Category: North America

Camino Winds

19/6/2020

John Grisham: Hodder & Staughton $32.99

RARELY does John Grisham revisit a set of characters, regardless of how successful that cast’s original exploits have been. In Camino Winds, Grisham makes an exception.
The fact readers are served up a second helping of Mercer Mann and Bruce Cable is a gift in itself; that their reinvigorated storyline takes an entirely new direction makes this sequel an intriguing contrast to the original novel, Camino Island, and at the same time a release that deserves to stand independently on merit.
In this instalment bookstore owner Cable is the key to the plot while Mann takes a sideways step into a peripheral role.
Hurricane Leo has just carved its way across Camino, twisting, churning and inflicting on the pretty seaside village of Santa Rosa catastrophic destruction and at least one death.
When Cable is called to the property of lawyer-turned-novelist Nelson Kerr to identify a battered body, it seems his friend has become an unwitting victim of the storm’s ferocity.
However, prompted by local author Bob Cobb and college student Nick Sutton, Cable soon starts to question whether the fatal injuries were indeed inflicted by flying debris. Could at least three separate blows to the head really have been caused by windborne branches? Surely the odds of this having happened must be extraordinarily low, so what – or who – actually did kill Kerr?
In the chaotic aftermath of Leo, Cable, Sutton and Cobb start to examine the circumstances surrounding his demise and workshop credible explanations.
Kerr – a former FBI whistleblower known for focusing on corporate wrongdoing – had just put the final touches to his next best-seller-in-waiting so could its imminent publication have spooked someone into wanting him silenced? In theory nobody has yet seen this freshly completed manuscript and so far the police have not considered it worth investigating. It could well be the motive they’ve been lacking, however.

The Shadow Writer

21/6/2019

Eliza Maxwell: Amazon $23.99

WITHIN a split second Gracie Thacker’s entire family ceased to exist, obliterated by a vicious teenaged murderer. Now, even Grace herself – “America’s sad little sweetheart” – has disappeared, leaving in her place an unrecognisable adult alter ego: creative writing graduate Graye Templeton.
As a nine-year-old eyewitness called on to testify in a high-profile trial, Grace was forced into hiding to escape a morbid public fascination with her tragic loss.
More than a decade later she has emerged as an anonymous, unremarkable young woman with no discernible past. Friendless and working as a teaching assistant in New York City, Graye is delighted to strike up an unlikely chance acquaintanceship with Laura West, a stylish, poised literary blogger whose husband David is a bestselling novelist.
When the Wests move to an island in Texas it seems the budding relationship between the two women will wither, but months later fate intervenes when Graye learns that a famous author in the same locality is recruiting. Seeking a professional reference from David she visits the couple and is quickly talked into working for Laura instead.
It’s Graye’s dream appointment: learning the publishing ropes from someone with influence, respect and a sharp eye for the ‘next big thing’ in books.
Sorting through the piles of unsolicited manuscripts delivered to Laura she decides to take the bold step of slipping a story of her own into the mix – and then waiting to hear her employer’s opinion of it. For Graye the pressure is almost unbearable. After all, her career prospects hinge solely on Laura’s reaction to the words on those pages, crafted on an old-fashioned manual typewriter and polished over and over through multiple drafts.
At the same time Graye is reacting to news of the killer’s release from jail. What will this mean for the future she has planned?

When Ashes Fall

22/3/2019

Marni Mann: published independently $14.99

AS A frontline paramedic turned telephone dispatcher for the Boston police department Alix Rayne is accustomed to remaining cool under pressure. Managing life-threatening situations is second nature for this attractive, vibrant, 30-something woman.
On her way out to meet a blind date one evening Alix stumbles onto a stranger on the brink of death in an alleyway, having mixed too much alcohol with an overdose of drugs. Using her professional training to assess and then respond to the emergency she calls for an ambulance and is relieved to learn later that the patient, Joe, has survived his transfer to hospital.
Alix recognises something special in the friend accompanying Joe, Smith Reid, and hesitates for only a split second before accepting an invitation from him to dinner as his way of thanking her for her help. After a pleasant meal they agree to meet again for a full day out in the city.
The pair’s budding relationship is complicated, however, by the constant dropping in and equally rapid vanishing of Alix’s partner, entrepreneurial airline owner Dylan Cole. Alix and Dylan’s romance had exploded three years earlier after they met by chance in a favourite restaurant.
Now, Alix is never entirely sure when Dylan will let himself into their apartment, appearing without notice and then departing just as quickly, leaving her alone again in the bed they share part time. Moving forward with Smith is impossible while Dylan remains in her life, yet Alix is certainly far from ready to have him leave.
Told in chapters from the perspectives of the three central players – Alix, Dylan and Smith – Marni Mann’s novel unfolds over a roughly three-year period as the story moves back and forth skilfully at a comfortably engaging, entertaining pace that never loses its way despite the frequent back-and-forth time shifts.

