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Bewildered

25/10/2019

 
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Laura Waters: Affirm Press $29.99
 
LOSING her travelling companion on just the second morning of a 3068km hike does not bode well for Laura Waters’ chances of tramping the entire length of New Zealand’s two main islands from north to south.
It’s a catastrophe-in-the-making that under any other circumstances could derail such an ambitious project completely.
Waters, however, simply steels herself, acknowledging silently that somewhere deep within she’s been almost expecting to have this happen. She might not have known precisely how it would unfold but the fact her carefully calculated plan has been upended at the very beginning does not really surprise her.
Despite the disarray, there’s no question as to whether Waters will continue independently. For this Australian travel writer, there’s no going back – not in the short term, at any rate.
Never having done any true long-distance walking, much less camped alone, she’s left a secure job in Melbourne to spend the next several months on Te Araroa: “the long pathway” that links the uppermost tip of Northland, Cape Reinga, with the Bluff, directly below Invercargill. It’s a lightly trodden trail that’s little known outside serious hiking circles, sketchily signposted and almost indistinguishable from the surrounding scrub or forest for much of its length as it traverses soft sandy beaches, heavily trees mountain ranges, dormant volcanoes and the intimidating expanse of Auckland’s spread-out suburbs and industrial estates.
Carrying all her own survival gear and food for up to a week at a time, 40-something Waters is determined that nothing – not the attrition of fellow trampers, not her own physical pain and not dispiriting weather – will break her focus.
Her story is the Australasian version of Wild – an exploration not only of New Zealand’s ruggedly beautiful but tortuous environment but also of one woman’s commitment to honour her promise to herself.

Crossings

5/7/2019

 
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Alex Landragin: Picador Australia $32.99 
 
HOW many Earthly lifetimes can a single human soul endure?
In its initial chapter readers meet one of the two hosts of Crossings as an aged version of the debauched and desperate 19th-century Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire.
Encased in a body riddled with syphilis, penniless and itinerant, the essence of Baudelaire has every reason to embrace the notion of transmigrating from this broken carapace to re-emerge with a new physical identity, ready to embark on a reinvigorated existence but with its amassed memories intact. Baudelaire’s is not the only figure to be inhabited over the course of roughly 150 years by this relater of tall tales, however; in fact, it is not even the first.
The unfolding of the novel also reveals a second shape-shifting storyteller, originating as Polynesian islander Alula at the time of isolated Oaeetee’s discovery by seafaring French explorers.
In the course of making its way from the mid Pacific Ocean to the literary heartland of Europe, this latter raconteur travels via idyllic Mauritius, the squalid port city of Marseille in France and a sugarcane plantation in the American Deep South. Changing gender en route, it pursues its former lover, Koahu, around the globe, campaigning desperately for an long-awaited emotional reunion.
Presented in three distinct yet complementary parts, Melbourne author Landragin’s manuscript weaves together disparate periods in history (including the two world wars), locations as diverse as steamy New Orleans, sophisticated Brussels and the French-Spanish border region of the Pyrenees, and a pair of narrators.
Perhaps most remarkably, it can be read in a choice of two ways: conventionally, from the first page of the book as it stands published through to the last, or through the eyes of a secondary character, Baroness Beattie Ellingham, following a sequence outlined in the introduction that delivers a unique storyline.

Red Storm series

27/7/2018

 
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James Rosone and Miranda Watson:  Kindle ebooks – Battlefield Ukraine $6.50; Battlefield Korea $6.22; Battlefield Taiwan $6.55; Battlefield Pacific $6.43
 
AS 2017 draws to a close, Russian President Vladimir Petrov’s patience pays off.
Petrov has been biding his time, stealthily marking off the days, weeks and months until conditions are in perfect alignment for a strategic assault against the political thorn in his side: Ukraine. Now, with his forces primed with the latest in 21st-century weaponry and tactical know-how, Petrov makes his move.
Ukraine’s charismatic nationalist leader is one of the first targets, assassinated in a pre-emptive strike on the man most likely to stand against a Russian invasion.
Ukraine is not left entirely defenceless, however. At the United States’ urging, NATO troops flood in, and so ensues a bitter struggle for control of the entire eastern half of the country.
This is not the only territory being coveted by a neighbour. In Asia, China is eyeing off land directly to its south, including the Korean peninsula, Vietnam, Myanmar and its longstanding annoyance, independent Taiwan.
As the NATO allies stretch their resources across an increasingly broad front on two continents, the communist superpowers unite to unleash a brilliantly formulated covert offensive known as Operation Red Storm.
Against a backdrop of email hacking, electoral tampering, spiralling unemployment, social unrest and economies in collapse, immediately identifiable characters populate these novels: a vodka-swilling macho Russian oligarch; a fractured US administration of self-interested officials and corrupt double agents; a Chinese leadership intent on regaining pride eroded by the dissolution of its once-mighty empire; passionate service men and women on every side of the conflict.
The depth of military detail in these novels is particularly impressive.
The first four books cover events in Ukraine, Korea, Taiwan and the Pacific, focusing primarily on each theatre in turn but delivering sufficient crossover to maintain the overarching storyline in real-time.
The next instalment, Battlefield Russia, will be released in September.

Road No Good

13/4/2017

 
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Bridget Isichei: Finch $29.99
 
WHEN a well-travelled, energetic young middle-class New Zealander arrives in Luganville, Vanuatu, she sees immediately that it’s more than merely her street – the literally named Road No Good – that’s in need of improvement.
Deployed to the country’s second-biggest population centre to help support preschool teachers on Espiritu Santo island, ‘Missus Bridget’ discovers a hierarchy in which the kindhearted, patient women who take on delivering early education to Vanuatu’s next generation are considered lower in importance than even domestic pigs.
From her base in a town where having a telephone line to her breeze-block apartment reactivated takes several months and the only internet access is through a single café, Bridget Isichei begins visiting far-flung community preschools via a time-consuming and frustrating combination of road, river and walking-path jungle travel.
Her task is to develop a reliable system by which the standard of preschool teaching on Santo can be strengthened and the status of the occupation raised in the eyes of the public.
She uncovers a millennia-old culture centred around communal village living, shaped by an absolute belief in black magic overlaid heavily with relatively recent Christian church-going.
The preschool teachers – all women, many of whom speak only the local dialect of pidgin English, Bislama, and are technically illiterate – are passionately proud of their work but readily accept that theirs is not a respected career. Because they do not hold any form of qualification, they are looked down on socially, poorly resourced and chronically underpaid.
As genuine friendships form, Isichei is enveloped in Melanesian family life and becomes fluent in Bislama, enabling her to communicate freely with her new colleagues.
She tells with sensitivity, humour, respect, discretion and love the story of the teachers’ achievements, disappointments and unquestioning acceptance of circumstances unimagined in developed countries and of her own learnings and realisations along the way.

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    — VB 2020

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