Category: Romance

The Runes of Destiny

18/12/2020

Christina Courtenay: Headline Review $22.99

ONE minute Linnea Berger is pitching in to help her father Haakon’s boss at an archaeological dig near their family home in central Sweden, the next she’s waking up on the ground with a stranger standing over her.
Regaining consciousness after an apparent blackout, Linnea is accused of having stolen the local jarl’s silver brooch – the same brooch she had just located with the help of a metal detector and dug out of the soil.
Now she’s surrounded by a group of Swedes dressed as some sort of throwback to the Viking era. It’s clear to Linnea that these people take their role-playing seriously – very seriously.
Not only are they wearing the clothing of ninth-century Svía villagers but they’re actually speaking Old Norse too. History student Linnea is capable of holding her own linguistically but the characters of this make-believe setting are absolutely fluent.
This can’t be happening. Nobody has spoken Old Norse like this since… well, not since it evolved into the group of modern-day Scandinavian languages roughly a millennium ago.
Her captors are taking this fantasy way too far, even referring to her as their “thrall” and discussing plans to sell her in a slave market in Miklagarðr – known in Linnea’s world of 2017 as Istanbul.
Surely they don’t actually believe they’re living in Viking-Age Svíaríki, do they?
If this is real, then she’s somehow been catapulted 1200 years into the past: a past in which expeditioners from this part of Sweden routinely navigate their way across the Baltic, along the rivers of western Russia and Ukraine and across the Black Sea to the heart of the Ottoman Empire and in some cases even to Iran.
Being immersed in a Norse community such as this is every historian’s dream but for Linnea the experience she’s now having feels much more like the worst possible nightmare.

The Evening and the Morning

2/10/2020

Ken Follett: Macmillan $17.99 ebook

THERE’S a first time for everything, so the saying goes – and in the case of unfortunate Combe, the ‘first’ this season is its first Viking attack.
Although a terror of pillaging Norsemen has hung over the settlements of western England for many years, never before has Combe been targeted. Finally, however, in mid 997 the village’s luck runs out.
At 17 Edgar is already a fully grown man, the youngest of three brothers apprenticed to their master-boatbuilder father.
When the marauders arrive, he is away from his parents’ home, waiting desperately at dawn on the far shore of the bay for his beloved Sungifu to join him. Edgar has constructed a sturdy wooden vessel to carry the young couple away together and can already imagine the happiness they will soon share. Today’s elopement will be the start of a new life for them both.
On the opposite side of the English Channel, the high-spirited Lady Ragnhild is ensconced safely inside Count Hubert and Countess Ginnilaug’s castle at Cherbourg.
Themselves the descendants of Viking conquerors, the Norman nobles are proud of their Norse heritage and feel no need to turn away the longships that visit their port en route to rich, undefended pastures nearby.
They are on friendly terms with the English at the same time and often welcome delegations led by clergymen.
As the fallout from the Viking plundering of Combe begins to solidify, the ruling families of the two communities are drawn closer together.
Wilwulf, ealdorman of Shiring, needs help. His coastline is being ravaged and Combe’s destruction has left its mark on his finances.
Gaining the co-operation of Cherbourg could be an important step towards stemming the flow of aggressors from the north but in order to forge an alliance he must be able to offer something to the Normans in return.

