FEBRUARY READING - The Library of Shadows; The Hand That First Held Mine; The White Earth;

THE WHITE EARTH by Andrew McGahan

The winner of the 2005 Australian literary prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, this is a stunning novel set in the Darling Downs, a diverse farming region west of Brisbane. Prior to European settlement, because of its lush indigenous grasses,the region was important as a food source and culturally to the local Aborigine tribes. The arrival of the European farmers in the 1820s and 1830s put a stop to that, and the Downs quickly became the food basket for the region. Farming communities and towns quickly developed, as did large stations and homesteads which dominated their local communities. The indigenous people, as happened many places elsewhere, were displaced and effectively disappeared.

With this background in mind, the story begins in 1992 with 9 year old William's father having an unfortunate accident on the farm, resulting in his death. Forced to leave the farm, William and his depressed mother are taken in by an unknown great-uncle, John McIvor, who owns what is left of one of the big stations, Kuran station established by the White family. He lives in the huge original and now very derelict homestead. The motives for this altruistic act become fairly clear as John attempts to mould, some would say brainwash, young William into his heir. It also becomes fairly clear that John is quite mad, with an unwavering obsession to keep the property in family ownership. This, of course, makes for quite a dangerous situation for a 9 year old boy to be in. No father and a non-functioning mother means he finds himself slowly being drawn into the spell his great uncle is weaving.

At the same time, law changes are taking place that will give local Aborigines greater claim to lands that were traditionally used before European settlement. John knows secrets about the land the station is on that pertain to this, and he is determined that no one else will find out about them, thus safeguarding the property for his own interests.

Sinister yes, and spooky yes, underlying tension and danger oozing throughout the narrative, with young William being manipulated beyond his childish understanding. And yet, the uncle never comes across as evil. His whole life has revolved around Kuran station, he loves the land with a deep passion and enormous respect, and although he doesn't have the financial resources to make it productive again as it once was, he does not want to see it destroyed. The gift of the clever writer is that you actually do feel sorry for the old man as he tries to protect all that is important to him.

Any 9 year old child left to their own devices will project their own imagination and childish perceptions of the world onto what is going on around them. As William comes more and more under the spell of his great uncle's dream, he almost begins to operate in a parallel universe so that as the reader, at times you don't quite know yourself what is real and what is not.

The story is cleverly told, with chapters alternating between John's story which essentially tells the history of Europeans in the area since the 1820s and how he came to be at Kuran; and William's story. There is always a sense of impending doom, with the two symbols of 'white' and 'fire' constantly threading themselves through the story. The third character in the story is the land itself. What a love for the land this author has - the vast pastures, the hills, the water holes, the dryness, the dust, the rain when it occurs. I read an interview with the author which I now cannot find. He grew up on the Downs so has this deep seated love and respect for the land plus a number of things that happened in the book also happened to him.

My only criticism of the book is that I did feel at times, William was much older than 9 years old. He has to deal with a lot, and some of his perceptions and reactions are way beyond what I think a 9 year old's brain would process. Nevertheless this is a marvellous story of Australia and the continuing conflict between the traditional owners of the land and the European new comers.


THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE by Maggie O'Farrell

A beautifully told and poignant story of the universal themes of love - romantic love, marriage and motherhood.

In the early 1950s, 21 year old Lexie Sinclair is desperate to escape her boring, house bound life in the country lanes of Devon. Out of the blue appears the divine Innes Kent. Naturally they fall instantly in love, and he whisks her off to a new exiting life in London. Which for a time it is, then naturally things start to unravel.

Running parallel to the lives of Lexie and Innes, are the lives of Elina and Ted, also living in London, but fifty plus years later. Elina has just given birth prematurely to a baby boy, Theo, and almost lost her own life in the process. Elina struggles with motherhood as do many new mothers - the loss of her former identity, the physical and emotional demands of a very young baby, the lack of time to give to herself. Ted feels guilty for having got her pregnant in the first place, and finds that fatherhood unearths very deep memories of his own childhood and certain things that don't quite match up.

In alternating chapters, the stories of these two women and the men in their lives are gently and lovingly told. There may be fifty odd years between the lives of Lexie and Elina, and different challenges and crises happen to both of them, but throughout is their unconditional love and devotion to their babies which is what makes them get up in the morning and get on with the day. And thus have a life.