The Glovemaker

1/3/2019

Ann Weisgarber: Mantle $29.99

DEBORAH Tyler’s husband, Samuel, is overdue. A travelling wheelwright, Samuel left the couple’s small orchard in Utah Territory months earlier intending to return by the start of December at the latest. It’s now well into the new year, however, with the savage Rocky Mountains winter at its most severe, and there’s still no sign of him reappearing, nor so much as a single letter relayed home to explain his prolonged absence.
In 1888 life on the Wild West frontier is difficult at the best of times for any woman, let alone one born into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The federal authorities are outraged by the practice among some male Mormons of taking “plural” wives and welcome any opportunity to bring the weight of the law down on communities such as the Tylers’.
As Deborah – who sews exquisite leather gloves in her scarce free time – waits and worries, a man on horseback does materialise, but it’s not Samuel. Rather, the new arrival is a stranger running from a posse of deputies as he seeks help to reach a remote property deep within the snow-bound valley on which he will be hidden safely from prosecution as a polygamist.
Deborah knows the penalty for assisting will be high if she’s caught yet tiny, tightly knit Junction’s custom of providing hospitality won’t allow her to contemplate turning this fellow church member back out into a snowstorm with night approaching.
Deborah’s circumstances are further complicated the following day when a second man emerges from the gloom – this time a sheriff tracking the original rider.
With the future of her brothers-in-law, sister and nephew in jeopardy she must decide how to respond to an emergency that, if handled incorrectly, could see the family group at best turned off its land and at worst executed as criminals.

The Tenth Island

11/1/2019

Diana Marcum: Amazon $30.75

NINE main islands make up the Azores; the 10th so-called “island” of the archipelago is the diaspora created by emigration after natural and political disasters ranging from volcanic eruptions to intellectual oppression and physical starvation under the rule of Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar.
Around the world communities of expatriate Azoreans thrive – nowhere more robustly than in the Central Valley of California, the fruit-and-vegetable-bowl of the US and one of the country’s most productive dairying regions thanks to farmers who originated in the Azores.
Now an autonomous region of Portugal, the Azores remain a haven for these loyal natives, many of whom fly in when possible to spend at least part of the northern summer socialising “back home”.
In this memoir Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Diana Marcum becomes acquainted with a cross-section of Atlantic-born Portuguese-Americans while writing for a regional newspaper in the valley and for the Los Angeles Times.
A brief initial visit to the rural island of Terceira fuels Marcum’s appetite so powerfully that it is inevitable she will one day return for a much longer stay.
The resulting year in a small agricultural village on Terceira’s northern coast allows Marcum to resurrect friendships founded a decade earlier and provides rich detail for this personal portrait of an island group that manages to balance an optimistic present and future with an intense respect for a deeply traditional past.
At the same time Marcum explores issues within her own life, including unfulfilling relationships and a career that has not always followed an outwardly clear trajectory.
With irreverence and humour, sensitivity and passion, she documents the personalities, practices and predicaments that set the distinctive people of Terceira apart as they dodge bellowing bulls, lament lost love, impress with newfound Californian prosperity, savour chewy shellfish and revere crusty home-delivered bread.

The Shape of Water

16/3/2018

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.