Winter Magic: A Bitter Creek Novella

25/9/2020

Joan Johnston: Joan Mertens Johnston Inc $4.13 Kindle e-book

A BATTERED woman. A fatherless child. A man with features mutilated years earlier by the jaws of a grizzly bear.
It’s an unconventional combination, yet these disparate characters find themselves forced to wait out a blizzard together after cattle rancher Mike Sullivan finds a vehicle broken down on the roadside near Whitefish in north-western Montana. Inside the rusty old pickup truck Mike discovers Joanne Henderson and her daughter Daisy, a sweet-natured, kitten-loving four-year-old.
In the rural high country, with snowdrifts rising ominously Mike’s only option is to open his home to the pair as shelter until the storm has passed and it is safe for them to continue their journey.
But welcoming two strangers into his cabin is an uncomfortable experience for the unmarried former navy SEAL whose near-fatal mauling has left him with the type of hideous scarring that startles children and makes adults flinch. Mike has had little social interaction since suffering his run-in with the bear and is pitifully awkward in the presence of his unintended house guests.
Joanne is exquisitely attractive: small, delicate, dainty and blonde. Pragmatist Mike knows himself to be hulking, shaggy, deformed. Any attraction he might feel towards this bruised and broken young mother is futile.
Yet, as brief as their time under the same roof is destined to be, it is nevertheless a cosy taste of domestic bliss that Mike can’t help but relish. If only his face and his confidence weren’t so terribly disfigured perhaps this could be his reality.
Winter Magic is the fifth release in the ‘King’s Brats’ series of Bitter Creek stories, adding to the Grayhawk family saga explored in Sinful, Shameless, Surrender and Sullivan’s Promise.
For Southern Hemisphere readers celebrating Christmas in July it is a perfectly themed shot of escapism into a world of generosity, acceptance and unlikely love.

One To Watch

18/9/2020

Kate Stayman-London: Hachette Australia $29.99

LOVE comes in all shapes and sizes – or does it? Certainly not in the highly unrealistic world of ‘reality’ TV, where contenders on the top-rating Main Squeeze bear absolutely no resemblance to LA-based fashionista Bea Schumacher and her social media followers.
As 25 single women or men vie on screen for the attention of a potential husband or wife, Bea is frustrated to see that season after season the line-up is all but identical: tall, swimsuit-sculpted, white.
When a series of tequila-fuelled comments catches the eye of the Main Squeeze production team, the studio decides to turn the program on its head by introducing its first ever plus-sized romantic heroine. Can Bea be convinced to step into the role?
It’s horrible timing for the self-employed blogger, who has been in emotional freefall since her one-time best friend and love interest decided to ghost her.
Now, faced with having to choose a possible life partner in front of a national prime-time viewing audience, she is all but paralysed by self-doubt and indecision. Could any one of these so-called suitors truly be attracted to Bea or are they more likely merely going through the motions with a view to boosting their own public profiles?
Is chef Luc, professor Asher, farmer Wyatt or soccer coach Sam really Bea’s ideal match? All four men are physically perfect – and the reflection Bea sees in her mirror is not that of someone whose natural place is standing beside one of these god-like figures. After all, she reasons, there never has been a fat fairytale princess.
Will Bea’s lack of trust in the process derail this opportunity to find love?
Far from being a froth-and-bubbles glimpse into the world of The Bachelorette et al, One To Watch is a thought-provoking conversation starter that questions societal attitudes to weight, femininity and appetite.

You Deserve Each Other

7/8/2020

Sarah Hogle: Piatkus $29.99

NAOMI Westfield has an idyllic life – or, rather, she will have just a few short months from now when her wedding day finally dawns. To the outside world, Naomi is blissfully happy.
Nicholas Rose is the man of any sane woman’s dreams: a handsome, caring, career-focused dentist earning a generous income and with an open, welcoming family behind him.
By contrast, Naomi’s own parents are distant – both physically and emotionally – and she has little in common with her siblings.
However, appearances can be dangerously deceptive – particularly in the case of this engaged couple as they’re shepherded towards mother Rose’s vision of ever-after togetherness.
Naomi and Nicholas are in fact dreading marriage yet neither is willing to be the one who has to bear the shame of breaking their engagement. Instead they’re locked in the ultimate game of intimacy chicken, each daring the other to be the first to blink and walk away from an impending avalanche of lifelong disaster.
So intent are they on maintaining the façade that they’re willing to go to almost any lengths to conceal their true fears. After all, in this age of social media obsession, appearing to have the ideal bond in public is far more important than actually feeling respected, supported and understood in private – isn’t it?
“Knowing that our relationship looks enviable from the outside is the only thing we’ve got going for us,” Naomi admits to herself.
Unwilling to confide in her friends and workmates and seek their advice, she begins finding convert ways to undermine Nicholas’ plans for their future – ways that to the outside world seem increasingly off-balance and bizarre. The result for onlookers is hilarious and thought-provoking.
Will one or other of the engagees realise their mistake and call off the wedding before it’s too late or will they simply continue freewheeling towards marital misery?

