Category: Relationships

The Wife and the Widow

10/4/2020

Christian White: Affirm Press $16.99

KATE Keddie’s husband John is missing.
Only hours earlier, with their daughter Mia, Kate waited for an excruciatingly long time in the arrivals area of Melbourne International Airport for a man who was not on his nominated flight home from a week-long conference in London that it has now emerged he was never even registered to attend.
Baffled and disillusioned, Kate is searching desperately for clues as to what, exactly, has been unfolding in John’s apparently parallel life for the past few months.
The situation isn’t helped by the fact John’s parents are behaving oddly. His father is bluntly critical of the marriage and his mother is claiming to have had a religious vision that confirms John is not yet dead.
Abby Gilpin’s husband is also absent – not physically, in Ray’s case, but certainly on an emotional level.
Abby is trapped in a numbingly mundane routine of restocking shelves and counting out change at the supermarket on Belport Island, a popular holiday hotspot off the southeastern coast of mainland Australia, accessible by ferry from the Bellarine Peninsula near Geelong. Belport’s off-season population is claustrophobically sparse compared to the hordes of high-season visitors who flood across the water to take up temporary residence in summer.
Ray has barely touched his wife in weeks – or is it months? Abby knows something feels off in their relationship but rather than raise the subject directly with Ray opts to bury herself in her other great passion: taxidermy.
The common denominator between the troubled couples is the island: John Keddie spent time there as a child but has been reluctant as an adult to make the most of the house he and Kate own in a quiet corner of this laid-back community.
Can the superficially blissful Keddies’ and the openly distant Gilpins’ lives somehow be intertwined?

The Tenth Girl

3/4/2020

Sara Faring: St Martin’s Press $20.72 Kindle e-book

TALES of ghostly hauntings are not unheard of in remote boarding schools – but when the facility in question has been abandoned for decades, the first wave of new teachers deployed to its musty classrooms is justifiably skittish.
Perched at the southernmost tip of South America, surrounded by inhospitable mountains and fields of jagged ice and accessible only by water, the ramshackle cluster of buildings is rundown and eerie.
Among those recruited to teach an elite class of 10 handpicked teenage girls is Mavi, the orphaned and destitute daughter of an anti-establishment couple ‘disappeared’ by Argentina’s ruling dictatorship. Mavi’s only ally against disengaged students and disaffected colleagues is Yesi, an aspiring author who spends every non-teaching moment adding to her manuscript.
It’s not long, however, before Mavi also attracts the attention of Domenic, the overly privileged wastrel son of the current principal.
The Vaccaro School was once one of Argentina’s most elite institutions – until its sudden closure ignited speculation that a curse had been cast upon it by the local indigenous Zapuche tribe, condemning it to fail as a business and leading to the outbreak of a fatal virus among its few remaining inhabitants.
Now, against the backdrop of the country’s crippling political turmoil, Carmela De Vaccaro has taken charge, denying outright the existence of all such paranormal phenomena and determined to reclaim her family legacy’s former prestige.
But with inexplicable happenings becoming increasingly evident around her, Mavi quickly starts to suspect there is more than a pinch of truth behind claims that the premises are populated by mysterious beings known as los Otros (the Others).
Told through the eyes of alternate narrators, The Tenth Girl is an up-close chronicle of a chain of psychologically disturbing scenarios unfolding within the confines of an isolated community cut off from the wider world.

White Horses

6/12/2019

Rachael Treasure: HarperCollins $32.99

SHARK attack or foul play: these are the two credible explanations for professional surfer Kai Kaahea’s disappearance off Pinrush Point – an event that prompts the international media and fellow surfers alike to join police in besieging this sliver of outback West Australian coastline.
Yet, one local is oblivious to the missing Kai’s apparent fame: drover Drift Wood, the only daughter of itinerant poetry-loving horseman Split and his late wife, who died in the same stretch of water when Drift was a child.
Having returned to the Widgenup district with a fresh mob of cattle for fattening, the Woods find themselves in the right place at the very worst possible time, their customarily quiet camp existence disrupted by a frenzied hunt for the young Hawaiian.
Unaccustomed to being surrounded by a throng of strangers and struggling to manage her father’s unpredictable, frequently drunken behaviour, Drift is relieved to find a friendly presence in the form of Constable Simon Swain. As a member of the investigating team, dependable Simon is a godsend for Drift and a potential lifesaver for Split.
Life has always been tough for Drift. With little spending money, no permanent home and almost no contact with people her own age for company, the 21-year-old is ill at ease socialising and struggles to accept Simon’s interest in her.
However, when Drift crosses paths with Sophia Gaier, the billionaire owner of The Planet, an enormous neighbouring station and conservation area, and Sophia’s community of workers, she finally begins to feel a sense of belonging and purpose.
Rachel Treasure’s innate connection to rural culture, understanding of livestock husbandry and ability to generate relatably flawed characters give this story a genuine warmth and authenticity in which the value of an entertaining, believable journey for the reader outweighs any expectation of a fairytale-happy conclusion.