Manhattan Beach

26/1/2018

Jennifer Egan: Hachette $19.99

ANNA Kerrigan is intimately acquainted with the unconventional side of life.
Not only has Anna grown up in an all-female household in a rough-and-tumble area of Brooklyn with no man as its protector but her mother is a former Broadway chorus-line dancer, her younger sister is chronically disabled, her aunt is an aging alcoholic seductress whose looks are sagging and her now-absent father forged his way in the Great Depression by “running errands’ for one of New York City’s most notorious crime lords.
It’s hardly surprising that when Anna enters a workforce depleted by the demands of war she is not content to accept one of the menial conveyor-belt roles traditionally allotted to women.
Instead, Anna quickly sets her sights on becoming a Brooklyn Navy Yard maintenance diver – a position so elusive that far more men fail the rigorous training process than complete the life-threateningly dangerous and emotionally draining course.
Surviving in Brooklyn is a challenge for any young woman, let alone one employed on the waterfront. With her instructor manoeuvring openly against her and her classmates offering virtually no co-operation, let alone support, she appears to have little chance of succeeding.
Anna is single-minded in her determination to join the program, however, and equally set on investigating a wispy recollection from childhood that appears to link her late father, Eddie, with a handsome and charismatic New York club licensee and gang leader, Dexter Styles.
Her disregard for the social mores that reign in the 1940s pits Anna against not only conservative individuals within her own community but the broader New York hierarchy at large – a hierarchy that invariably favours men with influence or wealth over even the most resourceful and committed teenage girl.
Part family saga, part underworld thriller, Manhattan Beach delivers a masterfully imagined storyline fleshed out with intricate, factual historic detail.

Marlena

25/8/2017

Julie Buntin: Macmillan $29.99

SCORING, binge-drinking, skipping school and wrestling with negative self-image and mortality converge in this midwest American equivalent of Puberty Blues, set both during narrator Cat’s teenage years on the shores of the Great Lakes and almost two decades later in modern-day New York.
Forced by her parents’ divorce to move with her mother and brother Jimmy to a cramped, prefabricated modular house in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Silver Lake in upstate Michigan, Catherine – an introverted straight-A student from an exclusive private school – welcomes an opportunity to reinvent herself socially and academically in the shadow of Marlena, her new next-door neighbour and soon-to-be best friend.
Two years Cat’s senior, Marlena is neglected by her amphetamine-manufacturing father and taken sexual advantage of – if not outright abused – by his drug-dealing accomplice. She is the looked down on by the rich families who inhabit waterfront mansions and taken for granted by her doped-up boyfriend. At the same time she is the only carer for her much-younger sibling, Sal – a lonely little boy who adores his big sister as the one stable reference point in his otherwise-miserable life.
Her mother’s physical beauty embarrasses Cat, whose father has long since married a woman barely out of college and now almost completely ignores his original two children.
As Cat insinuates herself ever deeper into Marlena’s grim, shadowy world, she discovers an uncanny ability to live a double life, going for weeks without attending classes while filling in her days drinking uncontrollably, chain-smoking and popping illicit pills.
Her presence close to 20 years later in New York, however, suggests that against the odds she survives her adolescence, albeit certainly not unscathed and with the memory of Marlena’s death at the age of 18 forever present.
What secrets is she harbouring, and how many ghosts still haunt Cat as she pretends that Silver Lake is in the past?

Camino Island

18/8/2017

John Grisham: Hodder & Stoughton $32.99

AMID the chaos of a reported late-night mass shooting, with fire alarms squealing and campus security personnel preoccupied, Princeton University loses one of its most valuable assets: the original handwritten manuscripts of four of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous stories, spirited away from the Firestone Library’s supposedly impenetrable vault.
Although able to make their initial escape with the bounty intact, the perpetrators – a loose gang of five smooth but relatively inexperienced conmen aiming well beyond their competence level – quickly lose control of the situation.
As the group breaks apart, the manuscripts are sold, then sold again. Both the FBI and Princeton’s insurer are in pursuit, yet the trail falls cold.
Meanwhile, on Camino Island, a coastal holiday enclave in northern Florida, life crawls along comfortably for bookseller Bruce Cable, a middle-aged bohemian playboy whose penchant for female authors is legendary. Could Cable – a man with a passion for antique first editions – know more than he’s admitting about the priceless loot?
Elaine Shelby certainly thinks so. Insurance investigator Shelby is adamant Cable is harbouring the manuscripts and in an attempt to entrap the book trader devises a plan to send in an undercover operative.
Her choice is attractive young writer Mercer Mann, a novelist with one acclaimed title already to her credit. Mann’s teaching position has just evaporated, leaving her unexpectedly unemployed and deeply in debt. When Shelby promises a hefty six-figure payment for six months’ work, she is won over.
Mann has the perfect cover: as a child she spent summers on the island with her grandmother, a prominent community member, so her reappearance on Camino is unlikely to spook a guilty Cable into disposing of any illicit items before the authorities can strike.
Yet, there remains no hard evidence of the Fitzgerald papers’ whereabouts. Are Shelby and Mann pursuing a dead end?