I loved this book. Lexie and Elina, Innes and Ted are very real people, they could be anyone that we may know. Strangely the whole story is narrated in the present tense which gives the reader the sense of being a fly on the wall, as if we are actually in the room watching a day unfold, or listening to a conversation. It is also very descriptive of life in London in the 1950s, from the streets, to the office buildings, to the clothes to the houses. Not so much description of course of modern day settings, but the writing is just as rich.





THE LIBRARY OF SHADOWS by Mikkel Birkegaard

Jon Campelli is a lawyer in Copenhagen, ambitious and doing quite well. He lives in an inner city apartment, drives a Mercedes and has a very good life. This is turned completely on its head when Jon's estranged father, Luca, who owns a second-hand bookshop in the city, dies very suddenly and violently. Jon, as the only surviving relative, inherits the bookshop and the staff, and very quickly discovers that things are not as they seem at the bookshop or with the staff. The bookshop is the base for a very secretive society of bibliophiles who have certain powers - either to transmit or receive communications through the power of reading. It does sound rather bizarre and peculiar, but when it emerges that there is an enemy of the group determined to take over control of the bookshop and hence the powers it holds for nefarious purposes, things take on a very sinister turn, and we have a true blue thriller, race against time on our hands.

Interspersed with this of course, is the requisite love story, self-discovery and self-improvement, plus some suspension of reality, which makes for a great story and plenty of tension. It takes the concept of 'talking books' to a new and very imaginative level and could almost put this story into the fantasy genre, if it wasn't so well grounded in the modern urban world that we all live in.

As readers we all know the power that books can have over us - escapism, knowledge, entertainment, opinions. Reading takes us to places and ideas that we may never have been exposed to, and so enrich us and empower us. This story greatly develops the idea of books being all powerful, and like all powers, can be used for good and evil purposes.

I enjoyed the imagination the author has used in writing his story. It is a bit clunky at times; far too much dialogue and conversation for a time of crisis and suspense when the future of the world is at stake! But there is plenty of tension, interesting characters, and you never quite what is going to happen next.

JANUARY READING - The Invisible Bridge; Never the Bride; The Blue Afternoon; Return to Paris; The Man In The Wooden Hat; Moon Tiger

MOON TIGER by Penelope Lively

Just look at the cover of this book. Doesn't it make you want to go to Egypt and sink yourself into this picture and all it conjures up? I don't imagine for a minute that Egypt is like this now, but what a wonderful vision to have when reminiscing on your life. 75 year old Claudia Hampton is dying, lying in a hospital bed, drifting in and out of consciousness as the important people in her life, both living and deceased pass through her memory and by her bedside.

And what a life Claudia has lived. Born between the wars, she decides that the prescribed life for women of marriage and children is not to be for her. Highly intelligent, beautiful, adventurous, fiercely independent and determined to prove herself she becomes a war correspondent in Cairo. The war, like it did for many many people, became the defining event in her life, the center point from which all her memories radiate out. After the war she continues to defy the conventions of the time by not marrying, having a child and becoming a successful historian. Who says women can't have it all?

So now she is dying. And just like her memories coming and going so the story is told in much the same way. Moving seamlessly from the present to various events and occasions in the past, narrated effortlessly by Claudia and those who make up her life, this is a novel all about a life well lived. It is also about the secrets and deep emotions that we all hold in ourselves and that no one else will ever know about. This is so beautifully and poignantly written with such deep insight that you can see why it won a Booker Prize way back in 1987. I read this book when it was published all those years ago without even really knowing what the Booker Prize was. It obviously made an impression at the time as it is a book that I have always kept. Now having read it again some 20 odd years later, and me being older, it is still a book worth keeping.

Like the previous author in this blog, Penelope Lively is also no spring chicken and is also a prolific and successful writer. She lived the first 12 years of her life in Cairo, hence her beautiful writing about it.

And what is a Moon Tiger? It is simply a mosquito coil which as it slowly burn drops ash, in much the same way that Claudia's memories are drip fed through the course of this novel.