Bewildered

25/10/2019

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.

The Stone Circle

18/10/2019

Elly Griffiths: Hachette Australia $19.99

FORENSIC archaeologist Dr Ruth Galloway and her cohort were never intended to go on sleuthing beyond case number 10 so the appearance of an 11th novel in the murder-mystery series is a bonus for fans of Elly Griffiths’ books.
Now, in the new instalment of this long-running police drama, Ruth finds herself at the centre of another possible crime when two female skeletons – dated several millennia apart – are exhumed from a Neolithic circle near King’s Lynn, Norfolk. The area is best known as the seat of the British royal family’s country estate, Sandringham, yet death is all too common in this pretty stretch of seaside villages and softly undulating farms.
The first young woman is found to have been buried inside a stone cist in keeping with Bronze Age tradition.
The second set of bones, however, is much more recent, leading Detective Inspector Harry Nelson and his team in King’s Lynn to believe it might be the remains of Margaret Lacey, a local girl who went missing as a 12-year-old on the evening of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer’s wedding in 1981.
Various suspects were interviewed at the time of her disappearance, including Margaret’s father and brother and a highly eccentric neighbourhood loner, yet no trace of the well-liked young student has ever surfaced.
But how could this modern-day corpse, regardless of its origin, have become intertwined with a sacred site laid out thousands of years before the birth of Christ?
Disentangling the details around the twin burials’ discovery will take every trick in Harry’s professional book and every ounce of concentration, not least of all as his wife of 20-odd years is due to give birth any day to a child that might not be his, and Ruth’s daughter Kate – who definitely is his biological daughter – is growing up fast.

The Body on the Beach

11/10/2019

Anna Johannsen: Thomas & Mercer $19.99

SINCE leaving Amrum, a laid-back island community off the north-west corner of mainland Germany, Lena Lorenzen has established an entirely new life for herself as a detective inspector based in Kiel.
Suddenly, an unforeseen return to Amrum looms, at once disrupting Lena’s comfortable big-city routine, providing temporary respite from an increasingly claustrophobic relationship with a colleague, and reuniting her with a former boyfriend, Erck, and her beloved Aunt Beke.
The director of a children’s home has died while relaxing late one evening in a beach chair on Amrum’s famous strip of snowy-white North Sea sand. The signs suggest heart attack as the likely cause, but his widow has requested an autopsy and the possibility of poisoning with a fast-acting and all-but-undetectable substance has been raised.
Lena has never been a favourite at the station in Kiel so the superintendent’s decision to appoint her to this investigation is somewhat baffling. Is she being set up to fail, she wonders.
As her partner Lena is assigned Detective Sergeant Johann Grassmann: a dedicated, passionate and lateral-thinking young man eager to make his mark on the case while earning his senior officer’s respect.
On Amrum the two encounter a confusing web of contradictory statements and unexplained gaps in the timeline. Not even the local police account of the body’s discovery is complete.
The more Lena and Johann compile evidence, the more apparent it becomes that Hein Bohlen was a far more complex character than those around him knew.
Having behaved unpredictably in the days immediately preceding his death, he could well have fallen foul of any number of people. Could someone in his circle have been provoked to kill him?
Originally published in German, The Body on the Beach is the first in a series of English-language Lena Lorenzen novels from Northern Friesland native Johannsen and New Zealand translator Lisa Reinhardt.

