Category: Adventure - Wabonga Press

My Polar Dream

23/11/2018

Jade Hameister: Macmillan Australia, $29.99

JADE Hameister has always been an exceptional achiever.
Aged six she walked to the summit of Mt Kosciuszko.
At 12 she convinced her parents to take her on a family hike through the Himalayas to Everest Base Camp.
The following year, at 13 Hameister set her sights on reaching the South Pole.
Only one obstacle stood in her way: the Hameisters’ chosen guide insisted she be at least 16 years old before attempting such a gruelling expedition.
Undaunted, she decided to kill time with a couple of relatively straightforward warm-up treks: to the North Pole and across the Greenland icecap.
Never having skied, she prepared with a few days’ training in New Zealand’s South Island, then set out from the Svalbard Archipelago in Norway determined to become the youngest person ever to ski entirely unsupported and unassisted from outside the final degree of latitude to the most northerly point in the world.
Along the way her youthful ambition, inspiring teenage message and passionate environmental focus caught the attention of both the National Geographic Society (which engaged a videographer to accompany Hameister and her father on each of their three increasingly taxing challenges) and the team behind the global phenomenon of TEDx talks.
Those same characteristics quickly drew the ire of a cohort of anonymous online trolls, however, who used the phrase “Make me a sandwich” to suggest Hameister’s true purpose as a woman should be to wait on men.
Her reply – along with the nearly three years’ worth of agony, frustration, ecstasy and relief that preceded it as she completed her sub-zero hat-trick – is recounted in Hameister’s own voice, from the joy of opening special letters written by her closest school friends to the physical torture of hauling twice her own bodyweight in a sled over jagged ridges of ice.

The Distant Shore

16/11/2018

Suzannah Thirlwall: $4.99 (Kindle edition)

IN ORPHIR, Orkney, it’s 1391.
Slipping away from his widowed mother after church one Sunday, Thorfinn races with his friend Thora ahead of an approaching storm across a treeless, otherwise-deserted moor, desperate to find shelter. Together they huddle in the entryway of a stone burial chamber, terrified of the fury raging outside but equally panic-stricken at the prospect of being haunted forever by the graves’ evil spirits.
The same merciless gale brings good fortune to the band of Orcadians who prowl the churning shoreline praying that fate delivers an undefended shipwreck to plunder. Their target this time is a galley from Venice laden with riches rarely seen in this subsistence settlement on the fringe of civilisation.
Years later, Finn and Thora find themselves together again, this time in the capital, Kirkwall, where the community’s ruler, a Scottish earl, is preparing to lead his people in a celebration whose character is as clearly Norse in origin as the now-teenagers’ names. Joining in the festivities is one of the few survivors of the Venetian vessel’s stranding, the youthful sailor Matteo.
Finn barely remembers his father, a fisherman who early in his son’s childhood failed to return from a routine expedition, presumably drowned at sea.
When a bedraggled stranger shows up in the revellers’ midst, however, Finn knows instantly that he is back. But where has the old man been all this time? Could a carved tablet in his odd-looking skiff hold the answer?
Soon Finn is on the move, setting sail with Matteo and the earl in a quest that will take them across the open Atlantic Ocean all the way to the land that centuries later will become Nova Scotia, Canada.
It’s there that the expeditioners’ ordeal really begins, pitting Finn and his companions not only against fierce native tribes but against themselves.

The Cull

16/2/2018

Tony Park: Macmillan Australia $29.99

RHINOCEROS are dying, being shot under cover of night and having their horns lopped off to feed an illegal trade thousands of kilometres away.
Sonja Kurtz is frustrated. Not only has her work to establish an all-woman anti-poaching patrol ended disastrously in an ambush with the loss of two squadmembers’ lives but now it appears her boyfriend, ex-CIA agent Hudson Brand, has taken advantage of her absence from their home to indulge in a blatant affair.
Scouting for fresh work, Sonja is approached by high-profile British entrepreneur and animal lover Julianne Clyde-Smith, whose business interests are flourishing among the easternmost game reserves of southern Africa.
With seemingly limitless finances at her disposal, Julianne is determined to both rid the region of its illegal wildlife slaughter and expand her resort empire by acquiring any properties that fail to fortify their own operations against lawlessness.
Her plan has Sonja at its heart: a carefully chosen militia of experienced international mercenaries and local operatives will search out and neutralise the cross-border hunters before they have a chance to strike.
The exact composition of the line-up is at Sonja’s discretion: in addition to young former maid Tema Matsebula, a member of her now-disbanded Leopards squad, and tracker Ezekial Lekganyane, Sonja recruits Angolan career soldier Mario Machado, a proven killer with a murky past and an ever-ready trigger finger. The group is directed by Julianne’s head of security, fellow Brit James Paterson.
When events take an unanticipated turn Sonja finds herself on the run, fleeing from one out-of-the-way park to another in a bid to stay one step ahead of both the so-called “authorities” in countries where corruption among officials is well entrenched – South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania – and hired assassins.
The Cull reunites two key characters who first met in An Empty Coast, set in Sonja’s native Namibia.