THE MAN IN THE WOODEN HAT by Jane Gardam

Sir Edward and Lady Elizabeth Feathers are devoted servants of Her Majesty's cause in the colony of Hong Kong from the time of the end of WWII to sometime before the handover back to the Chinese - in other words a very long time! In her book 'Old Filth' Jane Gardam chronicles the life of Edward from his unhappy childhood beginning in Malaya with the death of this mother in childbirth, growing up in foster homes in Wales with truly ghastly foster parents, to schooling in England, a career in the law which takes him to Hong Kong. Hence the title Old Filth which has nothing to do with his standards of personal hygiene, but simply stands for Failed In London Try Hong Kong. Which he does with outstanding success. Along the way he marries Elizabeth, or Betty as she is known, but we actually learn very little about Betty in this first novel. Together they stand at the top of the civil service success ladder, complete with knighthood (him) and OBE (her). The story finishes with Sir Edward's old age in Dorset, thus concluding a most interesting commentary on the life of the expatriate in the British colony.

In this particular book, the sequel, the author tells the story of the other half of this success story - Betty. Betty is also a product of a traumatic childhood, having spent most of it in a Japanese internment camp, where both her parents died. We don't learn much about her prior to meeting Edward, other than that she is really quite directionless and finds herself back in Hong Kong about to accept Edward's proposal of marriage. It is not and never becomes a marriage of passion, poor Betty having no role models of what a marriage should or could be, with only distant memories of what her mother was like, and Edward of course has no idea what a marriage should or could be either! Not a good start you might think.

But being British and of the stiff upper lip variety, full of post war fortitude and the getting on with it attitude, that is exactly what they do. Along the way there are slip ups and the odd tragedy which is probably a very normal part of most marriages, and yet it is all handled extremely pragmatically and sensibly with Betty never wavering from her promise to never leave Edward. In fact the marriage and their lives together comes across as incredibly ordinary, whatever an ordinary marriage may be like! But, as one would expect of an expert story teller, never dull. Despite the rigid confines of the British colonial civil service, Betty does manage to find herself, and rise above the banality of life around her. The gradual change for example from being called Elizabeth to Betty is an example of this. As is her determination to stay in touch with her old school friend who also lives in Hong Kong, but a far more ordinary existence than Betty. And finally after years of indecision, deciding that yes she will leave Edward and follow her heart rather than her head.

Jane Gardam is wonderfully observant and insightful of people and relationships. She also writes very vividly of how Hong Kong was after the war in all its colonial splendour in an alien land. And then neatly follows this up with the tedium and uniformity of existence in London and later in the small towns of Dorset where ex-colonials of certain standing retired to. No spring chicken herself, the author is well into her eighties, and, has been writing for children and adults since the 1970s winning a large number of awards along the way.


RETURN TO PARIS by Colette Rossant

Who does not like books about food, and French food at that. No pictures in this one, but such vivid descriptions and such love of the food that we don't really need pictures.

Colette Rossant is of French and Egyptian descent. Now in her late 70s, she lives in America with her American architect husband James, whom she first met when she was 16. Just like any love story, they immediately fell in love and were finally reunited four long years later.

Colette's mother was Parisian Jewish French, her father was Egyptian, from Cairo, and also Jewish. Prior to the war the family was living in Paris, when her father was diagnosed with cancer. The family moved to Cairo when Colette was 5 in 1937, where her father died shortly after. Her mother, not the most maternally inclined of women, effectively deserted her daughter, leaving her in the care of her paternal grandparents. The unhappy and lost child found refuge in the kitchens of her wealthy grandparents,in the process developing a love for food and food preparation. After the war, in 1946, when travel was once again possible, her mother, at the demand of her mother in Paris, suddenly reappeared in Cairo, swept up the now 14 year old Colette and disappeared back to France. Colette's life in Cairo is narrated in the beautiful memoir 'Apricots on the Nile'.

