This slim volume by Eric Vuillard takes us on a very powerful journey in its scant 192 pages. Originally published in French and translated into English by Ann Jefferson, it packs an emotional punch that few lavish biographies or epic novels are able to do.
 
The narrative is pure quicksilver, hypnotic and shiny, slipping this way and that around the incontrovertible bluff of the greatest showman of all time, Buffalo Bill Cody, who created the mass spectacle to which thousands flocked in order to witness for themselves recent historical events in the Wild West. Woven throughout are fictional impressions of Cody’s private life, his spurious beginnings and carpetbagger associates, his womanising, even his town, Cody in Wyoming, and how he became consumed by his own legend and ultimately unable to distinguish truth from the showman’s lies.
 
There is equal force in the retelling of Sitting Bull’s relationship with Cody and how this stately Native American was reduced to being part of the freak sideshow for fifty bucks a week. Then there are the the cast of other  “injuns” who are jeered at, insulted and made to recreate their own massacre every night, only to rise and fight and die again the next day, and the next. Most of them are now forgotten and lost to history, like stunt rider Feather Man who had a fall in Marseilles and died in agony, “all alone on the other side of the world, unable to speak either French or English” with no-one to claim his body and whose remains were eventually discarded in a communal grave. The disturbing tale of Zintkala Nuni (Lost Girl), the infant survivor of Wounded Knee, is especially poignant in how she fell victim to good intentions, transient curiosity and ultimate degradation at the hands of white men.
 
Real history and imagination mix so well here, that it is difficult to slot this book into a specific genre but its impact is in its poetic prose and its brevity. Even the busiest reader can find the time for this rewarding work on how the tragedy of show business is a spectacle that ".... steals from us, and lies to us, and intoxicates us, and gives us the world in every shape and form. And sometimes, the stage seems to exist more than the world, it is more present that our own lives, more moving and more persuasive than reality, more terrifying than our nightmares.”

Five stars.

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(With many thanks to Edelweiss for the advance reading copy.)

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(For more examples of the fine writing in this book, an edited extract can be found here on The Independent book review site.)

It’s 1940 and most of the men in the village of Chilbury have gone to war and so the local choir will be disbanded, but not if music teacher Prim Trent has anything to do with it and she persuades the vicar to let a group of ladies carry on.
 
The choir is almost secondary to the various subterfuges and romances of the local residents, some of whom are up to no good while others hide their lights under bushels. Told in the form of letters, diaries or journals it has a mix of humour and seriousness. As with so many novels written from many viewpoints or in an epistolary style there are always some passages that work better than others, plus the inevitable credibility problems with swathes of description and fictional dialogue in letters that would never normally appear in such writing.
 
The dodgy midwife Edwina’s absurd baby-plotting antics in particular feel like part of a comedic “Agatha Raisin” cosy-crime plot while the journal entries of the lonely widowed Mrs Tilling, whose only son has gone to war, offer a much deeper and reflective style. The two sisters, Kitty and Venetia, are inconsistent. Kitty has adult perceptions that the average thirteen-year-old girl in 1940 was unlikely to have and the flighty Venetia’s transformation from irresponsibility and flirtatiousness to a more serious mien in a matter of days is implausible. Other characters are clichéd fare so often found in twee novels set in English counties such as a mysterious Cary Grant look-a-alike, the upper-class Mrs B who finds fault with everything yet becomes a stalwart, the rigid and sadistic Brigadier, the sneaky maid Elsie, plus a range of young “hooray Henry” chaps off to war (including one called Henry). The major tragedy that hits the village is another contrivance to ensure that certain characters are eliminated in order that all ends well for others.
 
The earlier cover with its genuine 1940s flavour is what drew me to this book initially whereas the second version is trendy and perhaps more fitting for a book about World War II written from a modern viewpoint.
 
If you don’t worry about flaws and just want an enjoyable read, then this will fit the bill. 3.5 stars.

Just when I’d decided I couldn’t face another World War I story for quite some time, this title and lovely impressionistic cover caught my eye and also the fact it is a translation. I thought perhaps here is a point of view that differs from so many WW1 novels written by English authors who tend to have similar voices because of their educations or backgrounds.
 
Written by Flemish poet and novelist Stefan Hertmans, with translation by David McKay, this is based on some notebooks written by Hertmans’ grandfather, Urbain Martien, shortly before he died in 1981. (This New York Times review gives the best summary.)
 
While it has passages of poetic beauty and tenderness deflecting off others packed with fiendish and grotesque horror, I do wonder how faithful this is to the notebooks themselves; how much is romanticised and intellectualised, how much is enhanced with splattered guts for those readers who prefer over-the-top-with-the-flag-boys fiction to introspection, art and philosophy? (If you aren’t already a vegetarian the descriptions of Urbain visiting a gelatine factory are enough to turn you into one.)
 