The Ice Star / In the Shadow of the Mountain

1/12/2017

Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $1.30 / $3.99 Kindle e-books

COMPLETING a pair of novels in a single calendar year is a rare achievement for any writer; having a third title in the series launched within the same 12-month period is an almost-unheard-of feat.
Yet this is precisely what Danish author Christoffer Petersen will achieve when the final instalment in his Konstabel Fenna Brongaard trilogy is published in its English translation on Christmas Eve.
Petersen’s first Greenlandic thriller, The Ice Star, opens with the torture of young Danish military special forces operative Brongaard by two foreign mercenaries in a hut in an isolated settlement far above the Arctic Circle in northeastern Greenland.
Brongaard has been on assignment with the government’s sled-dog patrol, an elite unit established to defend the sovereignty of Denmark’s biggest and most remote territory. Now, she is in the hands of a pair of unrelenting inquisitors who have executed her partner and seem determined to frame her for the sickening murder.
Brongaard’s sole chance of escaping rests with David Maratse, a local policeman in the village in which she is being held.
Set against the severity of Greenland’s harsh, icebound, arid terrain, Brongaard’s desperate scramble for survival leads from tiny Scoresbysund across thickly packed sea-ice onto a luxurious coastal expedition ship, where the passengers turn out to be every bit as formidable as the pursuers she has so far evaded on land, and to the high-rise offices of cut-throat corporate Canada.
The suspense continues in In the Shadow of the Mountain, in which the life-or-death action is set in three immensely contrasting locations: cosmopolitan Copenhagen, the Arizona desert in the US and an exploratory mine site outside Greenland’s capital, Nuuk.
The third episode in this Bourne-like Nordic adventure, the soon-to-be-released The Shaman’s House, will feature an Australian connection, linking the world’s two major islands on diametrically opposite sides of the globe.

The Girl from Venice

3/2/2017

Martin Cruz Smith: Simon & Schuster $32.99

ONCE part of a fishing dynasty, Innocenzo now sails alone, one brother dead, drowned when strafed in an Allied air raid, the other dead to him as a result of having enticed Cenzo’s wife into an affair that ultimately cost the young woman her life.
To their mother, however, Cenzo is the least successful of the sons: a simple fisherman who refuses to do his patriotic war duty by joining Benito Mussolini’s Sons of the She-Wolf and to date has failed the family by finding excuses to delay marrying his widowed sister-in-law.
It doesn’t help his situation that the adulterous surviving brother, Giorgio, is a famous screen actor and airforce hero known as the face and voice of the Fascist party.
Cenzo’s life is further complicated when during a moonlit outing from his home in Pellestrina, a tiny breakwater community on the lagoon bordering Venice, he reels in more than merely fish. Manoeuvring silently through the marshes he is shocked to discover what he mistakes at first for a corpse, floating pale and sodden alongside his boat. In fact, the teenaged girl, Giulia, is very much alive – for the time-being, at least.
The lone escapee from a German attack on a community of Jews, Giulia is being stalked by a warship.
Her only hope of escaping lies with Cenzo.
With the end of World War II imminent and American forces likely to reach them within a matter of days, can he smuggle her to safety?
The pair’s cat-and-mouse travels take them from Pellestrina to Venice, then Salo, Mussolini’s seat of power and one of the final strongholds of the Italian military.
As Cenzo is forced to mingle with Salo’s glamorous diplomats and socialites, Giorgio’s treachery resurfaces.
Can the siblings set aside their rivalry for the sake of survival, or will the long-festering hatred lead to more tragedy?

Precious and Grace

21/10/2016

Alexander McCall Smith: Little, Brown $32.99

ASK anybody outside southern Africa to name a famous Botswanan and almost invariably they will respond with “that Precious woman – you know, the one in the book”. Much of the world knows little about day-to-day happenings in Botswana yet millions of readers are relatively familiar with the culture through a line-up of endearing characters created by British author Alexander McCall Smith.
In the latest instalment in his The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, McCall Smith has business partners Mma Precious Ramotswe and Mma Grace Makutsi turn their focus back 30 years to an era in which their city, Gaborone, was just a dusty country town. Their detective agency is engaged to help locate the childhood home and classroom friend of a visiting Canadian, born in Gaborone and cared for in her early years by a nurse known only as “Rosie”.
As Precious – a proud, independent Tswana “of traditional build” – and her less full-figured but more conservative business partner set about tracing their client’s roots, their investigative path diverges, testing their professional bond.
At the same time Precious is confounded by an occasional employee’s advocacy of a seemingly too-good-to-be-true cattle-fattening scheme that threatens both the friendships and the finances of their social group.
Throw the unplanned adoption of a stray dog and an ongoing feud with a fellow female entrepreneur into the mix and this is a heart-warming literary adventure that weaves together unexpected storylines played out against an exotic setting by a genuinely charismatic cast.
McCall Smith’s writing is generous and intimate, laying bare the types of issues that exist in contemporary Botswanan society.
As is the case with all good series, it is not necessary for readers to have met these people or places through any of the previous 16 novels; Previous and Grace stands comfortably on its own two feet.

