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Mrs Kelly

26/5/2017

 
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Grantlee Kieza: ABC Books $39.99
 
ELLEN Quinn is barely 18 years of age when she falls under the spell of emancipated convict John ‘Red’ Kelly, 30. Ellen’s family have been in Australia for almost a decade, having emigrated from the northern tip of Ireland as free settlers shortly before the Potato Famine swept across their homeland.
Despite his earlier thievery, Red has behaved impeccably since being transported to Tasmania and later relocating to the foothills of the Great Dividing Range north of Melbourne, where works for Ellen’s parents. Although James Quinn is dubious, when his eldest daughter reveals she is pregnant she is allowed to marry.
So begins the adult life of Ellen Kelly: the one-time raven-haired, carefree, horse-loving girl from County Antrim who as a middle-aged matron and mother of 12 children will gain infamy – “the notorious Mrs Kelly”, as she will be dubbed by Victoria’s assistant police commissioner.
It is Ellen’s first-born son, Edward, who becomes the ‘man’ of the household when Red – slowly embittered by years of struggling to earn a legitimate living – slips back into his petty-criminal ways and then dies. At 11, young Ned is ill-prepared to fill his father’s shoes but has little choice in the matter; in 19th-century Greta every slab hut needs a male figurehead.
Behind the scenes Ellen rules, however. Illiterate, she signs both her marriage certificates with a simple “X”, yet when her family’s reputation is questioned she speaks up loudly, proudly and stridently, on occasion defending her increasingly wayward boys in court and in one particularly impassioned incident crushing a policeman’s helmet with a baking paddle as he attempts to arrest her third son, teenaged Dan.
In the end, Ellen outlives more than half of her offspring as a tough, determined, desperate pioneer in one of the harshest periods of Australia’s history.

None but the Dead

19/5/2017

 
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Lin Anderson: Macmillan $19.99
 
LONG-TIME residents say that ‘incomers’ moving to Sanday, one of the outermost of the scattered Orkney islands off the north-east corner of Scotland, are generally running away from something. Mike Jones is no exception – so when traces of a human skeleton are unearthed from the soon-to-be vegetable garden behind his partially renovated Sanday house, he finds the police attention it generates rather unnerving.
The discovery is the second mysterious happening at the former school building; in its attic Jones has already found 13 ‘magic flowers’ crafted from deceased children’s clothing.
Orkney detective Erling Flett is one of the first professionals called to the scene, followed shortly thereafter by two forensic experts, Dr Rhona MacLeod and her assistant, and a special investigator, Michael McNab, from big-city Glasgow, a full day’s travelling over land and sea to the south. There, the trio have been looking into the death of an elderly man in his own apartment – a death that now seems to have been much more suspicious than they had at first assumed.
MacLeod has an island connection herself, but not to Orkney; rather, her childhood was spent on the Isle of Skye on the opposite side of Scotland.
As work on the two cases escalates, the team begins to see similarities. Could these apparent homicides – hundreds of kilometres apart and separated by at least half a century in time – actually be linked?
Anderson’s fictitious storyline is accompanied by intimate descriptions of the real-life places and events that make Orkney a unique archipelago of Neolithic structures and World War II relics surrounded by the bitter North Sea between Britain and the islands’ former ruler, Norway: a tiny outpost of proud Viking heritage where Norse names are common and islanders consider themselves to be Orcadians first and foremost rather than Scots or Brits.

The Cows

12/5/2017

 
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Dawn O’Porter: Harper Collins $29.99
 
THIRTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD Camilla Stacey is confident, frank, fulfilled and secure in her choices to not have children, to eschew emotional relationships with men and to speak her mind daily via the immensely successful blog HowItIs.com. In the eyes of her half a million readers Cam is an idol; to her three older sisters, however, she is a sad, lonely figure unable to experience the true sense of accomplishment that only motherhood can generate.
For personal assistant Stella, looking into a mirror is a painful experience, every glance showing all too clearly the face of her identical twin, Alice, who like their mother was killed quickly and cruelly by aggressive cancer. Now Stella has learned she too carries the BRCA gene. Having her ovaries removed is the most sensible precaution yet Stella is not yet ready to abandon her hopes of having a baby – hopes that have just been thrown into further doubt by the unwillingness of her boyfriend to co-operate.
TV producer Tara, on the other hand, already has a child: Annie – the product of a one-night stand six years earlier. Raising a daughter alone is both a challenge and a joy for Tara: an achievement that outshines even her substantial screen credits. Now it seems this is about to unravel thanks to a semi-drunken indiscretion on what she thought was a largely deserted train. For a professional accustomed to disclosing other people’s dirty secrets, it’s mortifying having her own actions examined, debated and publicly mocked.
As the three strangers struggle to keep their lives in London in order, they reflect on not only each other’s decisions but also their own.
The Cows’ author, Dawn O’Porter, is an established TV reporter and print journalist known for her socially confronting documentaries on sexuality and body image – two themes that are repeated throughout this novel.

Talking As Fast As I Can

5/5/2017

 
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Lauren Graham: Viking $32.99
 
SHE'S played Craig T. Nelson’s daughter, Alexis Bledel’s mother, David Sutcliffe’s wife, Ray Romano’s fiancée and her real-life boyfriend’s sister in a Hollywood career that has rarely allowed more than a moment’s downtime.
Fans of her two incredibly successful and long-running television dramas, Gilmore Girls and Parenthood, have been aware for years of Lauren Graham’s ability to regurgitate rapid-fire dialogue at a pace that would leave the average actor completely tongue-tied.
What they might not have realised is that Graham – an accomplished writer and producer – has spent a disproportionately generous share of her precious off-screen hours jotting down equally hilarious and irreverent prose of her own.
In her latest book, a collection of vignettes revisiting some of her favourite showbusiness memories, the woman known by millions of viewers as Lorelai Gilmore and/or Sarah Braverman delivers a sassily witty commentary on her experiences both in front of and behind the studio camera.
Graham recalls her excruciatingly awkward first meeting with Peter Krause, the man who would much later become her off-screen partner as well as her brother on Parenthood.
She shares details of her unconventional upbringing in Japan and the Caribbean, her deep and genuine friendships with castmates and her disregard for the celebrity lifestyle, mocking the so-called ‘benefits’ of fame. She confesses her distaste of the outdoors and her constant struggle to meet writing deadlines.
Graham weaves into her commentary a walk through the popular culture of the 1990s and early 2000s (Filofax organisers, videotapes, BlackBerry PDAs) and pokes fun at her nationally televised failing as a fashion judge.
And as a highlight for Gilmore Girls aficionados, she includes diary excerpts from the period in which – a decade after Lorelai was officially retired – she returns to the set of fictitious Stars Hollow to reprise the character for the series’ exclusive Netflix reboot.

    ' 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.
    Please contact Wabonga's publisher, Rosalea Ryan, to discuss how this service can be tailored to your newspaper or magazine.​

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