The prologue set in 1920 features two separate scenarios: in the first, an unnamed grieving mother is devastated when her donation to a village’s war memorial is rejected and, in the second, a police inspector arrives at Darkacre Hall, asking members of the Stillwell family questions about a local lad who went missing prior to the war, in 1914.
 
Nurse Sarah Hove arrives at the Hall to assist in caring for Leonard Stillwell, who was left severely disabled after fighting in the trenches. Currently looking after him are his brother, Maurice, and long-time family friend Victor Monroe. Maurice’s wife, Ida, has been forced to attend to domestic chores since they were left without staff and Sarah must also help with these.
 
It's not long before sinister, brooding undertones to life at the Hall become evident. Sarah starts to experience strange psychic phenomenon, seeing what may be ghosts. Ida is unhappy with the choices she has made and can’t understand why the villagers hate her so much. Maurice is having nightmares, slipping back into the mental instability caused by shellshock. Leonard battles depression and feels life isn’t worth living. Victor seems to be the only voice of reason. When another policeman arrives to continue the investigation into the missing boy and asking more disturbing questions about the past, fractures start to appear in the family façade as their lies slowly unravel.
 
This immensely readable novel is part claustrophobic old-house-gothic ghost story, part Agatha Christie murder mystery, part reflection on class and social attitudes and what we now call PTSD following the ravages of war. In spite of her unease with the atmosphere, Sarah remains stoic and competent when compared to the rest of the family. Ida is difficult to like and Victor displays dismissive treatment of weakness in the others although he still remains loyal. Both Maurice and Leopold are victims of their experiences and one has to find some sympathy for them in spite of what it transpires they might have done.
 
Some readers may pick up early on subtle clues as to the murder mystery, but it is very cleverly crafted and thus the whole novel makes for compelling reading. This is the second book I’ve read by Anita Frank and although quite different from “The Return”, which I read and reviewed previously, it is just as good and highly recommended.

Five stars

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Way down in the seething ocean turbulences at the bottom of the world around Cape Horn where the latitudes graduate from the Roaring Forties to the Furious Fifties and into the Screaming Sixties, and channels and landmarks bear names like the Gulf of Sorrows, Dead Man’s Road, Desolation Island, Mount Misery, the Port of Famine, the Bay of Severing of Friends and the Rocks of Deceit, lies the mist-shrouded uninhabited Wager Island.
 
As a result of the somewhat dubious and bizarre “War of Jenkins’ Ear”, Commodore George Anson is ordered to take a Royal Navy squadron and hunt down the Spanish in the Pacific. Wager is one of the vessels that falls behind and is wrecked on a remote island in 1741.
 
This is the story of what happened to the crew and subsequently. Pre-dating the better-known Mutiny on the Bounty by almost half-a-century, this harrowing tale carries prescient echoes of that event but on some levels is even more extraordinary, and has an unexpected conclusion.
 
There’s the ambitious Captain David Cheap who is determined to follow orders at any cost and is at odds with the gunner, John Bulkeley, a surprisingly erudite and religious man whose meticulous record-keeping forms the bedrock of the story. Others also write or record their own observations, including the sixteen-year-old midshipman, John Byron, destined to be the grandfather of the famous Lord Byron.
 
Rather than their misfortune binding these men together, they break up into gangs and factions. Scurvy, deprivation, accidents, murder, abandonment, lack of warmth or shelter and starvation kills most. Hunger can drive even the best of friends to commit unspeakable cruelties against one another. And it appears someone has deliberately destroyed the logbook pages detailing the last hours of the Wager.
 
Increasingly angry with Cheap, Bulkeley takes command and rebuilds the longboat which he sails to Brazil with his large group of supporters, leaving behind Cheap and his small group of loyalists. Only Cheap, Byron and one other officer survive and eventually reach Chile with the aid of an indigenous tribe. When they return to England, they are faced with a storm of a different sort. Bulkeley and twenty-nine other men have survived their ordeal and Bulkeley has published his memoirs. Cheap will have a very different story to tell of the events. In 1746, five years after the wreck of the Wager, a court martial takes place in Portsmouth.
 
You’ll find yourself totally swept up in the horrendous events and its cast of real-life characters. No fiction can compete with this amazing true story of human endurance and psychological complexities all at the mercy of politics, war, class, prejudice and ambition.
 
There’s the short poignant tale of John Duck, a free Black seaman, who managed to survive everything, only to be kidnapped and sold again into slavery, never to be heard of again.
 
“Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t – the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.”
 
It’s no wonder there is a movie currently in production. Whether it can ever do justice to this brilliant book remains to be seen.
 
 
Five Stars
 
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Dymocks Australia

​Jenny Quinn is 77 and has been baking all her life. Feeling there is little to look forward to any more at her age, and on an impulse, she applies to be on a baking TV show (unashamedly copied from The Great British Bake Off.)

As she doesn’t expect to get a call back, let alone make it as a contestant, she keeps it a secret from Bernard, her husband of almost 60 years. But that isn’t the only secret she has kept from him that is revealed in a series of flashbacks.
 
There is heart and much charm in this story and you may reach for the tissues by the end, but it is all rather too predictable. Jenny is nice enough but twee and insubstantial, even fey, at times. A bit more fire  and drama in the competition could have given her the opportunity to show her more steely side and lift the narrative's pace. Bernard’s character is so nice and loyal, that it seems ludicrous she didn’t think he’d forgive her for keeping important events from him.
 