The Desert Vet

2/9/2016

Alex Tinson: Allen & Unwin $29.99

REPTILE collector, camel expert, big-cat doctor, gazelle wrangler, antiques aficionado, father of five: Alex Tinson juggles disparate roles in balancing his career as a veterinarian and researcher with his pride in heading up a happily blended Australian-Emirati family.
Raised on Sydney’s North Shore watching Daktari on TV and reading zookeeper Gerald Durrell’s books, Tinson studied in Melbourne and gained his early vet experience at Bacchus Marsh and Tweed Heads.
While overseeing a Bicentennial camel race across the Outback in 1988 he was approached by a representative of the United Arab Emirates’ ruling family. Within weeks Tinson had relocated to Abu Dhabi and from there to the remote oasis town of Al Ain to hone the crown prince’s stable of racing camels. There he found animals developed over generations to weigh less than a fine-boned Thoroughbred horse. The Melbourne Cup might stop Australia but throughout the oil-rich Gulf countries it’s camel racing that dominates.
Tinson’s story is ripe with exhilarating highs (the births of the world’s first embryo-transfer and frozen-embryo camel calves; a slashing of race speeds by 30 per cent; the advent of the camel ‘beauty’ show) and devastating lows (most notably, losing two babies to sudden infant death syndrome). He details the fervour with which he has pursued the most coveted trophy in the billion-dollar sport of camel racing: the Golden Sword.
Tinson writes candidly of his successes and failures, both professionally and as a husband, son and father. Tinson also delves into the psyche of Bedouin Arab culture: the importance of tradition, the loyalty to family and the laid-back “it’s God’s will” attitude that so surprises many Westerners.
His passion for camels – the animal that has fuelled his life in the Middle East and allowed him to pursue groundbreaking breeding projects in Western Australia, Mongolia, Pakistan and India – is obvious at every stage.

Hack in a Flak Jacket

26/8/2016

Peter Stefanovic: Hachette Australia $29.99

DEATH, disasters, destruction, disease: Peter Stefanovic has endured the worst imaginable circumstances in some of the world’s most dangerous places in the course of his employment as a television news journalist.
In a sensitive yet self-deprecatingly humorous professional memoir, Stefanovic recounts the highlights and lowlights of his eight years as a foreign correspondent for the Nine Network, based firstly in Los Angeles and later in London as he covered events across North America, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
Having followed his brother Karl into the media, the younger Stefanovic was posted overseas at the age of 26.
Among his earliest assignments were bunkering down in Texas as Hurricane Ike swept ashore and interviewing distraught fans on the day Michael Jackson died. In 2010 he was despatched to Haiti while the earthquake that killed at least 100,000 people was still reverberating.
From London he travelled to South Africa for the original trial of Oscar Pistorius, to Norway in the wake of a fundamentalist right-wing gunman’s murder spree, to France as the hunt for the Charlie Hebdo assassins was in progress and to Iraq for a meeting with an all-female militia unit behind ISIS lines.
Stefanovic takes readers for an edge-of-the-seat ride through the Arab Spring uprisings, the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship in Libya and the relentless warring that is characteristic of Gaza. He records the anguish and agony created by the carving up of Ukraine and describes the suffering wrought by the 2015 Nepalese earthquake.
On the surface the “flak jacket” of the book’s title is literal: the body armour Stefanovic wears while reporting from the frontline or shadowing rebel groups among bullets, tear gas and low-flying bombers. More deeply, however, it is a perfect metaphor for the subconscious emotional defences he erects in response to traumatic stress experienced repeatedly while at work.

Leaving Before the Rains Come

27/5/2016

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.