'Return to Paris' is the sequel to the first book, and tells of Colette's sudden and difficult shift back to Paris, a city she hardly remembers, to a grandmother and older brother she has not seen for 9 years. Hardly a simple life for a 14 year old girl. After the freedoms of living in Cairo, life in post-war Paris is not easy; the grandmother is a dragon, her mission in life to bring Colette back into the Jewish fold, to turn her into a young lady and to marry her off to a suitable young man. Once again Colette finds refuge in the kitchen with the lovely Georgette who was the family cook when Colette was a young child. After some resistance she slowly rediscovers her love of French food, which naturally is very different from the flavours of the Middle East. She would appear to have plenty of spirit and thrives on disobeying her elders: missing school so she can explore food markets and back streets of Paris, not playing ball with regards to the young men she is regularly set up with by her family, and seriously enjoying her love of good food.

The memoir finishes when Colette is in her early 20s, having married her sweetheart and migrated to New York, again not an easy shift for her, but her love of food becomes the key to her acceptance of her new life.

Throughout the book are recipes of dishes from her days in Paris. Omelettes aux Fines Herbes, Chicken Fricassee, Tomato Salad, Pommes de terre aux Gratin, Rabbit with Prunes and Lentils, Crepes, Onion Soup, Raspberry Tart to name just a few. With one or two exceptions, all of the recipes are very straight forward, depending, like all great meals, on good quality ingredients combined with what appears to be easy technique and a bit of time.

I really enjoyed reading this. Having read 'Apricots on the Nile' some years ago, I knew reading this would be like meeting an old friend and catching up on the next instalment. Most of the book covers her teen years and as we know being a teenager is never an easy time in life. She is very honest and open about the difficulties she has with her family and the expectations placed on her, and I imagine at times she fully deserved their anger and rules! But I never felt like I disliked her, or that she was getting too big for her boots! Totally charming and self-deprecating, with this overriding passion for food and personal discovery, I think she is just gorgeous. By the way the Tomato Salad is delicious, be careful of garlic burps the next day.




THE BLUE AFTERNOON by William Boyd

Because I like William Boyd's novels so much, I chose this book without bothering to read the blurb as to what it was about. Blind confidence? Of course not! I just knew it would be yet another fabulous story, with interesting characters, set in interesting times, and interesting places, doing interesting things and with a number of interesting twists! This novel was published in 1993 so it is one of Mr Boyd's earlier novels (he has now written 10) and at the time won two book awards.

Opening in the Los Angeles of the 1930s, talented young architect Kay Fischer is getting over a broken marriage and a broken business partnership. Into her life appears the mysterious Salvadore Carriscant who inexplicably claims to be her father. Slowly he weaves his spell over her, which takes the reader back to the Philippines, to the city of Manila in 1902. Recovering from three wars in very quick succession - the Philippine war, the Spanish-American war and the Philippine-American war- Manila is not a happy place and still has a very heavy American military presence. Salvadore is of mixed race as many of the Filipinos are - his pedigree is Spanish, Scottish and Filipino. He has recently returned to Manila after training as a doctor/surgeon in Edinburgh. He finds himself working in one of the badly equipped, and shockingly unhygienic hospitals, with doctors who have no idea or interest in the modern hygiene and surgery practices that Salvadore has brought back from Scotland. This inevitably leads to conflict with the hospital hierarchy. When American soldiers start turning up murdered and mutilated, the pressures mount. Throw in a doomed love affair, a fellow doctor trying to be one of the first men to fly an airplane, and we have all those interesting places, times, characters and events. And let's not forget the twists and turns.

Boyd writes in such a way that the reader feels as if they are actually there. In this book, we feel the humidity and oppressive air of Manila, we are walking through the poverty ridden streets and hovels, we are in the disgusting operating theatres smelling the blood and the decay, we are in the airplane as it makes its first flight, feeling the wind, the excitement and the adrenalin rush. It would make a fantastic movie. This is a marvellous story, perfect for a long plane flight, lazy day or holiday reading.


NEVER THE BRIDE By Peter Magrs

The only thing I know about the English city of Whitby is that it is in the north of England and is the place where Captain James Cook began his sailing career. Plus it is also a suburb in the city of Wellington with all the streets named after Captain Cook related and sailing related things! What I didn't know about the Whitby in Yorkshire is that twice a year since 1994, in April and October, it has hosted a Gothic Weekend! There is some historical association with Dracula, and the festival is now apparently one of the most popular of its type in the world!

