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Leaving Before the Rains Come

27/5/2016

 
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Alexandra Fuller: Vintage $22.99
 
GROWING up in the backblocks of rural Zambia, surrounded by the turmoil and terror of Rhodesia’s civil wars and the constant uncertainty of post-colonialism, life is never dull for Alexandra Fuller. As the daughters of an English-born farmer and his Anglo-Kenyan wife, Fuller and her sister learn to negotiate a hazardous landscape, potentially lethal wildlife, rampant diseases and political volatility. Complicating the mix is their mother’s emotional instability and both parents’ excessive drinking and financial recklessness.
Nothing prepares the girls, however, for life in the wider world.
Beyond the relative comfort of her father’s various farms, as a young wife living with her American adventurer husband in the capital, Lusaka, Fuller first encounters the unfamiliar insecurity of feeling alien. With each new life event – the birth of her children, the family’s move to the US, the couple’s search for work and acquisition of a mortgage – Fuller’s discomfort escalates.
Emotionally distanced from her husband, she begins to wonder if their marriage can survive the pitfalls of a materially driven Western existence in a culture completely at odds with her simplistic upbringing.
In Leaving Before the Rains Come Fuller grapples with the possibility that the union is beyond salvation: “Ours (has) contracted into a grocery-list relationship – finances, children, housekeeping,” she writes. She describes the loneliness and isolation of first-time motherhood and the lack of support that leaves her floundering.
At the same time she questions her own identity. No-longer truly African, she finds herself caught somewhere between her youth in tropical southern Africa and her adulthood in the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming and Idaho, distanced physically from one place but never quite fully acclimatised to the other.
Fuller’s frank assessment of her uncomfortable circumstances creates a memoir that is likely to trigger self-examination in many readers and prompt some to review their own choices.

In Brazil

20/5/2016

 
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Fran Bryson: Scribe $32.99
 
WITH anticipation of this year’s Olympics now on everyone’s lips it’s hardly surprising that the games’ host, Brazil, is attracting more than its usual share of international attention.
Through a series of chapters profiling specific locations and events, Fran Bryson offers a colourful glimpse into the world’s fourth-largest nation, second only to Nigeria for its population of people of African heritage. (Approximately 100 million modern-day Brazilians are descended at least in part from slaves.)
Bryson draws comparisons between the histories, cultures and geographies of Australia and Brazil, arranging her observations – formed during repeat visits over many years – by region.
In lively, entertaining and at-times highly humorous detail she describes Easter passion plays performed by telenovela (soap opera) stars in Nova Jerusalém; the rise and then decline of the rubber industry around Xapuri in the upper Amazon Basin; the pedestrian-unfriendly but eyecatching architecture of the capital, Brasília; and the terror generated by taking public transport (“It can be curiously liberating travelling at such speeds that if something goes wrong, you know you won’t survive”). She relates tales of bushrangers’ exploits in the badlands of Piranhas, where the severed heads of 11 outlaws were arranged and photographed on the cloth-covered front steps of the local town hall, and remembers the eight young men and boys shot and killed by rogue police in the Candelária massacre of homeless people in Rio de Janeiro in 1993.
She also examines the at-times-uneasy marriage of Catholicism and African spiritualism that has produced in Brazil a unique religious landscape.
Along the way Bryson notes that Tasmania’s last Aborigines have not in fact died out but are alive and well in the small island communities of Bass Strait – an unexpected inclusion in a book about Brazil but one that in this instance feels natural.

Midnight Watch

13/5/2016

 
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David Dyer: Penguin $32.99
 
A CRYSTAL-CLEAR, moonless night, an iceberg and not one but two ships steaming at full speed into danger: they’re as thrilling a combination of ingredients as any writer could dare to dream up.
The plot to Sydney author, literature teacher and former lawyer and merchant marine Dyer’s first novel is based not on the writer’s imagination, however, but on real life – specifically, the events surrounding the “unsinkable” Titanic’s sinking 104 years ago.
Largely fact augmented by selective fiction, The Midnight Watch revisits the world’s worst maritime disaster from a vastly different viewpoint to that taken in most retellings: that of individuals on a second, little-known cargo ship, Californian, which like Titanic finds itself on the night of April 14 1912 surrounded by ice.
However, unlike its huge English cousin, Californian cuts its engines and settles in to wait for daylight before continuing its voyage towards the US.
By the time morning dawns, Titanic is on the ocean bed and Californian is a ship divided – divided not by the captain’s decision to delay its progress but by his apparent refusal to respond to distress rockets fired from a vessel nearby. The hours, days and weeks that follow are a time of claims and counter-claims, accusations, allegations and acrimony as Californian’s officers and crew turn on each other and on the press amid a flurry of newspaper fascination with every detail of Titanic’s demise.
Told through the eyes of fictitious Boston American reporter John Steadman, this tale of mystery explores everything from maritime practice to personal conscience to US-English antipathy.
Dyer sets a newsroom-style pace that keeps readers engrossed and eager to uncover the next column centimetre of this brand-new take on one of history’s most dramatic stories as Steadman pursues an explanation for an otherwise-exemplary captain’s dismissal of Titanic’s plea for help.

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