Blackout Ingenue

27/9/2019

Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $24

DETECTIVE Freja Hansen’s private life is anything but easy.
Her husband Adam – a former member of Denmark’s riot police – is drug-addicted and banished from the home she shares with their daughter Ayoe and the little girl’s grandfather Esben, and Freja herself is still recovering from a knife wound suffered during what should have been a leisurely cross-country run through the Scottish Highlands. Complicating things further, Adam is now employed by a powerful businessman who years ago tried to prey on Freja.
Professionally, on the other hand, she is very much in control. As a senior officer stationed at Sønderborg in central Denmark, Freja has a challenging and fulfilling position doing meaningful work. At least that much is on track.
When billionaire theatre patron Jeanne Fønss is killed in a bizarre coincidence on the opening night of a play, it appears to be nothing more than a straight-forward case of a frail elderly woman having been in the wrong place at the wrong time. After all, having one’s neck broken when a leading lady plummets into the audience could hardly be suspicious, especially when a stagehand admits to having been with the now-dead actress just before she overbalanced from a gantry 16 metres above the plush velvet seats. This certainly doesn’t require a detective of Freja’s ability.
Why she has been assigned this new investigation is therefore baffling. Is her boss – apparently under the misapprehension that Freja is yet to recover emotionally from her stabbing – determined to exclude her from real policing?
Yet, despite the situation’s apparent simplicity, as Freja and Sergeant Mik Kristensen compare statements, something doesn’t seem right. So consistent are the accounts that surely the confession must have been rehearsed – but why?
Blackout Ingenue is the first full-length novel in a new series introduced by the short story The Fell Runner.

The Burnt Country

20/9/2019

Joy Rhodes: Bantam Australia $32.99

LIFE should, by any measure, be returning to normal on Amiens, the vast finewool-producing property owned by Kate Dowd near Longhope in northern New South Wales.
Post-World War II peace has reigned for the past two years, rainfall has been generous across the region and Kate’s Merino flock is in the peak of health.
With temperatures rising, the 1947–48 summer is shaping up to be a productive one, with lush pasture blanketing the district and plenty of water in the Amiens dam.
‘Normal’ is an unfamiliar concept to Kate, however. As a mid-20-year-old woman trying to run a woolgrowing enterprise singlehandedly, she is an anomaly: an unconventional – indecent, even – upstart bucking the rules of societal decency by stepping out of the kitchen and into the world of not-so-secret men’s farming business.
The squattocracy of Longhope is appalled – not least of all because even Kate’s own husband seems to have tired of her antics. Now entrenched in the islands off New Guinea, Jack Dowd has walked out on his young wife, apparently, leaving her alone to face the shame of having failed at marriage.
Compounding Kate’s anguish, Luca Canali has returned to Longhope. An Italian ex-soldier who as a prisoner of war worked on Amiens three years earlier, Luca is a permanent reminder of a future she can never have: a future with a man she loves and who respects and cares for Kate in return, a kind and understanding, supportive soulmate who is proud of her efforts to keep her family legacy afloat.
Even within Kate’s household there is turmoil; her part-Aboriginal baby half-sister is in line to be snatched away by the authorities.
And now Kate is in the crosshairs of Longhope’s patriarchs yet again for carrying out fuel-reduction burns in her paddocks. What lunacy will this foolish woman come up with next?

Valley of Death

13/9/2019

Scott Mariani: Avon $19.99

HIS ex-fiancée’s new husband has been snatched off a footpath while walking to dinner in an upmarket part of Delhi and Ben Hope is now the wife’s strongest – perhaps only – chance of having Amal recovered alive. Will this crisis response and former military commando step up to help?
That’s the question faced one otherwise-quiet weekday evening by Ben as he starts to unwind after a typical day at his tactical training base in France.
Ben has just finished putting a group of clients through a routine hostage-extraction exercise when an unexpected visitor delivers the shocking news of Amal’s kidnapping and Brooke’s subsequent distress.
In fact, the capture of part-time playwright Amal is the second blow to have struck the billionaire Ray family in less than a month; three weeks earlier his younger brother Kabir disappeared, presumed dead, when an archaeology expedition he was leading was ambushed by bandits in the arid Haryana region of northern India. Kabir and two graduate students were in an area scattered with remnants of one of the world’s great ancient cultures, the Indus Valley Civilisation, apparently carrying out field research.
Upon hearing of the attack, London residents Amal and Brooke flew immediately to Delhi to be with Amal’s elderly parents and a third brother, Samarth.
Now, with their second son also missing, the remaining Rays will go to any lengths – no expense spared – to ascertain the pair’s whereabouts.
Seeing Brooke again in such an unlikely setting is a complication Ben has not anticipated. In order to undertake this life-threatening investigation on twin fronts, is he able to set aside his unresolved feelings for the woman he was once within a few hours of marrying?
Ben must come to terms fast not only with his own emotions but with both the seedy slums of Delhi and the largely lawless neighbouring desert mountains.