Tidelands

1/5/2020

Philippa Gregory: Simon & Schuster $19.99

BEING female in 1648 is dangerous for even the most reputable of women; being a deserted wife suspected of practising witchcraft in a devoutly puritan community is almost certain to be fatal.
Medieval England is in turmoil, enveloped by a malicious civil war: the hereditary monarch, Charles I, is under house arrest in exile on the Isle of Wight, the Catholic queen consort is with her family across the channel in France and control of the country is in the hands of a renegade parliament backed by the army of Oliver Cromwell, a “middling farmer from Cambridgeshire”.
Alinor Reekie’s household is equally dishevelled. Alinor’s husband is missing, presumed drowned after having disappeared while fishing off the south coast of England months earlier. A herbalist and midwife, Alinor treads a perilously fine line between earning an honest shilling here and there dispensing natural remedies to neighbours and assisting in home births, and finding herself ostracised or worse for allegedly perpetuating ‘the old ways’. As she scrounges together a subsistence for herself and her two children on the edge of a tidal wasteland, Alinor’s days are back-breakingly long and uneventful.
When a stranger appears in the churchyard in the twilight of Midsummer’s Eve, Alinor has two choices: denounce this papist foreigner’s presence to the godly people of Foulmire or take the enormous risk of helping him to reach the apparent safety of the local lord’s manorhouse. It’s the type of potentially life-altering decision no-one can afford take lightly, but for Alinor the correct course of action is clear.
Known around the world for her historical fiction pen-portraits of the English nobility, Philippa Gregory delves for the first time into the lives of everyday Britons with The Fairmile Series, established with Tidelands and soon to include a second instalment in the saga of the desperate Reekies, Dark Tides.

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 Last Days of the Romanov Dancers

15/3/2019

Kerri Turner: Harper Collins $29.99

WINTER is coming – and so, too, for the average citizen of Russia are the desperate privations that accompany full-blown war.
As German troops move into the empire’s westernmost provinces, however, life for the elite of Petrograd society remains virtually unchanged.
Petrograd – as St Petersburg has been officially retitled in a move to make the grand city appear more patriotically Russian – is the seat of power of Tsar Nikolai II and his family, an all-powerful royal dynasty that not only rules the country but also celebrates arts such as dance. To be a principal of the Romanovs’ Imperial Russian Ballet is the ultimate aim of fledgling danseurs such as Luka Zhirkov, whose father barely manages to support himself while working in a factory and whose brother is now fighting bitterly to keep the would-be invaders at bay.
As the closing months of 1914 unfold, Luka’s standing soars, buoyed at least in part by his association with prima ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska, who almost inexplicably draws the young corps member ever deeper into her acquaintanceship.
For the tempestuous Valentina Yershova, emerging quickly as a celebrity in her own right, a personal battle to rival that waged by Russia’s starving soldiers brews. Valentina has been traded by her original “protector” – one of the rich and influential older men who traditionally keep a young dancer as a mistress – and is now at the mercy of Maxim Sergeivich, a volatile and at-times cruel and calculating newspaper columnist who openly craves the approval of Tsarina Alexandra and her closest advisor (and reputed lover), “mad monk” Grigori Rasputin.
In this debut novel Sydney author and ballet teacher Kerri Turner weaves historic figures and events into an engrossing, unpredictable, heartrending story that fleshes out the circumstances in which Petrograd and its dancers find themselves as World War I closes in.

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.

