Wabonga Press
  • WELCOME
  • OUR SERVICES
  • OUR PROJECTS
  • OUR CONTENT
  • CONTACT US

The Templars' Last Secret

27/10/2017

 
Picture
Martin Walker: Hachette Australia $32.99
 
TUCKED away in the southwestern corner of France is one of the world’s most impressive collections of prehistoric art. The départment of Dordogne is known in international circles for a trio of drawcards: more than 1500 castles, abundant black truffles and the 600-plus irreplaceable Paleolithic paintings that line the Cave of Lascaux.
Within the Dordogne, Périgord is a normally sleepy, peaceful region, but in 21st-century France, extremist violence can flare without warning. Now, it seems, the Vézère Valley is being targeted – in a fictitious sense, at least.
The 10th release in Martin Walker’s ‘Bruno’ series opens with soldier-turned-village-police-chief Bruno Courrèges preparing to host the wedding in St Denis of two archaeologists.
The drafting of his speech must fit around his official duties, but in small-town rural France, policing is more often a matter of gently guiding delinquent teenagers back into the classroom than of investigating life-or-death cross-border crime.
For Bruno, the working week preceding his friends’ nuptials turns out to be an exception, however.
When the body of an unfamiliar woman is found sprawled at the foot of the once-grand Château de Commarque, with its Templar connections, it is apparent that her death was no accident. Unsuccessful attempts to identify the victim at first frustrate Bruno and his fellow law enforcers, then drive them to explore far beyond their usual boundaries – all the way to Israel and North Africa.
The trail of evidence they assemble spans thousands of years of Vézère history, beginning with the creation of the valley’s priceless artworks and extending through the Middle Ages, when knights returning from the Crusades were rumoured to have secreted their legendary treasure somewhere within the chateau.
Accompanied by his trusty basset hound Balzac, Bruno knows that for this tiny community, time to solve the mysterious killing – and in so doing stave off an infinitely bigger attack – is running out.

The Man from Talalaivka

20/10/2017

 
Picture
Olga Chaplin: Green Olive Press $33.95
 
WHEN Anglo-Australians think of World War II battle zones, the natural tendency is to list only those in which our own servicemen fought: Southeast Asia, the Pacific, North Africa, Western Europe. The unimaginable destruction that occurred as Hitler’s army swept across Eastern Europe is overlooked.
For a generation of immigrant Australians, however, the realities of life before and during that ‘other’ conflict were transported along with their meagre belongings when they fled to an adopted country on the opposite side of the world.
Olga Chaplin’s parents were among the many thousands of displaced Ukrainians who managed to regroup sufficiently to forge a contented, prosperous future in Australia. Her beautifully worded, fictionalised account of their experience has the ability to warm a reader’s heart one minute and summon tears the next.
The story of Petro ‘Peter’ Pospile opens in December 1929 in Talalaivka, a tiny administrative town in far-northern Ukraine.
Following the death of Russia’s socialist dictator Lenin, control has been seized by totalitarian tyrant Stalin. Stalin is pillaging Ukraine’s rich black-soil farmland, confiscating its produce to feed Russians while millions of Ukrainians starve.
A veterinarian, Peter is considered marginally more useful than the typical local worker, yet not even this can save his family from horrendous suffering under Stalinist rule.
After more than a decade of deprivation, he accepts the arrival of German soldiers in June 1941 as just one more chapter of a never-ending ordeal. He cannot foresee that he and Evdokia will soon be sent to labour camps in Germany, Peter to fight Allied-bomb blazes in Berlin and Wilhelmshaven and his wife to manufacture munitions on an assembly line.
Eventually peace is declared but the couple’s long-entrenched distress is not easily banished: as homeless, stateless refugees, they continue to fear the Soviets’ reach and struggle to create a stable new existence for themselves.

Lycke

6/10/2017

 
Picture
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?

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

    ​​

    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.​

    Picture

    Categories

    All
    Adventure
    Africa
    Antarctica
    Arctic
    Asia
    Atlantic
    Australia
    Author – Australian
    Biography
    British Isles
    Caribbean
    Christmas
    Crime
    Easter
    Entertainment
    Europe
    Fiction
    Finance
    Food
    History
    Humour
    Journalism
    Maritime
    Middle East
    Nature
    New Year
    Non-fiction
    North America
    Pacific
    Pandemic
    Relationships
    Romance
    Scandinavia
    South America
    Sport
    Sub-continent
    Suspense
    Travel
    War

    Archive

    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015

Picture