Undara

30/8/2019

Annie Seaton: Mira $29.99

AFTER an agonising year of physical suffering and loss on the personal front, trawling a network of North Queensland lava tubes for unknown insect species is exactly the professional distraction Dr Emlyn Rees needs.
In fact, the chance to focus on this brand-new research is perhaps the one positive aspect of entomologist Emlyn’s life.
Heading a project team from a university in Brisbane she arrives at Hidden Valley – about five hours’ drive north-west of Townsville – on New Year’s Eve, intent on losing herself in the workload demanded by this pioneering underground survey.
The accommodation that’s been provided grudgingly by beef producer Travis Carlyle and his socially awkward brother Gavin is filthy, the heat and humidity in the build-up to the onset of the wet is sapping and Emlyn’s colleagues are several days’ drive away, still making their way north by road. It’s a lonely introduction to Hidden Valley but, in her debilitated, distressed state, the solitude suits Emlyn perfectly.
Little by little, however, as the wary standoffishness between Emlyn and Travis begins to ease, the two find common ground in their attraction to the spectacular tunnel system that underlies a good portion of the property. Progressing from fragile truce to respectful alliance and, in time, genuinely caring friendship, the connection grows stronger with every encounter.
And, with the appearance of Emlyn’s co-workers and the beginning of their inch by inch-by-inch subterranean treasure-hunt, the prospect of finding something truly momentous mounts. The outcome of their labours, it seems, might well have the power to influence more than one person’s future.
The second novel by Seaton, who with her husband now spends winters scouring Australia for potential story locations, Undara takes its name from the real-life Undara Volcanic National Park, to which the lure of exploring the remnants of a long-ago eruption draws thousands of visitors every year.

A Nearly Normal Family

16/8/2019

MT Edvardsson: Macmillan $29.99

“STELLA Sandell is under reasonable suspicion for murder.”
They’re the words no parent contemplates ever having to hear: that courtroom proclamation by a stranger that a beloved child is facing one of the most serious charges imaginable.
For pastor Adam and criminal lawyer Ulrika, life in the southern Swedish university city of Lund has always been comfortingly unremarkable. White-collar professionals with an upper-class income and an easy-going, stable suburban lifestyle, the Sandells holiday abroad in winter, dine out regularly at their local Italian restaurant and enjoy cycling together along Lund’s cobble-stoned streets.
Stella has just completed her final year of high school, an occasionally tempestuous teenager employed part-time as a sales assistant at H&M as she saves for a long-awaited gap year in Asia.
Suddenly, though, over the course of only a few days the family’s world begins to unravel.
It starts with a missed work shift here, an early-hours arrival home from an evening out with her best friend there. Then Stella lists her brand-new pink Vespa scooter – an 18th-birthday gift from her mother and father – for sale online. This is a side of their daughter Adam and Ulrika don’t recognise.
But worse is to come. A phonecall late one Saturday night informs the couple that their little girl is being held in police custody, accused of having stabbed a prominent local businessman – the son of a well-known law professor, no less.
Surely Stella is no killer? Adam and Ulrika can’t conceive of a future with her in prison.
Yet unanswered questions begin to pile up, not least of all surrounding the fate of a piece of potential evidence: an apparently blood-spattered favourite shirt.
It’s a moral dilemma for the normally upstanding Sandells: exactly how far will the average person go, and what will they overlook, to defend someone they love?

Beyond the Shadow of Night

16/8/2019

Ray Kingfisher: Amazon Publishing $27.99

BORN within days of each other in 1923, Mykhail Petrenko and Asher Kogan grow up as the best of mates, brothers by choice if not by blood.
Living in adjacent farmhouses near Dyovsta, Ukraine, their families labour together under the constant scrutiny of the Soviet authorities, producing crops to keep Russia’s masses fed.
Despite occasional famine and a lack of modern equipment it’s an idyllic childhood for two boys who like nothing more than spending afternoons sitting on a riverbank fishing for dinner.
As the 1930s wear on and antagonism towards Jews festers, however, Asher’s parents decide to sell their land and join relatives living in Poland. There, in Warsaw – a sophisticated, cosmopolitan metropolis with motorcars, apartments, factories and cafés – Asher discovers a lifestyle unimaginable to rural Ukrainians like Mikhail. With his father and older sisters earning wages, there’s money for clothing, toys and groceries – sometimes, even cakes.
Suddenly, though, several years’ worth of rumours become fact as Nazi forces swarm across the country’s western border and quickly overrun the ill-equipped Polish defence. Seeing aeroplanes for the first time, Asher finds himself directly in the path of repeated aerial bombing.
Mercifully, it’s short-lived. The initial attack over, the Kogans are allowed to settle back into their regular routine. Perhaps the Germans won’t prove to be nearly the ogres the Poles have feared.
Little do they know that within a matter of months every Jewish resident of Warsaw will be herded into a newly-walled ghetto in the centre of the city and Mykhail will be conscripted into the Red Army.
Fast-forward more than half a century and in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one half of the inseparable childhood friendship had been shot dead, one elderly man murdered at his own kitchen table by the other. What could possibly have transpired in the intervening decades to have prompted this?