Urbain found his release from war, grief and disappointment in love through painting copies of masterpieces and portraiture, so somehow the excessive details of his war service don’t quite fit. It is a well-known truth that the majority of those who survived the trenches of World War I were silent or reserved about their actions and, even if they did share what they had been through, they would resort to macabre humour or allusion rather than describing squelching brains of comrades left on one’s boots. Perhaps rather than polishing and expanding the raw words of Urbain, there may have been greater honesty if the memoir had been lightly edited and left as written.
 
All this aside, I acknowledge that this is a magnificent piece of writing (evidence of a superb translation too), and it works best when the author’s own voice comes through as he wanders through the modern landscape trying to place it within the context of his grandfather’s past, such as in this passage where he is trying to visualise an ethereal nude girl who rose out of a lake and captured Urbain’s soul:

“ … but it can’t be done: the ring road, the buildings, the industrial sites, the fences, the streets, the railway, everything runs straight through it, as if an old songline had been ruptured by the brute force and mindlessness with which modern technology has flattened memories everywhere.”
 
And in the closing pages …
 
“… paradox was the constant in his life, as he was tossed back and forth between the soldier he had to be and the artist he’d wished to become. War and turpentine. The tranquillity of his final years made it possible for him to slowly overcome his traumas.”
 
No matter how good your research and imagination are, if you weren’t there you can’t ever really know what it was like and first-hand accounts remain the best (as in All Quiet on the Western Front, Testament of Youth, A Farewell to Arms, etc.). There are echoes here of that reality but like some of the old masters that Urbain copied they are hidden under the varnish.

Four stars.

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Anthony Horowitz wrote one of my favourite TV series of all time, Foyle’s War, and he has also been responsible for quite a number of scripts for Midsomer Murders and Hercule Poirot, plus he’s written versions of Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, books for children and young adults such as the Alex Rider spy series as well as stage plays and goodness knows what else. He has a fiendishly clever mind for plotting, so I knew even before I started Magpie Murders I would be in for a roller-coaster of a ride and this novel-within-a-novel didn’t disappoint me.
 
Without giving away too much of either plot, editor Susan Ryeland of Cloverleaf Books has the manuscript of the last title in a detective series written by the late Alan Conway, but its final two chapters - the ones who tell you whodunit - are missing. Why? And is there in any connection between Alan’s presumed death by suicide and what is contained in those missing chapters?
 
The Alan Conway manuscript carries all the traditional aspects of a 1950s Miss Marple or Poirot plot; a cute English village with its cricket and crumpets for tea and classic characters such as the over-bearing lord of the manor, an unfaithful wife and her dashing lover, the resident nosey-parker, a creepy gardener, dodgy antique dealer, wide-eyed ingénue in love, etc. Enter the foreign-born detective who will solve the case, Atticus Pund. It is absolute pastiche, absolutely fabulous.
 
Susan’s modern story contains lots of observations on the publishing world and even throws in real-life individuals such as Agatha Christie’s grandson into cameo roles. She discovers things about Alan Conway and his Atticus Pund series that even she as its editor hadn’t spotted: anagrams, word plays and cryptic codes. When she finally realises that Alan was murdered her own life will be in jeopardy when she discovers the truth.
 
This is a delicious book to be gobbled up in one manic extended session because if you leave it aside for any time you risk losing the momentum and forgetting who’s who or recalling some of the hidden clues that so cleverly juggle one story with the other. I must admit to not guessing the culprits in either of the two stories and that made it a terrific reading experience. Unlike Midsomer Murders on TV which has been known to get so slow and convoluted it can send me to sleep, this sparkling and clever tale kept me wide awake for many enjoyable hours.

Loved it. Five stars.
 
(With many thanks to Edelweiss for the opportunity to read a review copy.)

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Much of this tale takes place in the fictional Essex town of Aldwinter where many of the local yokels are terrified of a creature said to inhabit the Blackwater and is blamed for all manner of inexplicable disappearances or disasters both large and small.
 
Enter Cora Seaborne, a widow from London. Her interests in the creature are secondary to her enthusiasm for her new-found freedom from an oppressive marriage. Although not traditionally attractive many are captivated by her in spite of her big boots, messy hair and fascination with fossils and such. We are never really quite sure what she suffered at the hands of her late husband Michael or the exact nature of her relationship with her friend Martha, who is a progressive socialist of sorts. Cora’s only child, Francis, is obviously autistic or suffers from Asperger’s before either of those conditions had a name but sadly there doesn’t seem to be any real affection between mother and son.
 
There is also the simpering sick sweetness of the vicar’s wife Stella who becomes addicted to all things blue while her husband Will tussles with rescuing sheep and explaining religion and is also intent on axing a carving of the serpent from the pews that is probably an allegory on his growing desire for Cora. His rival, arrogant and “imp-ish” London doctor Luke is "cut" in more ways than one; by Cora and also a thug who puts an end to his surgical celebrity. Others include the Ambrose couple, all hale-and-hearty do-goody-ness, a legless beggar who quotes poetry, a girl with webbed fingers and another angelic child who smokes cigarettes, plus the creepily Gothic man Cracknell who skins moles, harbours earwigs up his sleeves and lives with two goats, Gog and Magog, in a moss-ridden house called World’s End.
 