Defectors

4/8/2017

Joseph Kanon: Simon & Schuster $39.99

VNUKOVO VIP airport, 1961: New York-based publisher Simon Weeks has just touched down in the United Soviet Socialist Republic, granted permission by the KGB to pay a brief visit to his brother and sister-in-law in Moscow, where the once-mainstream American couple now lives by choice behind Cold War enemy lines.
This is no simple family reunion, however. Simon’s sibling is the notorious US defector Frank Weeks, a one-time CIA man turned traitor in the eyes of his government who for the past decade has been operating in exile against his homeland.
Former State Department analyst Simon has been sent on assignment to Moscow, representing the literary company that will publish Frank’s sensational memoir, My Secret Life.
The rekindling of the relationship is something that only months earlier neither could have foreseen. Travel between the two countries is rare; the USSR is wary of admitting foreigners and the US, in turn, frowns on its citizens venturing anywhere near the Soviet bloc.
Simon has been welcomed at Frank’s instigation. The KGB, for which Frank is engaged in intelligence, sees the release of his tell-all manuscript as a public relations coup – the ultimate piece of propaganda confirming to the US public that one of its own has seen the error of his liberal Western ways and embraced Communism as the epitomy of government.
It’s a fraught situation, both politically and from a personal perspective. Simon has not forgotten Frank’s decision to vanish completely one night, taking with him a bank of knowledge amassed over years of casual brotherly lunches as the Weeks boys traded tales from their respective government offices in Washington, DC.
But maybe, just maybe, this move is Frank’s attempt to signal a change of heart – to reach out for help. Are his spying days over? Is he hinting that he’s ready to head home at last?

The Fix

14/7/2017

David Baldacci: Macmillan $29.99

AMOS Decker is all too familiar with loss.
First went his social graces, his tolerance and his ability to empathise, wrenched from him in an instant by a near-fatal football concussion that left in their place a photographic memory and an abnormally heightened awareness of death.
The athletic ability that had carried Decker all the way to the NFL deserted him shortly thereafter.
Then, most cruelly of all, his wife and daughter were murdered in their home, prompting the small-town homicide detective to move away from Ohio and join the FBI.
These days the closest thing he has to friends are his colleague and housemate, Alex Jamison, and a former All-American running back whose life he helped to save after the man had spent 20 years awaiting execution for someone else’s crime.
Now another family is being crippled by grief.
Directly in front of Decker as he walks to his office one morning, within sight of the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, government contractor, husband and father Walter Dabney withdraws a handgun from his briefcase, shoots an apparent stranger in the head at close range and then kills himself.
Decker’s FBI taskforce is assigned to investigate, challenged to uncover anything in Dabney’s recent past that might have prompted this seemingly uncharacteristic murder-suicide.
Could his classified work for the Defense Department have contributed to his bizarre behaviour? What secrets might he have learned in the course of his work?
As the jigsaw of clues is slotted together, it becomes apparent that Dabney was involved in significantly more than simply manufacturing.
But what role, if any, did the dead woman play? How did she, a part-time teacher whose identity can be traced back no more than a decade, afford a penthouse apartment and a late-model sportscar?
Were Dabney and his victim, Anne Berkshire, somehow linked?

Talking As Fast As I Can

5/5/2017

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.