It is hardly surprising then that this most peculiar and entertaining Gothic novel is set in Whitby. I don't think I have ever read a true Gothic novel before. Do Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre fall into this category? But as we all need to step out of our comfort zone from time to time, and it is a relatively small book, some 275 pages of large font and spacing and a half, I thought it was worth a go! This particular book is the first in a series of what is now five books, starring the never-specifically-stated-age Brenda and her similarly aged friend, Effie. I suspect they are on the other side of middle aged. But being a story full of secrets, one would never really know!

Anyway Brenda is a relatively new arrival in Whitby and is owner/manager of a B and B which by all accounts is a successful business with a steady flow of visitors. Next door is Effie, a spinster, who owns and manages an antique shop, the premises having been in her family for a very, very long time. It transpires Effie is descended from a very long line of witches, and the house, naturally is chock full of witch related stuff. Brenda has her own particular history which is very mysterious; although it becomes obvious early on where she is descended from, but it is never actually stated.

So naturally with these two strange characters, there also have to be many others. After all there is something about Whitby that seems to attract the stranger element in our society! We have Mrs Claus who runs the Christmas Hotel where every day is Christmas Day, and her elves are very weird. Then there is Mr Danby who owns the Deadly Boutique, where people who go in come out rather different! Even some of Brenda's guests would be classified as weird. And then we have the psychic-themed TV show that wants to make an episode in Effie's house that goes spectacularly wrong!

The roles of Brenda and Effie in all this strangeness is to find out exactly what is going on in these various establishments and the people who inhabit/work/visit them. There are a number of mysteries to solve, each with its share of surprises, the book ending with a very alarming surprise that no doubt sets the scene for the second book in the series. Brenda and Effie are a most unlikely pair, nothing like Miss Marple in their mystery-solving techniques, but very entertaining all the same.

I did a bit a research on the author who has also done quite a bit of writing of Dr Who novels for the BBC. And this book definitely has a Dr Who fantasy fiction tone about it. I don't know if I will read anymore books in the series, Harry Potter being about the extent of my entering the genre of the fantasy fiction. But I did enjoy this book very much. It is quirky, funny, sinister, full of surprises and chock full of bizarre, weird and peculiar people.

THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE by Julie Orringer

Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, novels and memoirs of WWII in Europe dominated much of the reading from the local public library. Without digging too deep into the memory bank, 'The Diary of Anne Frank', 'I am David', and 'The Silver Sword' immediately spring to mind. And then moving onto the 1980s with 'Sophie's Choice', 'Schindler's List' and the novels of Leon Uris. More recently 'The Reader', 'The Book Thief', and many many others, continue to document the horrors of the Holocaust, the Nazi regime, the displacement of millions, the destruction of cities and countries, the millions and millions of deaths. And let's not forget all the movies and TV programmes that have so effectively illustrated these stories. You would think that with all that saturation we would be anesthetized to new novels and stories of these terrible times. After all, we know what happened, we know how awful it all was, and so we think perhaps it won't touch us anymore. Then every now and again a book comes along that does touch us, and opens our eyes again to what a truly awful period in modern history the war, or any war for that matter, really was.

This book is one of those, with writing like this - "In fact, the aperture to any future beyond the war seemed to contract by the day. They lived in constant fear of deportation; from the outlying towns came news of thousands sent away in closed trains. In the capital itself there were horrors enough: frequent Arrow Cross raids on the yellow-star buildings, the displaced families' possessions stolen, men and women taken away for no reason other than that they happened to be home when the Nylias men arrived." And so it goes on.

The story opens in 1937, in Budapest, Hungary. Young Andras Levi is about to leave home for the first time. He has been awarded a scholarship to go to architecture school in Paris, because being Jewish, the quota has been exceeded for him to study in Budapest. His older brother Tibor, is a promising medical student and is awaiting on a scholarship to Italy. Huge adventures for young men. Andras establishes a life for himself in Paris, immerses himself into student life, and falls in love with Karla, an older Hungarian woman with her own sad history, which becomes intertwined with his own. Life continues like this for two years, then with the outbreak of war, being Jewish, Andras' student visa is not renewed and he and Karla have to return to Budapest. The idyllic freedom and richness of life in pre-war Paris in the first half of the book is in marked contrast to the catastrophic events and turmoil about to unfold in Budapest for the next six years or so.