Perhaps it’s a reaction to the brusque nature of much contemporary fiction or our modern sound-bite way of life, but there is a trend for some authors of recent historical novels to go to the opposite extreme and indulge in the long-winded intellectual styles of 19th Century literature with florid detailing of everything from fogs to furbelows. But like any intricate work of art, the individual characters within in it can get swamped by too powerful a background. For some reason it also feels oddly mid-Victorian and therefore old-fashioned within its own context which is post-1890.
 
The beautifully-designed cover displays abundance and sinuousness and the narrative certainly reflects those qualities. Like the mythical serpent of the title it meanders with symbolism and superstition only to slither off into the stinky Essex marshes leaving one wondering what the heck it was really all about …
 
Summary:-  a novel weighed down by its own brilliance. Three stars.

(With many thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC)

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Having recently read the excellent Behold the Dreamers, an immigrant novel with interesting characters facing the dead-end of their American dream, I had hoped for similar insight in this title from a Chinese-American perspective.
 
A brief summary of the plot:- the make-up empire of super wealthy businessman Charles Wang goes bust in the financial crisis, so he gathers together second trophy wife, Barbra, takes his kids Grace and Andrew out of school and college and together with elderly family retainer Ama drives an old car from California to the East where elder daughter Saina lives in the sticks after a crashing failure in her art career. Charles’ ultimate dream is to go back to his mythical ancestral lands in China.
 
Sounds as if it should be fun - and some passages do raise a chuckle - but the posturing is excessive with its acronyms and cool jargon, name- and brand-dropping, and the passages on the reasons for the financial crisis read like they were copied from incoherent second-rate economics theses found in Google searches. The demise of the first Mrs Wang was black humour turned into more of a disturbing grey.
 
Plus the Chinese dialogue that is left untranslated displays the arrogance of an author who is dismissive of her less-advantaged readers. I once went to a talk in Australia given by a famous Canadian author who repeatedly lapsed into French without explanation and which was clearly aimed at the educated high-brow contingent of her audience at the expense of us English-only ignoramuses who were left puzzled while the fawning elite gushed and clapped at her French in-jokes and reminiscences. Perhaps some idiot PR person had told her that all Australians interested in her books were members of Alliance Francaise, but the damage was done and I’ve never been inclined to read anything she's written since. So I’m afraid I feel the same about Jade Chang.
 
After persevering to the half-way mark, I was finally done in after the chapter on Saina’s career which is especially excruciating with its hip art chatter which might be clever if you are in the know about the New York art scene. At this point, I couldn’t care less if any of these unappealing poor rich people crashed and burned or found their Shangri La or not and I scanned my way to the end.  Two flickering stars for the occasional chuckles.

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Back in 1960 when I was on a summer holiday with my parents in the Cape Province of South Africa, I spotted a groovy, nattily-dressed young guy getting on a bus and my teen heart was all a flutter.
 
Only problem was as soon as I saw him take seat in the “Coloureds Only” section, I was shocked - not because he was “coloured” (he just looked tanned to me) - but because being a “white” girl I wasn’t allowed to be attracted to such a boy. Heaven forbid I should mention it out loud to anyone because you didn’t know who was listening and if I openly expressed an attraction to someone of mixed race, in my naivety I actually thought I might get sent to jail. Hard to believe these days, but that was how one was conditioned to think when visiting South Africa. Also, some years later in the early 1970s when I took a ship from Durban to Australia I made friends with a lovely couple from Nyasaland (now Malawi). He was white, she was black and they had three children. While transiting South Africa from Nyasaland by train, the husband had been forced to travel in "white" carriages and his wife and children were forced into the "black" carriages. In Durban, they had to stay in separate hotels and could have nothing to do with one another until they boarded the ship. 
 
Trevor Noah’s coming-of-age book brought back these memories for me. Although he was born in the 1980s when apartheid was wavering but still held its grip on the country, much of what he encountered growing up hadn’t changed. For a Xhosa woman to have relations with a white Swiss man was officially a crime. How Trevor’s independently-minded and slightly eccentric mother bravely negotiated her life with her son makes for moving and astonishing reading. That Trevor came out of it with the sense of humour and prodigious gift for satire that have now made him a successful and much loved entertainer is an even greater tribute to her.
 
Trevor’s unique situation, being neither Black nor White, and not even quite Coloured under the legal definition of those days, makes for sober but occasionally hilarious reading. His desperate tales of trying to get a girlfriend, or about the casting out of the demon and buying a toffee apple had me laughing out loud, but those about his mother’s troubled second relationship and what eventually happened to her nearly had me in tears.
 
In any memoir such as this, there is always going to be comedic exaggeration or poetic licence and there are quite a few gaping holes in his youthful career path apart from being a DJ and pirating and hustling CD’s, but possibly these will be filled in another future book.
 