Twelve Unending Summers

2/8/2019

Cholet Kelly Josué: Authority Publishing US$15.99

IN AN engrossing memoir Cholet Josué describes being born in the Bahamas to immigrant workers from Haiti. There he spends his first four years suspended between competing cultures, cocooned by the archipelago’s expatriate Haitian community and unaware that he’s resented by the English-speaking native population.
When an almost-fatal incident prompts his parents to return with their offspring to Haiti, Josué meets his extended family for the first time: aunts, uncles and cousins who together assume responsibility for helping to raise the five Josué siblings. His summers are spent in the country; for the remainder of the year Josué lives with his mother and brothers in Saint-Louis-du-Nord while his father works their farmland.
His priorities are simple: playing soccer (often with a large unripe orange rather than an expensive and puncture-prone plastic ball), studying, telling stories by lamplight and feasting on simple, robust Haitian cuisine prepared in kitchens whose doors are always open to neighbours.
The death of his father, followed by his widowed mother’s move back to the Bahamas as she struggles to support her children, leaves Josué a virtual orphan at the age of eight but living happily in a huge household of warm, welcoming maternal relatives.
His life takes another unpredictable turn when as a 16-year-old he is given directions for embarking on a small fishing boat to be smuggled via a stomach-churning ocean voyage to Miami, North America’s human melting pot.
Finally reunited with his mother, who has made her own way to the US, Josué focuses his body and mind on using his athletic skills to secure a college scholarship. It is only when he is accepted, however, that the implications of his status as an undocumented illegal arrival truly hit, forcing this determined young man to re-evaluate his identity in his adopted country as he strives to establish a legitimate future for himself.

Ghosts of the Past

26/7/2019

Tony Park: Macmillan Australia $32.99

EDWARD Presgrave’s name has never been familiar to his fellow Australians but that could change quickly once readers start talking about Tony Park’s 17th novel, Ghosts of the Past.
Known for his love of southern Africa’s diverse landscapes and cultures, in his latest release Park combines a penchant for constructing adventure-rich storylines with an interest in military heritage.
In Ghosts, newly unemployed Sydneysider Nick Eatwell decides on a whim to travel to South Africa in the footsteps of a previously unknown great-great-uncle, Sergeant Cyril Blake – a young man accused of having tortured and murdered a prisoner before being executed in German South West Africa almost a century before it was reborn as modern-day Namibia.
A volunteer who served with the mounted British unit Steinaecker’s Horse during the Anglo-Boer War, Blake has been identified by an investigative journalist in Cape Town as a key player in an intriguing and dramatic search for Afrikaner President Paul Kruger’s vanished fortune: millions of dollars worth of solid gold bars.
Within hours of arriving in Kruger National Park, however, Eatwell has his safari cabin burgled and realises that both his family-historian aunt and a former colleague who’s assisting with document translation could also be potential targets. Clearly someone has a vested interest in staying several paces ahead of Eatwell in his attempts to retrace Blake’s movements across the continent.
As he strives to unravel the details of his relative’s time both in the army and later as a horse-trader, Eatwell must weigh up who can be trusted and who might want him and his contacts dead.
The character Blake is based closely on the real-life Presgrave, an Australian soldier who fought with British Empire forces in South Africa and eventually became embroiled in the slaughter of Nama tribespeople under German rule across the border in South West Africa.