This is mostly an enjoyable uplifting read, albeit with a slightly darker side relating to Jenny’s past. (My only quibble with the e-book version is having the flashbacks printed in annoying italics when just a different font would have served better.)
 
Three-and-a-half stars

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Dymocks

​In war, what are the traits that make a man a hero?

Who decides that the hero receives the proper recognition and rewards for his actions?

What happens to him when the guns fall silent and life returns to normal?
 
These questions and their answers lie at the heart of this story about six remarkable men who deserve to be better known – certainly by all Australians. Single-handedly, and displaying enormous initiative and courage, they turned events in the favour of the Allies during the second Battle of the Somme.

Historian Lucas Jordan has finally brought their truth to light.
 
On 9 August, 1918, two sergeants of the First Australian Infantry Battalion, Jake Hayes and Harold Andrews, were AWOL. Like many other diggers, they were inveterate souvenir hunters and had crossed the Somme in search of treasures.

In their rear, the British had been fighting to take a ridge called Chipilly Spur for nearly three days. Around 2,000 British soldiers had already been gunned down by Germans holding the Spur.

From their observations, Hayes and Andrews thought the frontal assault was a waste of time. They returned from their expedition and sought permission to surreptitiously tackle the Spur.

Hayes and Andrews chose just four volunteers from their Battalion - good mates, Jerry Fuller and Billy Kane, and two stretcher bearers, George Stevens and Richard “Dick” Turpin, who volunteered as riflemen.

Bandoliers slung over their shoulders and bombs in their pockets, they crept out, surprising and blasting the Germans in their dugouts and charging them with bayonets. They captured nine machine guns and 71 German prisoners. The Chipilly Spur was wide open and the British could advance.

The six were never properly acknowledged for their efforts. Even Australia’s senior commander, Sir John Monash, had the facts wrong, giving credit to an American regiment and another Australian brigade, ignoring the six completely.
 
The terms “larrikin” and “rogue heroes” certainly apply to all of them and that all survived in the face of unimaginable danger is beyond astonishing. Wounded, or struck down with illnesses, they were patched up and sent back to the fray over and over again. Jack Hayes was not expected to survive when severely wounded at Froissy just two weeks after the Spur and left to die. Miraculously, he survived and went on to be a dedicated member of the returned services leagues that would help ex-soldiers in the years to come. He is also one of the men behind the creation of the Anzac Day dawn services that are now an intrinsic part of Australian life.
 
Returning to Australia, some of the men were caught up in the Spanish Flu epidemic and quarantined in appalling conditions. Bitter domestic politics and issues with trade unions permeated post-war Australian life. Life was always tough, there was always a struggle with money. The Great Depression made things so much worse. All of the six married and had families. They worked hard, as labourers, on the railways, cutting timber, making roads.
 
It was only later in life they would realise the mistake they had made in their “she’ll be right, mate” attitude when declining pensions for their war service. At the time, they were young working-class men who’d come through baptisms of fire and were determined to provide for themselves and their families without hand-outs. It was only as they aged and their physical and mental wounds started acting up that they discovered the government refused to help them because they’d said no to those pensions twenty or thirty years before. What an indictment, considering what these men did for their country, both in war and peace.
 
Enthralling and sobering reading for anyone interested in little-known stories of World War I but also Australian social history of the mid-20th Century.
 
Four-and-a-half stars

New South Books

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(Note: for anyone interested in genetic traits as to what makes an adventurous Aussie “larrikin”, the leading sergeant Jack Hayes, was a descendant of an aristocratic convict sent to New South Wales, the notorious and irrepressible Sir Henry Browne Hayes, who kidnapped an heiress and was transported for his crime. During his twelve-year sentence, he established the estate of Vaucluse in Sydney which he surrounded with a trench filled with imported Irish turf in order to keep out snakes! A continuous thorn in the side of the authorities, he was also involved in an abortive Irish convict rebellion. After his release and on his return voyage, he managed to escape a shipwreck on the Falkland Islands.)
 

​Some months ago, I read and reviewed The Crimson Rooms by Katherine McMahon, an excellent novel about Evie Gifford and the numerous problems she faced being a pioneering female solicitor in the 1920s. This novel follows on with her story.

There have been major changes in Evie's life and she now shares a flat with her late brother's lover, Meredith, and their illegimate son, Edmund. On a personal level, she still has a conflicted relationship with her mother and struggles to get over her failed love affair with barrister, Nicholas Thorne. After the death of her grandmother, new facts come to light about her life in the theatre. Fresh complications arise when Evie's employer, Daniel Breen, starts displaying a romantic interest in her. And then Nicholas reappears.

On her professional front, Evie tackles two major cases. One represents a working class family that is being torn apart by extreme domestic violence and the other is a family at the direct opposite in the social scale and in which a prominent public figure rejects his child as not being his own. 

Woven throughout the pages are descriptions of the infamous General Strike of 1926 which is not often covered in novels. The radical Daniel represents strikers and Evie again finds herself across the court in conflict with Nicholas.

As in the earlier novel, all these characters with their failings, flaws and idiosyncracies will hold your interest. The flavour of the period is impeccable. While the resolution may be a little too tidy, it doesn't deter from what is another intelligent and satisfying book by McMahon.

Four-a-half stars

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