Now that some places in the world are looking like reviving these despicable old prejudices and racial divides, we need to be reminded of what it was like to live under such systems and I can’t recommend this book highly enough for that reason.

​Four-and-a half stars.

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The fad for contemporary thrillers with “Girl” in the title seems unstoppable. As these have proved to be about females who are either too immature and/or psychologically-disturbed to be called women, when I was given the opportunity to read and review this latest offering I decided to see whether the genre had anything new or more positive to offer.
 
There are two parallel female narrators. Emma, who was Then, and Jane, who is Now. A useful device that distinguishes these two is that Emma can’t be bothered with quotation marks but Jane is more grammar-conscious (might be a subtle clue once the plot starts to unfold).
 
At different times, the women take out a lease on the unique house at One Folgate Street. Designed and owned by a minimalist perfectionist architect who imposes a vast number of conditions on his tenants from not permitting books, rugs or cushions to not leaving cups in the sink or allowing clothes to lie on the bedroom floor, it is a technology fanatic’s dream as the house is fully computer-controlled and attends to your every need. A bangle on your wrist operates the locks, the lights and tells the shower how hot you like it.
 
For Emma, who is recovering from the effects of a violent burglary, it is a sanctuary of safety for her and boyfriend Simon. For Jane, struggling with the grief of a stillbirth, it is a place of calm and reflection. But both women increasingly come under the malign influence of its owner, Edward Monkford, who controls not only the house but also its occupants.
 
The writing is fast-paced and through its progressive twists and turns you have to decide which narrator is the more “unreliable” (another fad much beloved of modern contemporary thrillers) and which other benign character is going to give you a shock. With a minimal cast as well, there are only so many ways this can possibly end although I must admit to Jane’s final words giving me the biggest surprise.
 
Although of course he’s a fiction, Edward’s character reflects another cliché in that handsome, wealthy leading men will treat such women as objects to be pitied or abused; that they will use their charisma to manipulate them into willing participation in violent sex. His fondness for Japanese precision that includes eating live food and his clinical obsessiveness about his buildings ought to send any self-respecting and rational woman running for the hills, but the message here is that Emma and Jane may both be damaged and irrational and therefore they are bound to invite their victimisation. Not a pleasant implication even if it has some truth in real psychology. (As an aside, I couldn’t help wondering why anyone with Monkford’s extreme monkish fastidiousness could even deal with the messiness of sex!)
 
Like One Folgate Street itself with its pristine callous angles that either protects or imprisons its tenants, this book will either appeal to you or completely repel you. I appreciated its snappy pace and often cleverly twisting narrative, but ultimately it is yet another “Girl” book with too many dark layers that I'd prefer to forget. Three stars (with reservations).

​(Many thanks to NetGalley and Hachette Australia for the ARC.)

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Twenty-one year old Eleanor Brennan has recently arrived in London from Australia and is living with her Uncle Ian, Aunt Susan and their two young daughters.

Susan is the CEO of Parker & Lane, a major publishing house, and she gets Eleanor a temp job there working for Nathan Lane, the obnoxious husband of the "elegant, graceful" Arabella, a marketing and publicity executive whose "laugh can make you smile even when you haven't heard the conversation."
 
On the morning after the firm’s Christmas party, Arabella’s body is found floating in the Thames near Waterloo Bridge. Eleanor is horrified when she realises she may have witnessed what happened to her. Only she can’t remember a thing, other than being vaguely aware she had spent some time with Arabella the evening before and that Arabella may have spiked her drink. When Eleanor later discovers Arabella’s ring in her bag she is even more distraught, but terrified to go to the police in case they suspect her.
 
This is a novel full of psychological twists and turns. Initially, it is about the murder of Arabella then progressively includes flashbacks to Eleanor’s childhood in the Australian bush and a time when her once-secure family began to crack at the seams before finally breaking apart.
 
The plotting is excellent and it keeps you guessing as suspicions ebb and flow. Although some of the characters are self-serving and unpleasant, it is well-balanced with others who are far more likeable. Unlike other thrillers, there are no truly evil people here, just those whose foolishness or uncontrolled passions push them into actions from which there is no escape. As one character observes, it is not hate, but love, that "is part of the problem".
 
There are times when Eleanor’s reluctance to reveal all to the police while trusting others makes you feel like giving her a good shake but as her past is slowly unravelled and you realise where she is coming from, you have to feel more compassionate towards her. The ending feels just a bit rushed with a few questions unanswered, but overall this is a most satisfying read and it genuinely did keep me up reading into the small hours.

4 1/2 stars.
 
With many thanks to Simon & Schuster Australia and NetGalley for the ARC.

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​The Tichborne Case occupied thousands of column inches in newspapers around the world from the mid-19th Century onwards when an obese, slovenly butcher (Tom Castro aka Arthur Orton) from Wagga Wagga claimed he was really the English Baronet Roger Tichborne miraculously risen from the dead and who travelled to England to claim his rightful inheritance.
 