The Red Coast

23/2/2018

Di Morrissey: Macmillan Australia $34.99

IN THE midst of preparations for Broome’s inaugural literary festival, the sudden appearance in town of a neighbour from her high school years in Sydney catches bookshop owner Jacqui Bouchard by surprise. What could Cameron North – a big-city east-coast lawyer – possibly be doing in the Kimberley?
At the same time, Jacqui is counting down to the scheduled arrival of her teenage son Jean-Luc from France, where he lives year-round with her former husband. Jean-Luc’s summers in Broome are an annual highlight for Jacqui, whose own parents are on the opposite side of the continent.
When her path crosses briefly with a visiting cameraman from Perth, Damien Sanderson, Jacqui’s personal life takes an interesting turn. Damien is the first man to have caught Jacqui’s attention since the dissolution of her marriage. Yet, being based in Perth he is not exactly the ideal partner for a businesswoman tethered firmly to the north-west corner of the country’s biggest state.
Distracting lonely Jacqui from her budding relationship with her fly-in fly-out date, Broome learns that a billionaire miner has plans for the region that quickly divide the isolated community into distinct ‘for’ and ‘against’ camps. While Indigenous leaders debate the financial and cultural merit of the proposal to mine a vast inland area and set up a bulk mineral port that has the potential to overshadow the famous Cable Beach, members of Broome’s multicultural population see either opportunity or loss, depending on their individual circumstances.
With disharmony and bitter divisions building, the looming festival is the one point of unity holding the fractured town together.
In The Red Coast Di Morrissey revisits a part of Australia first explored in two earlier novels, Tears of the Moon and Kimberley Sun, reawakening the story of Lily Barton and her highly successful pearl farm and rekindling interest in the extended Barton family.

Where the Murray River Runs

5/1/2018

Darry Fraser: Harlequin $22.49

BENDIGO in the mid-1890s is an inhospitable place for any unwed mother, let alone one whose predicament is the result of a single afternoon’s alcohol-fuelled indiscretion with someone else’s sweetheart. Complicating the situation further, the father – unaware of the pregnancy – has been driven off his parents’ struggling orchard by the need to earn an income and is now living many days’ travel away in the South Australian Riverland.
A frontier goldmining town it may be, but Bendigo is nevertheless a community with clear moral standards – standards that in Mary Bonner’s case motivate the desperate teenager to follow the only course of action likely to bring redemption and marry an older stranger who agrees to assume responsibility for the coming child.
When the marriage quickly turns sour, fearing that her new husband will kill her Mary bequeaths the as-yet-unborn baby to a former schoolmate, Linley Seymour, whose aunt CeeCee runs a clandestine refuge for abused and abandoned women.
Mary’s foresight proves to be well founded and within hours of his birth the tiny boy is lifted from his dead mother’s bruised and bloodied arms and delivered to Linley.
What Toby’s ill-tempered stepfather does not know initially is that the baby was not Mary’s only possession; with him goes a substantial family inheritance willed by the terrified young wife in trust to her son.
Once realisation strikes, Gareth Wilkin’s fury snowballs.
Rather than feel relieved to be shed of “the brat”, Wilkin allows his frenzied rage to set in motion a course of vengeance that will force Linley and CeeCee out of their home and endanger a series of lives, including that of Toby’s biological father.
With colonial Bendigo, Renmark and the thriving paddlesteamer port of Echuca as its backdrop, this novel explores domestic violence as it existed more than century ago.

The Little Theatre by the Sea

8/12/2017

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Rosanna Ley: Quercus $19.99

NEWLY graduated from design college but with no immediate job prospects, Faye Forrester is both surprised and delighted to receive an invitation to housesit for an old school friend and her Italian husband in Sardinia.
Perhaps a few days of visiting Charolotte and Fabio’s tiny fishing port on the west coast of the island is exactly what Faye needs as a buffer between three years of intense study in London and returning to the real world of working non-stop. The possibility of collaborating on a minor theatre restoration during her break in Deriu is an added lure.
Naturally, Faye assumes, there will be tall, dark and handsome locals whose mission is to charm the visiting Englishwoman; she is determined to brush aside all such advances as nothing more than mere Latin opportunism.
What she does not expect, however, is to meet a boatbuilder who captures her interest. The moody Alessandro Rinaldi may be a co-owner of Deriu’s derelict entertainment centrepiece with his sister, Marisa, but that’s as much as Faye wants to know about this apparently complicated man.
What she really needs is some straightforward rest and relaxation and a professional credit on her as-yet-blank résumé.
The building itself is magnificent, if severely neglected: a once-grand focal point of the village dating from the early 1800s and beloved by residents. Abandoned after the deaths of the Rinaldis’ mother, actress Sofia, and father, businessman Bruno, it is desperately run-down – exactly the type of rejuvenation project any newly qualified interior designer would eagerly embrace.
Back home in England, meanwhile, Faye’s parents, Adrian and Molly, are facing challenges of their own as they struggle to accept that over the decades they have drifted away from each other and now have few interests in common.
Which relationships will founder, and which will go from strength to strength?