The German Girl

24/3/2017

Armando Lucas Correa: Simon & Schuster $29.99

BERLIN, 1939: With her blue eyes, blonde hair and smooth creamy skin, Hannah Rosenthal is the physical epitome of all that is truly German – in every way but one. Hannah’s parents, Max and Alma, are German Jews.
Even as an image of Hannah circulates on the cover of a Nazi propaganda magazine, held up as an example of the ultimate Aryan child, the terrified Rosenthals desperately plot their escape from a country that is making clear its contempt for the “impure”, the “stained”.
Seen through 12-year-old Hannah’s eyes, the events of Berlin’s infamous Crystal Night and its aftermath in 1938-39 leave no doubt that war in one form or another is inevitable. Although Max and Alma have retreated from society and now rarely go outside, they are nonetheless tormented, taunted by the tenants who rent parts of the family’s grand heritage building.
There is the slimmest glimmer of hope, however: a mysterious place called “Kuba” is accepting Jewish refugees.
New York, 2014: At the age of 12, Anna Rosen is a full-time carer for her reclusive mother, Ida, a woman who has barely managed to function since her husband Louis’ mysterious disappearance six months before Anna’s birth.
However, the unexpected arrival of an envelope from Havana breathes fresh life into the pair’s existence. Filled with new-found energy, Ida agrees to take Anna to Cuba in search of her father’s only other relative.
While the Rosenthal/Rosen family is fictitious, the flight of Jews from Hamburg aboard SS St Louis did take place in May 1939 – for many, with disastrous consequences when the Cuban authorities suddenly rejected almost all of the ship’s exiled passengers. This little-known piece of history is rekindled beautifully through the experiences of two girls half a century apart but bonded by not only blood but a need to be their parents’ sole support.

Rushing Waters

20/1/2017

Danielle Steel: Bamtam Press $32.99

NEW York has barely recovered from the second-costliest hurricane ever to strike the US. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc across Staten Island, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.
Now, just a couple of weeks short of five years later, it’s mid September 2017 and an equally intimidating storm front is moving in. This new threat, Ophelia, can’t possibly mirror Sandy’s destructiveness – or can it? Opinion is divided.
In London, businessman Charles and interior designer Ellen board the same transatlantic flight, each heading for a few days in the Big Apple to mix business with the pleasure of family reunions.
Charles’s two daughters have been in the city for the past 12 months with their mother, Gina, a model who left the marriage without warning to live with her American fashion-photographer lover, taking the girls with her.
For Ellen it will be a welcome homecoming. A native New Yorker, she has spent the past decade in London with her British husband, George.
In New York, Ellen’s mother, architect Grace, is determined to remain at home in Tribeca, a district of lower Manhattan fronting the Hudson River. Unlike her nearest neighbour, best-selling author Bob, Grace is convinced there will be no repeat of the flooding that ensued when Sandy struck.
University classmates Ben and Peter have also vowed to stay put rather than follow the authorities’ evacuation order – at least in part because they see riding out a hurricane as an adventure challenge.
Fellow student Anna, on the other hand, has already fled to her parents’ home in an uptown neighbourhood well clear of danger.
As Ophelia approaches, emergency room doctor Juliette fears the worst. Having worked non-stop through Sandy, she knows well how severe the fallout from a natural disaster of this magnitude can be.
Who will survive, with whose help, and with what consequences?

The Princess Diarist

6/1/2017

Carrie Fisher: Bantam Press $34.99

MORE often than not the story of an affair lasting only a handful of months between two no-name actors 40 years earlier would remain unremarkable and untold; it would certainly not be material on which to base a potentially best-selling book.
Yet by the time Carrie Fisher rediscovered three diaries kept during the filming of Star Wars in 1976, she and co-star Harrison Ford had become known the world over for their portrayal of two of film’s most iconic characters: Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan, a displaced royal rebel fleeing the destruction of her beloved home planet, and Han Solo, a roguish smuggler-pilot turned would-be hero who finds distressed damsel Leia more than capable of saving herself.
Fisher’s notebooks resurfaced early last year, not long after her fourth on-screen incarnation as Princess Leia had premiered. The day had come, she decided, to reveal her short-lived infatuation on a film set far, far away with a then-34-year-old married co-star.
When the cameras started rolling on little-known director-screenwriter George Lucas’s low-budget project near London in 1976, Fisher was aged 19. She was already familiar with showbusiness, however, having grown up as the daughter of one of ‘old Hollywood’s’ most glamorous but ill-fated pairings: entertainers ‘cheating cad’ Eddie Fisher and ‘America’s sweetheart’ Debbie Reynolds.
Her revisiting of her big career break and what followed is wide-reaching, comprising entertaining yet sensitive musings on fame, hairbuns, metallic bikinis, unemployment, aging, relationships and, of course, Ford (a quiet, emotionally distant, stoney-faced man who smiled seldom, Fisher wrote, but always treated her well).
The Force deserted Fisher early last week, leaving this simultaneously hilarious, introspective and thoughtful memoir and one more yet-to-be-released Star Wars sequel as the final chapters of her substantial public legacy. Fisher herself narrated the audio version of Diarist in her distinctively raspy, expressive, at-times cackling voice.