His case wouldn’t have got far if the missing Baronet’s grieving mother hadn’t embraced him as her son without question. It set in motion some of the most extraordinary events in English jurisprudence. Hundreds of witnesses swore the butcher was definitely the refined and aristocratic Roger Tichborne and just as many swore he definitely wasn’t, but an illiterate crook and charlatan.
 
Everything about the Claimant was analysed and discussed: his differing height, dodgy memories, his tattoos, the mystery contents of a secret packet, a mystic signature code and even shortcomings with his private parts (which didn’t stop him having upwards of 8 children). In the days before a DNA test would have put paid to the claim quick-smart, the public was enthralled. Everyone had an opinion. Was he or wasn’t he?
 
There’s a maniacal frenzy about the whole affair (including characters already in the lunatic asylum). The obsequious former servants or acquaintances being bribed to remember things, the members of the ruling classes bamboozled into giving the Claimant money to live the life to which a blue blood must be accustomed, the completely out-of-control defence barrister (Edward Kenealy) who ranted for days and abused his client and the judge in the process. You couldn’t invent many of these characters and the scenarios because no-one would believe you.  
 
Then there was the support he had from the common folk who saw his campaign as some kind of banner to follow in their struggles against privilege and the aristocracy. On his first release from prison, rather than being pilloried, the Claimant became a people’s champion and crowds lined the road to wave to him as he made a progress about the country waving from “a wagonette drawn by four fine bay horses decorated with Tichborne-blue rosettes and carrying footmen in scarlet silk jackets.” It is incredible to think that there was even a movement to have Orton/Castro/Tichborne become a member of parliament which in a way disturbingly reflects recent happenings when a whole country was in denial, willing to believe lies and support a man even though he has been proved to be a crook.
 
But it’s difficult to really get a handle on Orton/Castro/Tichborne. At one stage he confessed it was all a put-up job and then retracted. Perhaps he came to believe his own myth. After he served his time in gaol, he turned into a side-show freak, often impecunious and living on the margins of society in both the USA and England. One has to have some sympathy for him, in particular suffering the loss of four infant children with his second “wife”. Although by the time he died in 1898 the majority had come to accept he was a fraud, his coffin still bore the name of the man whose identity he usurped.
 
Every few years someone re-examines the fascinating story of the Tichborne Claimant and this latest offering by journalist Paul Terry presents it in an entertaining and in-depth fashion. A downside is that the book lacks an index although there is a list of some of the principal characters at the front. One name omitted from that list is the man who briefly acted as the Claimant’s secretary, a certain Mr Truth Butts. Not even Gilbert & Sullivan at their peak could have come up with a more agreeable name to reflect this bizarre but true comic opera.

3.5 stars.

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Australia is a young nation built on a primordial landscape. It had no permanent European settlement until the late 18th Century, but its Aboriginal history stretches back more than 50,000 years. For those susceptible to spiritual echoes there are numerous places on the continent where one might be able to connect with either the recent or ancient past.

This, the fourth title in J.G. Montgomery’s investigations into the paranormal, concentrates specifically on Australian ghosts in each State and Territory, plus Norfolk Island. There are tales here about ghostly prisons and pubs, lunatic asylums and lighthouses, that can send shivers down the spine of even the most sceptical individual.
 
Some ghosts are already well-known to Australians, such as Frederici, the actor ghost who haunts the Princess Theatre in Melbourne or Martha Rendell “the last woman to be hanged in Western Australia” who watches over Fremantle Gaol.
 
While perhaps most sightings have a rational explanation, there are others that do not. Even the famous historical fiction author, the late Colleen McCullough, had a strange experience in her house on Norfolk Island that was hardly surprising in “... that this tiny, remote settlement is so haunted given the names of so many places on the island, names such as Ghost Corner, Bloody Bridge, Slaughter Bay and Gallows Gate ...”
 
The book also touches on the inexplicable in the physical landscape, such as the strange oscillating Min Min light formations that occur mainly in the Channel Country of Queensland, and although there may be a reasonable geological explanation for the way Lake George near Canberra seems to disappear and then reappear, sometimes in a matter of days, to many people it remains “an eerie place” that “has built up an enviable reputation for ghosts, hauntings, UFOs and strange phenomena”.
 
This compact book is nicely produced, complete with a few blood splatters, and well-illustrated with colour photos. It also has a comprehensive bibliography for anyone wanting to learn more about the supernatural side of Australia. Just the thing for when you are in the mood to be spooked!
 
(With many thanks to Edelweiss and Schiffer Publishing for the ARC.)

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Once upon a time there was a beautiful captain’s daughter from Maine called Jessie Dermot. Rather than running off to sea like the men in her family, she skipped away from some messy personal matters and went on the stage, changing her name to Maxine Elliott. In due course she would use her sex appeal and savvy business sense to reach the pinnacle of the social ladder and the ultimate prize of a dalliance with King Edward VII.
 