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Sanctuary

17/11/2017

Judy Nunn: William Heinemann Australia $32.99

GEVAAR Island, 40 kilometres due west of tiny Shoalhaven on the West Australian coast, is an isolated, largely inhospitable place at the best of times. In the off season, when the fishermen whose huts are the only sign of civilisation among the rocks rarely leave port on the mainland, it’s entirely deserted.
Suddenly, the unplanned arrival of an Indonesian dinghy bearing nine battered, malnourished and dehydrated passengers breathes life into Gevaar’s cluster of colourful timber shacks with their neglected kitchen gardens and sparsely stocked cupboards.
The group comprises three couples, two single travellers and an energetic and resilient three-year-old boy for whom scrambling ashore on this remote outpost is the start of an exciting adventure.
One woman looks and sounds British; to those who aren’t familiar with the region, the rest could be from anywhere in the Middle East. In fact, they are citizens of five separate countries – Egypt, Iran, Syria, Kurdish Iraq and Afghanistan – with three religions and communicate in a mix of local languages linked together loosely by a blend of classical Arabic and somewhat rusty English.
All eight adults are hiding something: the triggers that prompted them to flee their homelands, their fears, their ambitions, their true identities.
At first glance the island is a haven for the bedraggled survivors, yet even as they settle into their makeshift community they begin to question what Australia’s reaction will be once their presence is discovered. Will this reportedly open and laid-back nation half a world away from their points of origin really welcome their impromptu appearance, as they’ve been assured it will, or will their uninvited occupation of Gevaar draw the ire of yet another set of hostile government officials?
Sanctuary’s author, actor-turned-bestselling-writer Judy Nunn, will be in Victoria to deliver a series of readings from her new novel in Gippsland next week.

Pachyderm

11/8/2017

Hugh McGinlay: Threekookaburras $29.95

FINDING an intelligent, attractive, available man in Melbourne isn’t easy, as crime-scene-investigator-turned-milliner Catherine Kint well knows. Finding an intelligent, attractive, available man who won’t, the morning after their first night together, allow himself to be mauled by a pack of African wild dogs is even harder.
Just when hatmaker extraordinaire and now-unofficial sleuth Catherine’s luck seems to have taken a turn for the better, brand-new love interest Beau Hacska is dragged barely alive from an enclosure at Melbourne Zoo, where he works as a keeper.
It’s not the first time Beau has had an unfortunate up-close encounter with wildlife of the open-plains variety; his primary claim to international infamy is as the man whose head was once buried inside an elephant.
Before having his run-in with the dogs Beau had enlisted Catherine to look into a sudden death at the zoo in a bid to clear himself of alleged culpability. With Beau now immobilised in hospital she turns to her best friend and favourite gin-pouring barman, Boris Shakhovsky, for backup.
The pair have already had considerable crime-solving success together, having woven their way through the alleyways of Brunswick in the interests of apprehending a murderer in local author Hugh McGinlay’s first novel, Jinx.
The plot of Pachyderm, McGinlay’s follow-up, is equally intriguing in characteristically off-beat, irreverent style. Believably flawed characters, cosily familiar inner-city locations and sassy, tongue-in-cheek, boisterous wit keep the chapters humming along to a satisfying and unexpected conclusion.
Catherine, Boris and Beau share centre stage with an eclectic cast: a slightly doddery visiting British documentary-maker and naturalist, a detestable bully with a prominent role in state politics, a bothersome millinery client who senses trouble before it strikes, a female laundromat customer with a penchant for pink-dyed men’s clothing, a flirty stranger who whistles openly on a train, and meerkats, lions and reptiles aplenty.