Hungary, in order to appease Hitler and to save itself, finds itself on Germany's side, having to provide armed forces and labour to Germany's cause - namely invading Russia and protecting the borders to the west and the north. Andras and other Jewish men are called up into a forced labour scheme which sends them to all corners of Hungary living in the most appalling conditions. Meanwhile back in Budapest, Karla, the other women and older family members are left to fend for themselves amidst a city falling apart. And so it grinds relentlessly on. It is not survival of the fittest, but survival of the luckiest.

This brief synopsis does not really do the novel justice,. Many many things happen in this story, involving a large number of characters and diverse personalities. The other major character in the story is the country of Hungary itself, a country I wager most of us know very little about, and with a war history I expect we know nothing about. I must say it does make a change reading about the experiences of a country and population that fought on the German side rather than the allied side. The author is the granddaughter of a Hungarian couple who lived in Budapest during the war. Being Jewish, her grandfather spent time in one of the forced labour camps, and her grandmother had her first child delivered by a Nazi doctor.

This is a very big book, some 600 pages, closely written with lots of detail. But don't be put off. Right from the beginning, the story is all go. It is slow moving in parts, and time does seem to almost stand still. There is perhaps a little too much emotional angst going on in the first half, but the romantics among us would say it is setting up the strong ties of love that will endure through the later hardships. Well worth the time it takes to read.

DECEMBER READING - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; Rebel With A Cause; Little Bee

LITTLE BEE by Chris Cleave
Also published as THE OTHER HAND.

Imagine if you will, the tranquility of a luxury beach side resort. Now think about it in Nigeria. Now think about it with an unlikely and violent clash between two young Nigerian sisters, a 30-something white professional couple from London, and the local police. You already know this will not be a pretty picture.

From the very first sentence - 'Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl.' - we are drawn into the life of Little Bee, one of the two Nigerian sisters on the beach that fateful day. The story begins two years after the beach encounter, with Little Bee being released from an immigration detention center in England. She has been detained there since her arrival in the UK as an illegal refugee. She sets out to find the only people she knows in England, being the husband and wife she met on the beach that day. From this most curious beginning, the lives of both Little Bee, and the couple,Sarah and Andrew, gradually unfold, with Little Bee eventually finding them. The two sets of lives, of course, could not be more different. Little Bee has grown up in a village in the forests of Nigeria, amidst the encroachment of Western corporate interests and the destruction that results. Sarah and Andrew live and work very comfortably in London, and really have no idea at all as to what goes on inside countries like Nigeria or what happens to the people there.

The story is told, in alternating chapters, by Little Bee, and Sarah. Little Bee is determined that she will be granted residency in the UK while she is in the detention center and studies the English language - the Queen's English that is - with a fierce passion. Being the only English she knows, this is the language she uses to tell her story. It is very measured and deliberate, as is the English of those for whom it is not a first language. It is also very visual, which makes for compelling reading. I imagine if the story were to be narrated by a native Nigerian, it would be like listening to music. Sarah's story is narrated in a pretty standard sort of fashion, but with the added delight of the language and awesome imagination of her four year old son, Charlie. This child is an absolute treasure; apparently the author modelled him based on observations of his own four year old son. Very cleverly, a lot of the story is viewed through his eyes.

Little Bee finds delight and happiness and positivity in vitually everything in England, she is convinced everything will work out ok for her. Sarah, on the other hand, is struggling with her marriage, motherhood, her work as a journalist/editor and life in general. The contrast could not be more great. But we get to see the beauty of Little Bee's new world, and the gradual changes that take place in Sarah as she comes to terms with Little Bee being part of her life.

This is a harrowing story, and has haunted me since finishing it two weeks ago. The West, and the huge multinationals who want to control the natural resources of our world, have a lot to answer for in their decimation of the Third World, its traditional societies and peoples. We don't have a lot of refugees here in New Zealand, being a low population country, but I will look at the plight and lives of refugees who have the good fortune to make it here with quite different eyes now.