Falling

25/11/2016

Jane Green: Macmillan $29.99

EMMA Montague isn’t looking for a boyfriend, and she certainly isn’t looking for a ready-made school-aged son.
Yet in the process of renting an unfashionably dated beachfront cottage in sleepy Westport, Connecticut, she finds herself tempted by the possibility of reaching out towards both.
After years of living the high-life in lower Manhattan, where she shone in the cut-throat world of professional finance, English expat Emma is seeking a few months of downtime as she unwinds and reboots courtesy of a generous severance package. Her days of wheeling and dealing behind her (for now, at any rate) she wonders if she might make a future for herself as an interior designer – something she’s always dreamt of trying.
Emma’s handsome landlord and next-door neighbour Dominic is an unexpected bonus of her decision to trade the New York lifestyle for the slower pace of a small town where everyone is connected.
Cheerful, outgoing Dominic could well be just the right match for quiet, shy Emma, and his six-year-old son, Jesse, seems to agree – initially, at least. However, accepting a new woman as part of Dominic’s world is not easy for Jesse, who has never had to share his affection or welcome anyone else into their household.
The situation becomes even more complicated when Jesse’s mother – the woman who vanished six years earlier without a single word of farewell – reappears suddenly in Westport. Has she come back to reclaim not only her child but his father as well?
Emma is distraught, torn between wanting to stand her ground and defend their relationship and needing to protect herself from what she assumes will be inevitable heartbreak.
What starts out as a traditional love story is made memorable by its generous side helping of unpredictability, warmth and insight and an emotionally charged climax that’s completely unexpected.

A Distant Journey

11/11/2016

Di Morrissey: Pan Macmillan $34.99

COLLEGE student Cindy is nursing a broken heart for the first time. Rather than propose as expected, her boyfriend of two years has just prioritised Harvard law school ahead of their relationship, leaving Cindy mortified and alone, the only unattached member of her southern California group of friends.
Her solution? Filling her days with the company of a visiting Australian grazier creates an exciting distraction – but when after only a week of mid-summer bliss Murray Parnell is due to return to his family’s property, Cindy realises she does not want to lose him. Instead, on impulse, she agrees to go with him as his bride and the pair marry in a hastily arranged Las Vegas ceremony.
Young, idealistic and swept up by the romanticism of an imagined life abroad, Cindy is barely out of her teens when she arrives at Kingsley Downs, an apparently prosperous sheep station on the plain that stretches between Deniliquin and Hay. The landscape is dry, but any similarity to Palm Springs ends there; the Parnells’ sun-bleached, bare, dusty paddocks could hardly be more different from the celebrity-studded, mountain-ringed desert hideaway in which Cindy has been living with her aunts and cousin.
In the Riverina her only real company is her father-in-law’s housekeeper, a mother-hen figure who does her best to settle Murray’s new wife into her role as a budding country matron.
Mr Parnell senior is less welcoming. Barely speaking to Cindy, he makes his disapproval of her obvious.
He is not without his reasons, however. Behind the gruff behaviour lurks a shocking mystery – one Cindy soon recognises and becomes determined to solve. Despite her best intentions, however, unforeseen consequences unfold and soon the Parnells’ future is in jeopardy.
In her 25th year as one of Australia’s leading novelists, Di Morrissey interprets the essence of rural Australia perfectly.

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.

Midnight Watch

13/5/2016

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.