The Hidden Hours

21/7/2017

Sara Foster: Simon & Schuster $29.99

A POST-WORKDAY river cruise. A drug-spiked cocktail. A gossip-fuelling altercation between two of the host company’s top executives.
Eleanor Brennan’s first taste of a Parker & Lane corporate Christmas party is one nobody at the book publishing house will ever forget.
Eleanor has been in London for less than a month when what should have been the beginning of a fresh start overseas suddenly sours.
First comes waking up in her uncle and aunt’s house, where she is living temporarily, with a crippling hangover and a gap of several hours in her memory. Then follows the discovery of the Parker & Lane marketing and publicity manager’s distinctive engagement ring loose in her handbag. And finally Eleanor – along with the rest of the roughly 100-strong office team – is informed that the jewellery’s owner, Arabella Lane, has been found submerged in the Thames’ near-freezing, murky shallows – dead, presumed drowned.
Eleanor, like several dozen of her workmates, witnessed Arabella slap her husband, the company’s managing director Nathan, with full force across the face, without explanation, during the previous evening’s festivities.
Nathan, as a consequence, is immediately declared the number one suspect in his glamorous and temperamental wife’s apparent murder.
But the Lane marriage is not the only one to have revealed the most serious of fractures in recent days.
Eleanor’s uncle Ian and his wife Susan, Parker & Lane’s CEO and resident ice queen, are also at loggerheads.
The stress is evident in the behaviour of the couple’s young daughters, Naeve and Savannah, who – like their barely-adult cousin – spend their hours at home evading the snapping, snarling pair.
As the tension snowballs, ghosts from Eleanor’s deeply troubled childhood in rural Australia resurface, triggering an avalanche of anxiety and self-doubt that threatens to immobilise her right when she most needs to be thinking clearly if she is to survive the aftermath of Arabella’s death.

A Dangerous Crossing

9/6/2017

Rachel Rhys: Bantam Australia $32.99

ON AN ocean liner bound for the far side of the world, everyone’s running away from something – or so it’s safe to assume, considering that perfectly contented, secure individuals rarely uproot themselves from a successful, established life in order to start afresh.
When Lily, 25, a waitress hoping to find employment in one Sydney’s grand English-style mansions, embarks on the adventure of a lifetime from Tilbury, London, she has little idea what the next few weeks of sailing will bring.
It is mid 1939, and with the possibility of war hanging over Europe, Lily is not the only one looking forward to exploring options far from home.
Her dinnertable companions include siblings Edward and Helena, a conservative pair driven out of cold, damp England by poor health, and George, an only son being sent by his father to sit out the impending upheaval in the safety of New Zealand.
Sharing a cabin with Lily are fellow assisted migrants Ida and Audrey, young women making the trip to Sydney alone at the urging of the two countries’ governments.
Also part of the eclectic mix are Eliza and Max, a hedonistic couple from the first-class deck whose scandalous past is very much present with them even as they pretend to shrug it off.
At the far end of the spectrum are Jewish refugee Maria and a group of Italian wives whose husbands have preceded them.
As the cross-section of society undertakes one of the classic voyages of the mid 20th Century, its members explore the exotic unfamiliarity of Gibraltar, Nice, Naples, Port Said, Suez, Aden and Colombo en route to Fremantle, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney.
However, nothing they encounter ashore is nearly as dangerous as their time on board, crowded together in oppressive, frustrating conditions where class distinctions and racial tensions test even the calmest of personalities.

Orkney Mystery

17/2/2017

Miranda Barnes: FA Thorpe £4.99

INHERITING property on a previously unfamiliar North Sea island has never been part of Englishwoman Emma’s grand life plan.
When great-aunt Freda bequeaths her estate to Emma, the 30-something insurance clerk’s unremarkable day-to-day existence in Newcastle is unexpectedly disrupted.
Rather than holidaying in Greece with her friends, Emma finds herself heading to Orkney, a windblown archipelago off northeast Scotland. After a full day’s drive and a stomach-churning ferry trip, Emma arrives to find the region grey and bleak at the end of a long winter.
Initially she intends to place the house on the market, but the more Emma learns of Freda – and Orkney in general – the more reluctant she is to dispense with her only tangible link to this previously unheard-of relative. How had English-born Freda come to be living in Orkney, and why does her own family know so little about her?
As she delves into the possibilities, Emma’s greatest ally is Gregor, an attractive but seemingly married freelance wildlife photographer and cameraman she met on the crossing who introduces Orkney through a local’s eyes.
With Gregor’s help Emma explores not only Freda’s past but also the Neolithic, Pictish, Norse and Celtic heritage of this one-time Viking stronghold. Together they visit Orkney’s intriguing attractions: the standing stones of Brodgar and Stenness (calculated to be more than twice Stonehenge’s age), the underground settlement of Skara Brae, World War II relics such as the naval muster point Scapa Flow and a chapel built by interned Italians, and the cliffs and islets that lure naturalists in their tens of thousands every year.
As Emma and Gregor research the mystery of Freda’s presence in Orkney, author Miranda Barnes weaves into her fictitious plot a heartwarmingly accurate portrait of the largely agricultural countryside and its scattered villages (including the ‘capital’, Kirkwall, with its 8000 residents).