Glass Woman

19/7/2019

Caroline Lea: Michael Joseph $29.99

IN DEEPLY religious 1686 it doesn’t take much to raise the suspicions of fearful Icelanders.
Simply being literate is enough to see a woman branded a witch and sentenced to die in the official drowning pool at Thingvellir, where Iceland’s parliament meets in summer; being caught reading runestones, mentioning the island’s troll-like huldufólk or referencing the old Icelandic sagas is punishable with even more brutal treatment.
After her bishop father dies, 25-year-old Rósa agrees in desperation to become the second wife of a stranger, Jón Eiríksson, the chieftain of a community many days’ ride to the northwest of her childhood home. After all, Jón will support her mother, Sigridúr, sparing the ailing widow an ordeal of starvation and freezing – the inevitable outcome for anyone without a provider to support them.
Jón’s original bride is dead, Rósa knows, overcome by a sudden fever, leaving him childless.
It will be Rósa’s duty to cook, clean, mend, spin, salt and dry, to help with farmwork and fishing, and to produce sons to carry on her husband’s legacy. Jón, for his part, will ensure Sigridúr receives a reliable supply of peat blocks and meat.
Although reluctant to leave her lifelong friend Páll, with no viable alternative Rósa arrives in the seaside settlement of Stykkishólmur willing to do her best not to displease her benefactor.
She quickly finds life is not as straightforward as she had hoped it would be, however.
Jón is absent from from before dawn until well after dusk day after day, leaving Rósa alone with orders not to speak to his subjects, and clearly prefers to spend time with his assistant, Pétur, rather than Rósa.
When mysterious noises and a feeling of being watched are added to the mix, Rósa’s nerves are soon every bit as fragile as the tiny glass figurine she keeps buried her pocket.

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?

The Place on Dalhousie

24/5/2019

Melina Marchetta: Viking $32.99

ROSIE Gennaro and Jimmy Hailler first cross paths under the most unexpected of circumstances.
Sydneysider Rosie is in Central Queensland escaping the misery of her father’s sudden death and the realisation that his widow, her despised stepmother, is refusing to relinquish control of a house renovated years earlier by Rosie’s parents.
Jimmy is also serving a period in exile, unable to leave the Sunshine State to return to his own home in Sydney until a good-behaviour bond has been completed.
When pitching in to help a town besieged by flooding brings the pair together for a fortnight, they find comfort in each other.
Two years later, having rediscovered a mobile phone misplaced after he and Rosie parted, Jimmy retrieves 12 months’ worth of voicemail and is shocked to discover he has a son. Toto is living with Rosie at her old family home in Dalhousie Street, Haberfield – just a hop, skip and jump from the neighbourhood in which some of Jimmy’s closest friends live.
Now working as a FIFO miner Jimmy can afford to fly from Brisbane to Sydney to visit Toto and Rosie – but will he be welcome? Afraid of following his parents’ poor example and disappointing his child, he hesitates.
Rosie is struggling. Reliant on welfare payments to support herself and Toto she is confined to the upper level of her childhood residence.
The rooms downstairs are the domain of 40-something Martha, still grieving the loss of her mother and then her husband in too short a time-span. Attractive and lonely, Martha has caught the attention of former rugby league star Ewan Healy, however, a man with an equally complicated life.
The latest release from the queen of multi-generational, multicultural family fiction (most notably, Looking for Alibrandi), Dalhousie interweaves the perspectives of Australians from various cultural backgrounds in a touching tale of mixed messages and uncertainty.

The Spanish Promise

17/5/2019

Karen Swan: Macmillan $29.99

WITH just over a week to spare before her wedding, London-based wealth counsellor Charlotte Fairfax barely flinches when a major bank seeks her help to resolve an awkward financial predicament in Spain.
A powerful client’s billionaire father, on the brink of losing his life to cancer and now crippled by a stroke at the age of 98, is moving to bequeath the entirety of his generations-old business portfolio to a mid-40s café worker in Madrid – a woman completely unknown to the aristocratic family and its advisors, giving rise to the assumption that she must be the latest in a line of mistresses. Mateo Mendoza is worried; if his papa, Carlos, succeeds in transferring his assets to this stranger, the prestigious Mendoza empire will cease to exist.
Charlotte’s mission is simple: fly in, convince this mysterious interloper to accept a million-euro payoff in return for relinquishing any further claim on Carlos and his estate, and fly out just as quickly, all in time to take pride of place at her rehearsal dinner and attend one final gown fitting over the weekend.
What should be a straightforward negotiation becomes infinitely more challenging, however, when ghosts from Charlotte’s younger days resurface.
The investigation into Carlos’s links to his apparently unwitting beneficiary soon begins to draw Charlotte ever-deeper into the Spanish heartland, leading away from the glamorous capital with its galleries and cocktail parties to Ronda, a spectacularly situated, white-washed village in the Andalusian countryside where the echoes of civil war atrocities still reverberate.
Will doing her professional utmost to preserve the Mendoza inheritance mean sacrificing more than Charlotte is prepared to give up on the personal front? As her supposedly routine assignment becomes more complicated with every passing hour, Charlotte finds herself questioning her own identity and values just as closely as the waitress’s.