Killing Monica

26/2/2016

Candace Bushnell: Little, Brown $29.99

SEX and the City rebooted this new novel is definitely not. That said, SATC and Lipstick Jungle author Candace Bushnell’s latest New York City saga is entertaining escapism into a world few mere mortals ever glimpse.
Central character Pandemonia James ‘PJ’ Wallis is (precisely like Bushnell herself) a writer of fantastical female fiction – phenomenally popular chick-lit that has enraptured the male movers and shakers of Hollywood. PJ’s on-paper creation, Monica, is America’s darling – a good-time, can-do, party-hard gal whose life is the envy of book-buyers by the million. Monica has it all: beauty, success, confidence, wealth and a blissful, apparently charmed Manhattan existence – and so too, by extension, has her alter ego PJ.
Being constantly compared with a too-good-to-be-true fictitious invention is not all it’s cracked up to be, however; after years of living in her imaginary heroine’s shadow, PJ has had more than enough of never quite measuring up. Other projects beckon, and the public’s relentless obsession with Monica is a roadblock PJ is desperate to clear.
Alas, breaking free of the Monica-mania isn’t as easy as typing “THE END”, she discovers to her horror, with a publisher, a studio and an entire country baying for further instalments of their idyllic dream girl. What will it take to spring an increasingly frustrated PJ out of her self-made Monica trap?
Readers expecting SATC’s Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda won’t find too many familiar faces in this revisiting of NYC’s cocktail-club scene, populated as it is with franchised versions of Samantha at her most outrageous surrounded by actors, publicists and a suitably oily celebrity chef. While Killing Monica lacks the witty repartee of the Bushnell-inspired HBO TV series, its plot takes all the kinks and dips of an Olympic diving routine before arriving at a genuinely unpredictable and satisfying – if perhaps slightly hurried – climax.

Sinful

13/11/2015

Joan Johnston: Bantam Dell US$7.99

FAMILIAL rivalry has for many years been a best-selling theme built on bad blood and outlandish behaviour in the cattle country of the south-western United States.
Look no further than the Colbys and Carringtons of Dynasty and the Ewings and Barnes of Dallas for examples of scheming and deceit played out across the neighbourhood fence.
Now the wide-open ranchland has another multi-generational feud: that fought by the Blackthornes and Creeds of aptly titled Bitter Creek, Texas, and their extended clans.
In Sinful, the 16th Joan Johnston novel involving the same coterie of surnames, the action takes place in Wyoming.
King Grayhawk first appeared on the Blackthorne-Creed scene several books ago as the man from whom Blackthorne patriarch Jackson had in his youth “stolen” Eve DeWitt to be his wife. Later, he resurfaced as the co-grandfather of Blackthorne’s illegitimate grand-daughter, Kate.
In Sinful, he is a pivotal villain in his own right. When estranged son Matt returns home after more than 20 years in Australia’s Top End to take up his share of the Greyhawk property, daughter Eve – named for Grayhawk’s lost first love – finds herself suddenly displaced. With the land that has always been at her disposal now under a stranger’s control, she must start afresh to create an adult life for herself and find safe haven for the mob of mustangs she has saved from slaughter.
Her options are few – that is, until she discovers that her late best friend’s widower, Connor Flynn, needs a mother for his child. With the Grayhawks and Flynns embroiled in a long-running battle of their own, can Eve and Connor somehow find a version of “happily ever after”?
Sinful is a few hours’ entertaining, light reading to a formula that invariably weaves over and around a heartwrenching trail of obstacles before winding up on a feel-good note.

Down the Rabbit Hole

2/10/2015

Holly Madison: Harper Collins $29.99

HOW does a quiet, clean-living, modest college student from Oregon’s small-town Twilight zone progress from being thousands of dollars in debt and homeless to finding herself ensconced as the “number one girlfriend” of the world’s most infamous womaniser – all within a matter of months? Inviting herself to move into then-75-year-old Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles is a handy first step, as Holly Madison discovered at the age of 21.
In Down the Rabbit Hole, Madison describes with grit, determination and a remarkable degree of grace and class the events and emotions surrounding her decade-long association with all things Playboy.
This is no titillating, salacious kiss-and-tell tossed together hurriedly by a ghost writer, nor is it a sugar-coated PR branding stunt. Rather, Madison presents a clear-headed, factual and intimate look back over the years of insecurity, intimidation and infighting that characterised life in captivity for the members of Hefner’s harem, revealing her one-time beau as a sly, manipulative, Machiavellian jailer who is mean-fisted both materially and emotionally and actively pits unhappy, bored young women against each other in a never-ending round of high-school-style cattiness. (That, despite Hefner’s immense legal resources as head of the Playboy publishing empire, he did not prevent this book’s release suggests in itself that Madison’s account is accurate.)
She also describes candidly the smoke-and-mirrors tactics that underpin so-called “reality” television; for five years Madison appeared on The Girls Next Door, a carefully manufactured peak into the lives of Hefner’s chosen women, and later had her own primetime show, Holly’s World.
Madison’s story encompasses her experiences outside the mansion’s walls as well, including the challenge of overcoming stereotyping in order to establish an independent stage career.
Does this fairytale-slash-nightmare end on a happy note? It’s well following this Alice in Wonderland-themed adventure with Madison in order to find out.