When Maxine decided to retire in the early 1930s, and using the skills of renowned architect Barry Dierks, she built herself a striking confection of a house known as Chateau de l’Horizon near Juan-les-Pins on the French Riviera. She began inviting the glitterati of the age to come and keep her company. And what a roll-call of names it was: politicians, royalty, movie stars, artistes. There were the notorious good-time girls of the English upper classes being the three “D’s”, Daisy Fellowes, Doris Castlerosse and Diana Cooper. Noel Coward played the piano. Winston Churchill rode the slippery water slide into the Mediterranean. Edward and Mrs Simpson, later to be Duke and Duchess of Windsor, found it a refuge from the storm around the abdication crisis.
 
Maxine’s reign ended early in World War II when the house was trashed due to the tramping in and out of various armies, and its next incarnation was under the ownership of Prince Aly Khan, playboy religious leader, whose infamous womanising antics dominated the gossip sheets throughout the 1950s. When he married Rita Hayworth in 1949, the lavish reception at Chateau de l’Horizon demonstrated an excess that had a world still recovering from trauma all agog. The house is now under the ownership of the Saudi royal family and the story of the Chateau is far from over yet.
 
There is a strange kind of compulsion in reading about these people with their brilliance, beauty and high achievement mixed with hedonism, immorality and irresponsibility. With so many of them doomed to tragic ends it is all too easy to demonstrate your own inverted snobbery about their shallowness while secretly, of course, you must be a little envious.
 
Mary S. Lovell always writes excellent biographies and although this particular work contains too broad a compass to explore any of the individuals in depth, it is still a most enjoyable way of curling up and idling away your own hours immersed in an era when “the worst possible behaviour was to be boring” and when wit and sophistication, glamour and style were at their peak.
 
4.5 stars.
 
(With many thanks to Hachette Australia for sending me an advance reader’s copy.)

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What does it say about a book that leaves you feeling both exhilarated and irritated? It means it has had an impact, is unlikely to be forgotten, and perhaps even the ultimate sign of great literature. This fictional tale about the Russian aristocrat, Count Rostov, who is confined to Moscow's Metropole Hotel for a good part of the 20th Century certainly qualifies on that score.

Much of its prose is brilliant and reminiscent of the great classics, with its observations of human behaviour and other philosophical meanderings and shades of nostalgia for a lost way of life, but its basic premise is difficult to swallow. If anyone knows anything about how aristocrats, artists, merchants and intelligentsia were treated by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution, they would know that there is no way as a “former person” Rostov would be allowed to continue to live almost in the manner to which he had been accustomed, albeit on a tiny scale and in a much smaller apartment than previously. If not executed out of hand, he’d have been locked up in some ghastly place like the Lubyanka before disappearing into Siberia along with the countless thousands of others like him who were exterminated by that increasingly vicious regime. His access to wines and quality foods in a country always on the brink of starvation, his ability to meet old friends and make new ones, to wander around the hotel at will and, the most implausible of all, teaching one of the Soviet regime's military leaders English, were absurd. Everyone who worked at that hotel would have been looking out for their own skin, everyone an informer, no-one to be trusted, yet the Count sails through all without ever really being at risk of losing his head.
 
It is also just too long and even the finest writing in the world can lose impact when there is too much of it. (My ARC also had some typesetting faults with closing paragraphs displaced at random several pages later which added to the labyrinthine quality, but hopefully this has been remedied in the final print.)
 
If one can pull away from reality and see this book as a bit of fantasy - somewhat akin to that film "Hotel Bucharest" - then it will be a satisfying experience and worthy of five stars. But if you prefer solid veracity when it comes to the background of your historical fiction, then it could be a struggle. 

(Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this novel in exchange for an honest review)

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This novel is disadvantaged from the start with the choice of title as it will inevitably get confused with that other blockbuster book. 
 
Gretl and her sister Elsa are the only survivors when a train bound for Auschwitz is sabotaged by Polish resistance fighters. One of the men, Jakob, comes across the two girls and takes them home to his family to look after. After the war, Jakob arranges for Gretl to be sent to South Africa under a scheme to resettle the orphaned children of German soldiers. When she is on the verge of adulthood, Jakob arrives on the scene, stirring up old memories and secrets.

Translated from Afrikaans, the novel's best attribute is in giving voice to little-known episodes in history including the struggles of the Polish resistance during World War II and the experiences of child migrants to South Africa from non-English backgrounds.

While it should be refreshing to read about an Afrikaner family without the usual accusatory and clichéd aspects of their treatment of black people, avoiding the issue altogether can suggest a form of denial. As a result, it is difficult to believe in all the sweetness and light surrounding Gretl, especially when her adoptive father carries intense suspicions and obstinate beliefs about Jews, Catholics and Communists. After promising opening chapters the novel plunges downhill into a romantic pot-boiler. The early fatherly relationship between Jakob and Gretl is tenderly conveyed but it becomes unsettling, even a bit creepy, when it switches to one of desire.

Also there are some issues with the translation, the word “weird” being overused every time for anything unusual or strange, plus I couldn’t help agreeing with Jakob when he kept continually warning Gretl how “old” he was, implying that she would be bored stiff with him after a few years.
 
