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No Going Back

30/3/2018

 
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Lisa Kennedy: Echo Publishing $32.99
 
“I FEEL guilty and… ashamed. I’m one of those stories you hear about in the news.” Lisa Kennedy’s candid admission sums up the shock and humiliation of having been deceived absolutely by her partner of almost a decade.
Very few Australians know Kennedy’s name. The situation could have been quite different, however, had a story filmed by current affairs program 60 Minutes been broadcast as planned.
In 2010, during what was intended to be a brief visit to introduce baby Daniel to his grandparents and aunt in Istanbul, Kennedy’s Turkish-born husband announced without warning that he had initiated divorce proceedings against her and that their son would live with him. Daniel was seven months old at the time.
After eight years of marriage, Kennedy was completely alone in an unfamiliar country where she spoke only a few words of the local language and whose laws were at best confusing and at worst unashamedly biased against foreigners.
The Australian Government was unable to intervene in what was essentially a domestic matter as far as the Turkish legal system was concerned.
Without her own parents, siblings or friends around her, Kennedy was left to choose between two unpalatable options: concede that she would never regain her son and return quietly to her old life in Melbourne, or dig in stubbornly and weather the antagonism being directed towards her by her husband and his family to continue fighting an expensive and emotionally exhausting battle for Daniel’s custody. Kennedy chose the latter.
When their case was eventually referred to the Family Court in Australia, the report was placed on hold by 60 Minutes. Seventeen months later a film crew from the program was detained by the authorities and an Australian child-recovery operative was jailed for their role in an eerily similar situation involving two Australian-born children Lebanon.

Island of Secrets

23/3/2018

 
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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.

The Shape of Water

16/3/2018

 
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Guillermo del Toro and Daniel Kraus: Feiwel & Friends $19.99
 
IT'S relatively routine for a novel to be licensed as inspiration for the Hollywood big screen, but it’s far less common for the content of an internationally successful film to be delivered concurrently in literary form.
In their most recent collaboration, Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro and his Trollhunters co-author Daniel Krause have teamed up to present del Toro’s Academy Awards ‘Best Picture’, The Shape of Water, as a book.
On the morning of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 2018 presentation ceremony, del Toro and Krause’s new print project was released.
As an alternative to the movie, the pair’s exquisitely balanced prose allows readers the luxury of overlaying their own visuals onto the haunting emotive storyline.
By 1962 standards, central character Elisa Esposito’s life has always been exceedingly mundane. Mute since birth and now orphaned, Elisa works the nightshift as a janitor at a US Government aerospace research centre in Baltimore.
One night, however, she glimpses something her low-level security clearance should never permit her to see – and so begins a connection that grows ever stronger as she is drawn back time and again.
The object of Elisa’s fascination is an amphibious human, captured in the Amazon Basin and transported in absolute secrecy to the centre, where studying the “creature” becomes priority number one for US scientists striving to gain a Cold War advantage.
To Elisa, though, this man is much more than a mere laboratory specimen, and through their own version of sign language the two begin to communicate.
Is there even the slightest chance that this unlikeliest couple can build a future together? Elisa’s one chance at preserving the relationship pits her against the full force of both US and Soviet operatives.
As a bonus, this book includes a scattering of illustrations by artist James Jean.​

The House of Unexpected Sisters

9/3/2018

 
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Alexander McCall Smith: Little, Brown $29.99
 
HAVING an uncommon surname is just one of many things distinguishing the “traditionally built” Mma Precious Ramotswe as a noteworthy Botswanan woman.
Another is running the country’s only all-female investigation outfit, an operation based on the outskirts of the capital, Gaborone: the nationally famous No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.
It is to this agency that Precious’s fellow Batswana turn when a husband is suspected of cheating, a debt is not paid, a loved one vanishes – or, in the latest instance, a sister of a colleague of an associate is dismissed from her role as a sales assistant for allegedly insulting a customer.
The now-unemployed Charity is adamant there was no rudeness, leading Precious and her second-in-command, Mma Grace Makutsi, to suspect the employer might have concocted an excuse for the firing. Is he going to give the position to a mistress, perhaps?
As the two begin their covert sleuthing a longstanding nemesis reappears: Violet Sephoto, Grace’s former classmate at the Botswana Secretarial College. Is this shameless woman with her too-short skirts, her deplorable student record and her focus on attracting male attention somehow behind Charity’s dismissal?
Before that question can be answered a third conundrum arises: an unfamiliar Ramotswe, a nurse, is mentioned in a newspaper report.
Precious has never heard of this apparent relative. Is she a legitimate family member or an imposter passing herself off as a Ramotswe for unscrupulous reasons?
With Grace on the case of the seemingly unjustified layoff, Precious focuses on her own mystery and how it might relate to her beloved father, the now-late cattle baron Obed Ramotswe.
As his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, author Alexander McCall Smith is visiting Australia. He will speak about his latest releases and favourite characters in Melbourne and Warrnambool next week.

I’ll Keep You Safe

2/3/2018

 
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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.

    ' Books are treasure for the spirit and ​the soul. '​
    — VB 2020

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    Book reviews

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