City of Thorns

15/4/2016

Ben Rawlence: Portobello $35.00

DREAMS – however distant – of resettlement abroad fuel the sometimes-heartbreaking hopes of residents trapped in the scorchingly hot, desolate limbo of the world’s biggest refugee camp: a combination of three separate but closely inter-related sites ringing the remote Kenyan town Dadaab.
With a population greater than that of Geelong and still climbing, the Dadaab camps house not only primarily Somalis but also Sudanese, Ethiopians, Ugandans, Congolese, Burundians, Rwandans and even an unexpectedly high number of Kenyan nationals, drawn by the promise of the free, foreign-funded medical care and education that their own government is unable to provide. There they are crowded together in makeshift accommodation that in some cases has sheltered two generations born and raised in exile from their ancestral regions.
Rawlence – a former Human Rights Watch researcher – tells the story of the day-to-day existence of these displaced people through the eyes of nine individuals who, due to contrasting but equally traumatic circumstances, have been forced to subsist behind the protective walls of thorn-tree branches that give this book its name.
His intimate portraits of men and women young and old explore the ways through which their paths have converged. Examples of inter-tribal tension hatred illustrate the disharmony that is rife across Africa, an enormous continent inhabited by people whose cultures in some instances are completely incompatible.
Rawlence also documents the rise of Al-Shabaab as a militant, extremist force willing and able to terrorise and kill Africans every bit as readily as it does Western targets.
Should readers expect to find a happy ending to this story? “Happy” might not, in this situation, be entirely appropriate, given the horrendous experiences many of the refugees have had on their way to and at Dadaab. It is perhaps most accurate to say the outcome is not entirely negative for at least some members of Rawlence’s cast.

Heat

19/2/2016

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.

An Empty Coast

15/1/2016

Tony Park: Macmillan Australia $29.99

FEW Australian authors write as convincingly on the subject of southern Africa as does reporter, press secretary, public relations consultant and soldier Tony Park. This should come as no surprise, however, given that Park has homes both in Sydney and adjoining South Africa’s Kruger National Park.
An Empty Coast – Park’s 12th African-themed novel – unites three characters first introduced in earlier books: Sonja Kurtz and Sterling Smith of The Delta and The Hunter’s Hudson Brand.
The circumstances that draw the trio together in the scrubland of modern-day Namibia are a direct result of almost a century of cross-border warfare between South Africa, Angola and the former German colony intermingled with internal uprisings.
When the desiccated body of an airman is uncovered in an archaeological dig just outside Etosha National Park, the find rekindles interest in the disappearance of a plane almost three decades earlier. International mercenary Kurtz is called in to help her archaeologist daughter Emma identify the dead man’s uniform. En route to the site – and a likely reunion with former boyfriend Smith – Kurtz crosses paths with private investigator Brand and the two are forced to team up.
With Emma suddenly in danger, the unlikely partners put their collective survival skills into action in the face of assassination attempts, repelling air and ground attacks while racing across a vast and treacherous Namibian landscape described in tantalising detail by Park.
An Empty Coast interweaves the history of three African countries with the suspense of wildlife poaching, smuggling and military subterfuge and the grandeur of the vast open deserts and isolated towns of rural Namibia.
Gunfights, explosions, kidnappings and espionage make the plot fast-paced and engaging, and sexual tension between several of the key figures ensures that this story is enthralling to the final page, with an option remaining for further adventures by this newly bonded group.

Walking the Nile

14/8/2015

Levison Wood: Simon & Schuster UK, $22.99

THERE'S a reason even the most adventurous expeditioners don’t usually attempt walk the length of the world’s longest river – in fact, there are multiple reasons, all exceedingly sound, as army-officer-turned-explorer Levison Wood knew when he fixed his sights on doing just that.
In December 2013 Wood (a veteran of service with a British parachute regiment in Afghanistan) set out to become the first person to follow the Nile entirely on foot from its burbling headwaters in the highlands of Rwanda to the silty Egyptian delta on the Mediterranean coast.
Wood’s journey – to be filmed in part for a television documentary series – would see him traverse six of Africa’s most challenging countries, beginning with Rwanda and including Tanzania, Uganda, South Sudan and Sudan.
The 6839-kilometre slog would pass through some of the least pleasant hiking terrain imaginable – slippery rainforests, crocodile-ridden marshlands, enervatingly humid savannah, parched sand dunes – all the while in an atmosphere that ranged from barely contained intertribal ethnic unrest to outright civil war. Into the bargain, the timing of his journey was such that he would need to cross a portion of the Sahara Desert at the height of summer – a feat rarely attempted by the most hardened nomadic camel herders, let alone Brits already weary and undernourished after months on the move. His only support would be occasional porters enlisted along the way.
In Walking the Nile, Wood’s experiences are documented in his own words and photographs, carrying readers with him and his minuscule party as they push ever northwards. He details the raw emotional extremes of his exploits: the anxiety borne of the likelihood that men whose hands he shakes have murdered their neighbours, the joys of adopting an abandoned baby monkey, the devastation of losing a travelling companion to heatstroke and the mateship cemented by trudging for weeks at a time in semi-silence.

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