is this seemingly-idyllic tropical lifestyle actually too good to be true?
One of Australia’s most prolific and enduring authors of fiction, Di Morrissey is known for the meticulously detailed settings of her novels and the depth of characterisation that injects colour and movement into these plots.
In Rain Music she combines both to bring to life for readers the entrancing sights, sounds and scents of the country’s most northerly strip of land, Cape York, and introduce a representative cross-section of the down-to-earth locals who live there. The addition of historical information and evocative descriptions of the region – including some of its lesser-known parts – makes this book an entertaining incidental guide to the Cape.
Morrissey’s storyline is simultaneously heartwarming, inspiring and gripping, with car crashes, break-ins, abductions and emotional confrontations interspersed with the more tender aspects of an engaging family adventure.

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Book reviews

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Killing Monica

Heat

Five Nights in Paris

Rain Music

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