Based on its beginning, this could have been a high-rating historical novel but its later chapters are littered with awkward, implausible and romantic formulaic writing that left me very disappointed.
 
Two stars.

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At a time when Western countries are struggling to deal with the ever-growing problem of mass migration and its leaders are displaying increasing intolerance, this is a timely novel from Imbolo Mbue about one young couple’s experiences in New York City just before and after the Global Financial Crisis.
 
Barack Obama is about to be elected President. Living in Harlem, Jende Jonga from Cameroon has overstayed his visa but still manages to get a dream job driving a Lehman Brothers executive, Clark Edwards, and glamorous wife, Cindy. Jende’s wife, Neni, is struggling to juggle family life and gain a qualification in pharmacy. Both are still hopeful that everything will work out.
 
Stories about the “American dream” are not new, but this one reinforces all about that ideal that is shallow or fake and takes on added meaning particularly at this time when the election for the next President has sunk to disgustingly vile lows and has resulted in turning America into a less-than-attractive destination for anyone wanting to better themselves.
 
The Edwards couple and their children suffer from a bit of stereotyping - stressed-out wealthy husband with extramarital “interests” - the wife with empty life and empty liquor bottles - disenchanted elder son off to find himself in India - younger son needing more family time. Jende has his charms and in spite of rejections and deceits remains optimistic about the dream. Neni less so, and she finally takes things into her own hands in an effort to get what she feels they deserve.
 
There are some delightful humorous passages especially in Neni’s relationships with other women from Cameroon and also the swaggering immigration lawyer who knows all the tricks used to pull the wool over the eyes of the authorities, especially fake refugee stories. Descriptions of life in Cameroon are colourful and interesting, and the ending has a certain poignancy but is also satisfying in its way.
 
A very enjoyable read with a humanity and gentle philosophy about the realities of getting what you think you want in life.  Four 1/2 stars.


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There are three places in the world where Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick, (also known simply as Jack Simpson) is immortalised in bronze. One statue is in South Shields, England, and the others are outside the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. Simpson’s extraordinary bravery at Gallipoli in 1915 has passed into legend and most Australian children learn his story in their history lessons.
 
A considerable number of books, articles and even plays have featured Jack and with each outing it seems his myth grows even greater, so this recent publication by Kelso McEwan Yuill makes for some refreshing and enlightening reading. The author has taken a different approach and rather than producing another hagiography has gone in search of Jack’s family: who they were and how their genes and the environment in which he was raised combined together to create this brave young stretcher-bearer who, according to Colonel [later Sir] John Monash, his Australian commanding officer at Gallipoli, “knew no fear and moved unconcernedly through shrapnel and rifle fire” in his determination to carry wounded men to safety on the back of a donkey.
 
Some of the fantasies perpetuated in previous accounts are overturned, just one example being the accident which supposedly crippled Jack’s father in 1904 when in fact Robert Kirkpatrick continued to work and did not die until 1909. The story of Sarah Simpson (Jack’s mother) who lived for a time in luxury in Malaga appears here for the first time, and there are further revelations of family feuding, adultery, illegitimacy and mental breakdown, all of which might combine into a saga worthy of anything that other Tyneside legend, the author Catherine Cookson, could have devised.
 
Jack had healthy self-belief and was not backward in offering his opinions - some of which may be considered a touch racist and sexist by today’s standards - about all that was wrong with “louse bound England” or what the womenfolk in his family needed to be doing in his absence. Nor was he above a bit of swagger and exaggeration or deliberate obfuscation when it might suit him. His comments are not edited out of the extracts from his letters as has been the case in some previous biographies. If you have not read about Simpson before you will gain a good sense of what he was really like; fearless and cheerful in spite of the odds but, above all, a young man with a firm conscience about doing what was right.
 
The book is exceptionally detailed, with many photographs. Interspersed within the chapters are paragraphs describing what was happening politically or socially at the time and these help to set the family’s situation in context. Several chapters are devoted to the ups and downs in the career (and love life) of Jack’s sea-going father, Robert Kirkpatrick; a man often forced to take jobs well below his qualifications in order to keep his growing second family off the bread line. This part of the book will be fascinating for anyone interested in what the life of a Scottish seaman was like around the end of the 19th Century. The Appendices also provide family trees and much additional detail about Jack’s extended family, many of whom were also seafarers.
 
Some typographical and editing errors have slipped through in the text, especially in regard to apostrophes, but these are minor issues compared to the extensive research and scale of the information it contains. Not just on Jack Simpson, but in the way people lived at a time when life could be brutal, family tragedies were almost commonplace and there was no social welfare to prop you up financially.

Recommended not just for its new information on the legendary “Man with the Donkey”, but for anyone researching family history in general before and after World War I and it would also be a valuable addition to any historical or genealogical library.
 
With much appreciation to the author for sending me a copy.
 
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This novel takes place in San Francisco and features two main female characters who are linked across time by a beautiful emerald ring.
 