The Girl from Venice

3/2/2017

Martin Cruz Smith: Simon & Schuster $32.99

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

The Ice Beneath Her

9/12/2016

Camilla Grebe: Allen & Unwin $39.99

STOCKHOLM'S crisp mid-winter perfection has been shattered, its pristine snowscape disfigured by a geyser of human blood. In an exclusive outer suburb of the city a woman has been murdered, her body crumpled in a hallway, the head propped upright and staring vacantly towards the millionaire homeowner’s front door.
The building’s only known occupant, Jesper Orre, is missing. The playboy CEO of Scandinavia’s fastest-growing clothing chain, Orre has vanished, presumed to have fled the scene of his crime.
Peter is one of the first police officers deployed to attend, a detective desensitised by constant exposure to the gruesome realities of homicide. His focus is all-consuming – a convenient distraction from the bitterness of a failed marriage and a lack of interest in his teenaged son.
In actual fact it’s Orre’s second disappearance in as many months, although only one person knows of his previous desertion. Wearing an impressive diamond ring on one finger, Emma has been waiting for Orre to share a glass or two of wine with her while toasting their yet-to-be-publicised engagement. He’s never missed so much as a phonecall, let alone his own celebratory dinner; his fiancée is distraught.
At the age of 59, behavioural scientist Hanne is also harbouring a personal secret: the humiliating signs of early-onset dementia. Recruited to assist investigators again after a 10-year hiatus, she uses her newly resurrected career as rebellion against a psychologically undermining husband.
A decade earlier, Hanne – at that stage drafted in as a police consultant for the first time – and Peter worked on another case together: a case with eerie similarities to the current one at Orre’s house. Then, professional collaboration morphed into a disastrous affair that sapped her self-confidence.
Narrated in rotation by Peter, Emma and Hanne, this thriller pivots on chilling parallel existences, unnerving delusions, festering resentment and lifelong regrets.

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.

Elvis & Ginger

1/4/2016

Ginger Alden: Berkley $27.99

TO MUCH of the world Priscilla Beaulieu was the one true love of Elvis Presley’s life. In reality, however, that marriage held together for just short of five years, and several other significant girlfriends moved through the superstar’s orbit, most notably Ginger Alden, Presley’s fiancée of seven months at the time of his death.
Alden was only 19 and living with her family in Memphis when she first accompanied her older sisters to Graceland. Far from being overshadowed by the two grown women, Alden sparkled, catching their 42-year-old host’s attention.
Almost immediately Alden was whisked from her middle-class suburban upbringing into a tornado-like whirl of concerts, penthouses, private planes and hired help.
Within weeks of their initial meeting Presley presented Alden with a diamond engagement ring; the couple began finalising plans for a Christmas Day wedding less than 24 hours before he died in August of the following year.
Alden was not one of the many relatives, employees and former ‘friends’ who profited by selling sensational reminiscences after he was found dead in the bathroom of the suite they shared; rather, she kept her memories private, choosing to open up to the world only now that her son is a young adult.
In her own words, almost 40 years later Alden recounts Presley’s thoughtful, tender actions (underlining passages in her parents’ Bible, playing practical jokes on her siblings, singing at her grandfather’s funeral) and incredible generosity (epitomised by lavish gifts of cars, jewellery, fur coats and personal keepsakes). She describes in detail Presley’s fascination with philosophy, numerology and religion and recalls the hours the couple spent reading quietly together.
There are terrifying recollections, too, of rages involving guns, thrown food and, on one occasion, domestic violence.
Alden’s portrait, spanning the final nine months of Presley’s life, shows him as an imperfect but invariably optimistic and deeply spiritual human being.

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.

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

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