By Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll
The Wild Date Palm by Diane Armstrong.
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Wild Date Palm
Diane Armstrong, HQ, $32.99
Travelling by train across the plains of Anatolia in 1915, Shoshana Adelstein observes brutal flashes of the Armenian Genocide; she fears her small Jewish community on the edge of the Ottoman Empire may suffer the same fate. So she forms a spy ring, enlisting the aid of her community, including her dashing lover, Eli, and hot-headed brother, Nathan, to pass crucial intelligence onto the Allies at grave personal risk to themselves.
Diane Armstrong’s The Wild Date Palm offers immersive, high-stakes espionage fiction on an exotic canvas. It’s tethered to historical detail, but free to roam through romance, adventure and dangers faced by people desperate to survive.
It’s also a historical war epic with a strong female protagonist – a subgenre that’s gained popularity since Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch, and on the strength of this novel, is likely to continue to do so.
What I Would Do to You by Georgia Harper.
What I Would Do to You
Georgia Harper, Vintage, $34.99
Set in an Australia that has reintroduced capital punishment, Georgia Harper’s What I Would Do to You has a savage twist. The death penalty law provides that the family of a murder victim may decide to execute the condemned personally, by any method they choose; if they don’t, the sentence is commuted to life imprisonment.
It’s a decision the family of 10-year-old Lucy must face, when their bright young girl is tortured and murdered in a crime that shocks the nation. Her mums, brother and her teenage sister, Hannah, all react in different ways, and a counsellor and sometime narrator guides them through the process.
Harper creates a plausible, disturbing near-future dystopia, and her dramatic examination of the justice (or otherwise) of capital punishment feels more like a psychological thriller than a single-issue novel.
Killarney by Nikki Mottram.
Killarney
Nikki Mottram, UQP, $32.99
The second in Nikki Mottram’s Dana Gibson mystery series takes us to the south-west Queensland town of Killarney. The child protection worker travels there with colleague Lachlan to locate a missing foster child, Jayden Maloney, and return him to care, but is soon dragged into parochial politics and family feuds.
Finding Jayden takes an alarming turn: intimations of child abuse and drug smuggling suggest something darker than merely running away. Dana’s romantic attraction to Lachlan’s younger brother further complicates her task, and when floodwater isolates the town, they seem to conspire against the truth rising to the surface.
My mother works as a lawyer in child protection matters, and while this novel does take artistic licence with the practical realities of working in the area, it does take an interesting angle on crime fiction and it’s assiduously plotted, with an atmospheric Australian setting and relatable characters.
Last Best Chance by Brooke Dunnell.
Last Best Chance
Brooke Dunnell, Fremantle, $34.99
The lives of two women, Rachel and Jess, intersect in Last Best Chance, though the lion’s share of the focus is on Rachel’s journey to single motherhood through IVF. Rachel’s marriage is over, she’s in her early 40s, and she desperately wants to have a child.
It’s an arduous and expensive process, and after failures at home, Rachel decides to travel to a fertility clinic in central Europe on the sly. If it works, she’ll tell everyone she had a one-night stand; if not, no one will be the wiser. Her encounter with Jess, who works at a nearby hotel offering accommodation to clinic patients, comes amid a green-energy expo, and their chance meeting might give both women what they want.
This isn’t great fiction on the challenges of becoming a mother in the face of infertility: the characters are underwritten, and the emotional and psychological landscape doesn’t feel sufficiently fleshed out to be credible.
The Cleopatras by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Cleopatras
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Wildfire, $34.99
Cleopatra is usually spoken of in the singular – in fact, there were seven. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones contends that we can only fully appreciate the most famous of them (Cleopatra the seventh) in context.
It’s an amazing story of strong, assertive women (from Syria, not Egypt) who, undaunted by power, broke the glass ceilings of antiquity again and again. It all started with the diplomatic marriage of Cleo the first into the Ptolemaic Dynasty. Thereafter, the marriages were famously incestuous, mostly to brothers and uncles.
In engaging and detailed writing, Llewellyn-Jones tells the stories of all the women, leading up to the myth and legend of “the” Cleopatra, pointing out the irony that, for a line of women who so successfully bucked the patriarchal system, the name means “glory of her father”.
Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen.
Nuclear War: A Scenario
Annie Jacobsen, Torva, $40
“The world could end in the next couple of hours,” warns a former US commander, who is one of the many figures Annie Jacobsen interviewed for this chillingly speculative account of how a nuclear war would unfold. And have no delusions, as another military figure says, “there is no such thing as a small nuclear war”.
The military’s greatest fear is a “bolt out of the blue attack” from Russia, which is why in 1960 a plan (continually updated) was devised in the event of such an attack. For every nuclear weapon to hit the US, 12 would be returned. The result would be apocalypse and only 24,000 years later would earth be habitable again.
If humans survived, they would, Jacobsen says, look upon the ruins of our civilisation as archaeologists today look upon the enigmatic 12,000-year-old ruins of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. This is a stark, warning shot of a book.
Private Revolutions by Yuan Yang.
Private Revolutions
Yuan Yang, Bloomsbury, $34.99
When the big picture of history changes, individual lives change too – as this study of four young Chinese women who, like the author, were part of the generation the Chinese call the “children left behind” when China opened up to capitalism in the 1990s and 2000s.
There’s Leiya, June, Sam and Siyue, all of whom embraced change in varying ways. Siyue, for example, embraced her inner entrepreneur, while Sam discovered Marxism, her MA thesis being case studies of the generation that lived through the revolution, re-inventing Marxist theory as she went.
Woven into this is the author’s story, and how at the age of four she moved to the UK with her parents, became British and, eventually, the China correspondent for The Financial Times. An intriguing group portrait that personalises the epic of China.
The Trial of Vladimir Putin by Geoffrey Robertson.
The Trial of Vladimir Putin
Geoffrey Robertson, Biteback Publishing, $34.99
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may, to an extent, have become the forgotten war, but this crisply argued case for the prosecution of Putin, aimed at the general reader, puts it back on page one. Of course, any trial of Putin would have to be in absentia, as the Russian president would be hardly likely to front up. What’s more, the International Criminal Court doesn’t currently have such powers – although, moves are afoot to change that.
But if it were possible, would it be worth it? Yes, says Robertson, whose argument takes in the history of international law, from Cromwell to Nuremberg. “The importance of a trial, to transform Vladimir Putin in the public eye from a statesman to a crime boss,” he argues, “may be symbolic, but it’s a symbol that reflects the truth.” Robertson may be dealing with intricate legalities, but his case is accessible and compelling throughout.
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