The present-day wearer of the ring, Sarah Havensworth, is procrastinating on finishing a novel for her thesis when she stumbles across a story in an old newspaper about two dressmakers who went missing in 1876. She suddenly realizes she has found the true story she is destined to write. As she digs through archives and visits relevant locations in the city, she slowly becomes aware that she’s unraveling a sinister mystery that is linked to her own husband's high society family. Sarah is also hiding her own secrets about her past and when some unknown individual discovers what it is that she is researching, she is subject to blackmail.
 
In 1876, Hannelore (Hanna) Schaeffer and Margaret O’Brien are two seamstresses at the mercy of an unsympathetic employer. The two young women become close friends, drawn together in their struggle against prejudice towards immigrants, poverty, and violent family relationships. When wealthy cousins, Robert and Lucas Havensworth, visit the shop, events are set in motion that will bring both joy and a terrible tragedy. When Margaret disappears, Lucas and Hanna search for her, falling foul of both the mean streets of the Barbary Coast and a wealthy family determined to hide the truth, no matter the cost.
 
The novel is a fast-paced and easy read and the historical details of San Francisco in the 1870s are especially evocative and well-described. Both Hanna and Sarah are worthy portrayals for their respective time and situation, but there are rather a lot of coincidences and loose threads [no pun intended], plus a hurried and questionable conclusion.

[Spoiler alert.] 

Violence against women can never be condoned, whether in the past or today, but the big downer for me with this particular title is its Epilogue where evil avoids its comeuppance. This may be acceptable in true crime or even a novel in a darker or literary genre, but in one such as this which appears to be aimed at a readership that usually cheers to see justice win over male aggression and privilege, it just feels disturbing.
 
Three stars - with reservations.
 
(Thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC.)

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In London in 1828, Elizabeth Coxen meets John Gould through her brother, Charles, who is employed by Gould as a taxidermist. The emotional connection between Elizabeth and John is immediate and thus begins a loving, although often challenging, partnership that will see Elizabeth taking on the responsibilities of wife and mother as well as illustrator of John’s books on the natural world.
 
We share at an intimate level the usual cares of a woman juggling her art with the demands of domestic life as well as the deep heartaches suffered in her loss of her babies. When John plans a voyage to Australia to document that continent’s unique fauna, Elizabeth faces her hardest decision in leaving some of her infant children behind in England at a time when life expectancy was fragile and communication took many months.
 
Whether in the hub-bub of London, on the high seas, on the rough streets of Hobart or the windswept Liverpool Plains, the evocative descriptions of 19th Century life and travel can’t be faulted. Many famous individuals of the time also pass through these pages, including Charles Darwin, Edward Lear and Lady Jane Franklin, and their characters are as carefully delineated as Elizabeth’s illustrations.
 
It is not easy reviewing a novel that is as awe-inspiring in the quality of its narrative as watching a bird-of-paradise strut its dazzling plumage. If you are an ornithologist, twitcher or wildlife artist you will adore this book without question. For anyone else with only a mild interest in birds - and less in the skills of taxidermy or the slaughter of beautiful creatures in the name of science - there may be problems with some of the content and its lengthy detail, but there can be no disputing it is a superb imagining of the life of a woman overshadowed by male achievement and must score five stars.
 
(Thanks to NetGalley and Affirm Press for the ARC.)

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Satirist Ben Pobjie has taken the essential stories that make up the history of Australia from its ancient bacterial origins to the arrival of the First Fleet and on to the Rum Rebellion through to the Eureka Stockade, the Burke & Wills debacle, the age of whiskery bush-rangers culminating in Ned Kelly, then on to Federation and Gallipolli, Kokoda, Vietnam and The Dismissal right up to last year's bun fight between Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull.

It’s one big Pythonesque  mash-up in which the first half is eye-wateringly, side-splittingly, hilarious. But then there’s a switch and while it seems OK to chortle at the antics of Captain William Bligh hiding under the bed or explorers Hume and Hovell cutting their tent in half and fighting over who gets the handle of a frying pan, massacres are tricky to make funny and when it comes to the war-blasted 20th Century it starts to feel more forced. The rambling script between those even more whiskery founding fathers of Federation is just a tad too long-winded.
 
It regains pace when describing the Great Emu War of the 1930s, but slips away again in the last third which is too much about recent Prime Ministers whose finest biographies are those by cartoonists. The book could have kept the wit factor high by concentrating on some other only-in-Australia eccentricities such the Hutt River Colony, the heroics of potato farmer Cliff Young, or even Lady Flo Bjelke Petersen and her pumpkin scones. Speaking of which, women don't get much of a look-in in this history, which is evidence that the Aussie male still secretly harbours the belief that sheilas belong only in the kitchen or the bedroom.
 
If the book had ended with Ned's last stand at Glenrowan, I’d have given it a big tick as an Australian equivalent of 1066 and All That, but after that the circus train fell off the tracks somewhere beyond the road to Gundagai. Three and a half stars.

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