This is Your Captain Speaking

25/9/2015

Gavin MacLeod: Thomas Nelson $27.99

HANDS up, those who’ve never watched so much as a single episode of The Love Boat. The Mary Tyler Moore Show? No-one?
Aside from being two of the most crisply written, longest-running and most commercially successful US TV comedies of the late 20th century, these international hit series have one more thing in common: now-84-year-old actor Gavin MacLeod.
Raised in small-town America, MacLeod – or Allan See, as he was known then – was from an early age a natural performer. However, his childhood was far from privileged and his transition to working professionally was a challenging and at-times-conflicted process.
Beginning with bit-parts alongside iconic film stars such as Gregory Peck and Cary Grant, MacLeod slowly and steadily earned increasingly lucrative roles. For the diligent, ambitious up-and-comer, these achievements had their drawbacks, though: namely, the frustration of playing unsatisfying peripheral characters. With that boredom came drinking, and with drinking – as MacLeod admits – followed the dissolution of his once-stable homelife and a need to rethink his choices.
This autobiography – just released in paperback – is simultaneously open and honest and heavily optimistic, presenting a glass-half-full account of MacLeod’s relationships on- and off-screen as he regrouped to become pivotal in the ensembles of Mary Tyler Moore (as writer Murray Slaughter) and then Love Boat (as father figure Captain Merrill Stubing). His generally positive, will-do attitude to life is evident throughout as he details his experience as a divorced Catholic who rediscovers Christianity and becomes passionately “born again”. (Warning: the final third of the book is particularly rich with religious references – something that may not always sit comfortably with Australian readers unaccustomed to middle America’s proclamations of faith.)
As one of the world’s most recognisable comedy actors, MacLeod writes with insight on not only himself but also Hollywood peers including Robert Redford, Bette Davis, Aaron Spelling and Marilyn Monroe.

Grey

7/8/2015

EL James: Arrow $19.99

“FIFTY Shades of Grey is to literature what catfood is to cuisine”, one particularly snarky French critic allegedly wrote. Whether the quote is genuine or merely one more wildly inaccurate urban myth is immaterial to the 60 million book-buyers who to date have delved into the novel’s erotically murky depths.
Now, four years after the original release threw the publishing world into impassioned debate, a fourth instalment in the series has been unveiled.
The flip-side of the storyline, titled simply Grey, was launched jointly in the US and the UK on June 18 – the birthday of its fictional lead character: billionaire American tech entrepreneur and sadomasochist Christian Grey. In its first five days alone Grey passed the million-copies mark in the US and was snapped up by more than 640,000 would-be readers in the UK, making it Britain’s fastest-ever-selling adult book.
The story is simple: boy meets girl, boy pursues girl, girl discovers – to her fascination, once some initial disgust is overcome – that boy is into some seriously left-of-centre cable-ties-and-riding-crops leisure-time pursuits.
This version, while revisiting the bulk of Fifty Shades’ rather transparent and unrealistic plot, differs from author EL James’ earlier trilogy in that it is written in the words of Christian Grey himself.
Where Fifty Shades and its two direct sequels lack authority and resonance, being filtered as they are through the eyes of a sexually inexperienced and generally naïve early-20s college graduate, Grey offers a deeper, darker and undeniably tormented interpretation of the more worldly Christian’s conflicted feelings and contradictory behaviour.
Fifty Shades created more questions than it answered for many people and painted a decidedly unsympathetic portrait of Christian; Grey, as the counterbalance, is satisfyingly insightful and should to appeal to both men and women for its frank, soul-baring confessions of Christian’s insecurities and fears.
In keeping with its predecessors this is a magnetising read that can be completed in days rather than weeks – an ideal time-filler on a daily bus or train commute for those who dare to be seen with it in their grasp.

' Books are treasure for the spirit and the soul. '

— VB 2020

Book reviews

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