The Mother-in-Law

22/2/2019

Sally Hepworth: Macmillan Australia $29.99

IT'S one thing, in a fit of long-simmering, spur-of-the-moment frustration, to wish one’s mother-in-law dead; it’s quite another to learn that it’s actually happened.
When Lucy first embarked on a relationship with workmate and now-husband Oliver Goodwin in suburban Melbourne a decade earlier she had dreams of forging a wonderfully close and warm connection with his mother. After all, Lucy had long been without a maternal influence of her own, having lived from the age of 13 with her widowed father.
What eventuated, however, was something more akin to a barely functional stand-off between the pair: a brittle tolerance of one another cobbled together by their mutual love of Ollie and, as time wore on, the young couple’s three children. While the rest of Ollie’s family welcomed Lucy into its midst immediately, Diana was coolly detached, showing none of the generosity and graciousness for which she was renowned throughout the community.
But now Diana Goodwin has been found dead – and despite initial suggestions that she may have been terminally ill, police detectives are investigating the incident as a case of homicide.
Who might have had reason to kill this wealthy matriarch: an apparently kind, caring grandmother whose life had been devoted to supporting newly arrived refugees through pregnancy and childbirth in an unfamiliar country?
Recollections of a very public spilling-over of animosity between Lucy and Diana in front of a roomful of witnesses quickly casts suspicion on Lucy – the one person known to have had a likely motive for her murder.
Told from the perspectives of three equally strong-minded, independent women – Lucy, Diana and Ollie’s sister Nellie – The Mother-in-Law explores the complex web of interplay that exists between disparate individuals and generations forced together by the one thing they have in common: Lucy’s husband, Diana’s son and Nellie’s brother.

The Forgotten Children

8/2/2019

Isabella Muir: Outset Publishing $29.50

LOSING an unborn child and having her boyfriend propose marriage within the same few days is more emotional upheaval than Emily Carpenter can handle.
Emily’s fresh wave of mourning reopens painful memories of a previous pregnancy and a tiny boy entrusted to the care of nuns 20 years earlier. Back then, as a 16-year-old schoolgirl she had no choice in the matter, the decision made without consultation by her conservative parents.
Now grieving all over again, Emily – an outwardly successful author – flees her home in Brighton, England, and in a single day drives until she runs out of road. There, on the western edge of Britain, in the island of Anglesea, Wales, she settles into a rented cottage in a village where her days are filled with taking long walks with her dog Ralph and teaching reading. It’s an opportunity for a new beginning, albeit temporarily, free from constant reminders of the ways in which her life has stalled.
After a series of stilted chats with a stranger on a clifftop, however, she realises the time has come to stop running and instead address her regrets and frustrations in person.
As Emily begins to pursue the truth about her surrendered son her research uncovers a trail of circumstances she could never have imagined. Not only is he no longer in the Brighton area but it seems children from the facility in which he had been living were among those sent to the far side of the world as part of a decades-long program to relocate unwanted British youngsters to Commonwealth countries including Australia. No records survive, leaving Emily with few options for tracing his whereabouts.
Whether she will now be able, so many years later, to make her peace with those events (and with her own mother’s role in them) is uncertain.

The Colours of all the Cattle

25/1/2019

Alexander McCall Smith: Hachette Australia $29.99

FEW authors tell a modern-day fairytale with more astute moral insight, keenly biting wit and generous laugh-out-loud humour than Alexander McCall Smith.
Deftly weaving together life lessons in ethical behaviour with an exotic location and a cast of endearing characters, McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series continues to reward readers with its family-friendly exploration of moral dilemmas in a 21st-century African setting.
In the 19th Ladies’ Detective Agency novel, Mma Precious Ramotswe is challenged anew, not only in a professional sense but also on a personal level.
While busy delving into the hit-and-run crippling of one of Botswana’s most respected citizens and a long-time friend of her now-late father, Mma Ramotswe must weigh up her commitment to her husband and children in the face of an unexpected opportunity to publicly oppose the planned construction a “disrespectful” hotel bordering the local cemetery.
Should she stand for political office in order to have a meaningful say in the decision-making process? If so, how will she fare in a public popularity vote against the arch-nemesis of her business partner, Mma Grace Makutsi: the contemptible but glamorous Violet Sephoto? After all, what can Mma Ramotswe say about herself other than the simple truth: “I can’t promise anything – but I shall do my best”?
At the same time Mma Ramotswe’s offsider, part-time trainee detective Charlie, is wrestling with internal questions of his own. His girlfriend Queenie-Queenie is yet to introduce Charlie to her family, and a boyhood acquaintance appears to know more than he’s admitting about the accident that injured Doctor Marang.
Impoverished and sharing a tiny bedroom with two of his younger cousins, Charlie might finally have a chance to prove his true value as an investigator – and in so doing mark himself out as a worthy suitor for Habarone’s most beautiful shop assistant.

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 Year of the Farmer

7/12/2018

Rosalie Ham: Picador Australia $32.99

NORMALLY there’s nothing even vaguely amusing about irrigation cutbacks, drought-crippled farms, disintegrating communities, dog-mauled livestock and neighbours fighting not only each other but in some cases even themselves.
Rosalie Ham can add a wickedly satirical twist to any storyline, however, generating wry smiles and sly sniggers with her caricatures of stereotypically flawed individuals who under any other circumstance would be irretrievably irksome.
Take, for instance, Ham’s cross-section of residents in a fictitious Riverina town whose once-robust river is now barely flowing.
Mitch and his wife Mandy are at odds, hurried into marriage by an imagined pregnancy after Mitch’s high-school sweetheart, Neralie, decided to broaden her horizons – and love-life – by moving to Sydney.
Lana and Jasey, on the other hand, share the same boyfriend: Kevin. It’s an unconventional arrangement that gives the gossips plenty of inspiration, but as far as these best friends are concerned, having half of Kevin is preferable to having all of any one of the area’s supposedly eligible men. They have a point.
So dire is the outlook that when a new water authority representative sweeps onto the scene in his cycling lycra, legs shaved and receding hairline combed over, it’s not only the young singles who suddenly develop a taste for break-of-dawn power-exercising.
But Stacey’s mission is more about retrieving water – and in so doing padding his commission-based takehome pay – than winning female hearts. His partners in the plan, Glenys and Cyril, are the scourge of the district, shunned for controlling the river’s flow either too tightly or not nearly tightly enough, depending on where individual priorities lie.
At the heart of it all is an overarching mystery: who now owns local pub? It’s been sold, they all know, and renovations are in progress, but what will this mean for their one remaining reliable watering hole?

Vodka and Apple Juice

30/11/2018

Jay Martin: Fremantle Press, $27.99

JAY Martin is embarking on what appears to be every other Australian woman’s dream: spending three years as a lady of absolute leisure in northern Europe.
Accompanying husband Tom Armstrong on his diplomatic posting to Poland, Martin is at first excited by the promise of free time in which to explore their adoptive city, Warsaw, and its surrounding regions.
The novelty wears thin after only a few weeks, however, and in place of the initial wave of exoticism Martin feels herself quickly drowning under a tsunami of helplessness and rebellion as she struggles to read grocery labels, use public transport and make interpersonal connections in an entirely unfamiliar culture.
Her attempts to master a language of ‘ssshhhhhhes’ leave her mentally exhausted, and the sense of loss brought on by having stalled her own career as a senior political communicator in Canberra in order to travel with her husband leave Martin longing to reclaim the demands of full-time work with its structure and routine. The life of a non-working expatriate wife, it seems, is not the idyllic existence outsiders imagine it to be.
As Armstrong becomes increasingly ground down by his obligations to the embassy, Martin finally starts to regain her characteristic confidence, creating a role for herself as a freelance reporter and establishing a small but meaningful circle of loyal and engaging friends, both local and foreign.
In the process she explores areas of Poland few tourists visit, accepts that vegetarianism is an unfathomable concept to meat-loving pierogi traditionalists and develops a penchant for generous servings of vodka-spiked apple juice.
Yet, as the seasons tick slowly by and the emotional strain on her marriage intensifies, Martin begins to wonder whether she will ever settle comfortably into the apparently endless round of exhibition openings, cocktail parties, black-tie dinners and receptions for Australian government VIPs.

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.

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