REBEL WITH A CAUSE by Ray Avery

Every now and again amazing people of unbelievable vision, talent and self-belief come along and change things about the world we live in. Or other people's worlds. Ray Avery is one such person. Currently the Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year, and the recent recipient of this year's Peter Blake Award for Leadership, Ray Avery is essentially a humanitarian. He has harnessed his scientific skills, his business experience, his inventor's brain, and his brilliant entrepreneurship together to change the lives of the people in Third World countries, initially Eritrea and Nepal, and then to other countries as well. His mantra is that 'one man can change the world', and he has certainly done that with his determination, his vision and sheer power of personality.

What perhaps makes his story even more fascinating and inspiring is that he had a most wretched childhood. Born just after the war in England, abandoned and abused by his parents, his early years were spent either with his mother, in foster homes, or running away and living on the streets. Consequently he developed excellent survival and can-do skills, which he put to such good use in his adult life. Against all the odds, and through sheer good luck he found himself under the tutelage of the school gardener who opened him up to the world of science. And from that point on there was no stopping Ray Avery.

Perhaps the most fortuitous thing to happen to him was meeting Fred Hollows, and this put him on the path to the incredible work he has done in Eritrea and Nepal bringing cheap and safe cataract surgery to millions of people. Based on his observations working and living in these countries he has gone onto to invent a number of other low cost, effective and innovative products to benefit the populations of these poverty-stricken countries.

Ray Avery is a fascinating and very humbling man, who has a fascinating story to tell. Reading his story may well make you think just a little bit differently about the footprint we leave on the world, and how little effort it takes to do a lot of good things, not necessarily in the third world, which is probably just a bit inaccessible for the majority of us, but in our own communities. If that happens, then we too have taken on some of Ray's spirit.






HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS by J.K. Rowling

The final instalment, the seventh book in the wonderful saga of magic, wizardry and witchcraft, where we have watched young Harry and his friends grow from youngsters to young adults, all the while dealing with the Dark Side, and despite all the odds overcoming. What child, or adult for that matter, has not dreamed at some stage of being able to cast a wand, say a magic word and it happens. We all knew it had to come to an end one day, and that it would have to be an epic ending, where dozens of loose ends get tied up and one or the other of Harry or He Who Cannot Be Named would have to be dispatched, and it couldn’t possibly be a clean and tidy despatch!

So on a family holiday trip to the US, to the land of magic and theme parks and surreal moments – Disneyland, Hollywood and the rest, it seemed the perfect place to start reading this last book. After all what is one more bit of escapism.

And I loved it. Action packed, full of twists and turns, surprises aplenty, Rowling has weaved virtually every single character from the previous six novels into this rich, multi layered story. Not only is the 18 year old Harry having to deal with growing from a boy into a man, falling in love, his internal demons, changing relationships with his friends but he has the added burden, complication, bonus of having to save the world as we know it single handed and staying more than one step ahead of you-know-who. Not what the average 18 year old has to deal with. We all know that it is complete fantasy, but it is just all so riveting, and imaginative, and fabulous that you just have to wonder in awe at the amazing brain of JK Rowling in holding it all together and making it work. And maybe that is part of the magic!

Despite the fantasy and the magic and the characters we have loved since they were children, this is actually more an adult novel than a children’s novel. There is a lot of violence, death, dark magic, and it is not a pretty read. It is almost as if Rowling has been making each novel darker and more evil to prepare us for the dramas of this one. The relationships between Harry, Hermione and Ron are also far more developed and complicated than previously. Magic cannot make for a perfectly, happy, contented personality where problems can be whisked away with a wand. I think Rowling captures very well the internal conflicts we all have and how they do take a bit of work and effort to resolve, not just something that can be fixed by a pill or a magic wand.

This book is a great finale to a wonderful story. Some of the books I have enjoyed more than others; some have been better written than others, but this book is right up there with the best. And I cried!

NOVEMBER READING - Magpie Hall; The Slap; The Household Guide to Dying; Cutting For Stone

CUTTING FOR STONE By Abraham Verghese

Ethiopia - earliest known home home of mankind, previously known as Abyssinia - one of the greatest of ancient civilisations, home of the Queen of Sheba, Christian since the first century, now one of the poorest countries on earth with serious health and life expectancy problems, a recent history of war with neighbouring Eritrea, military coups, communism and now a democracy. This is country we know very little about, we don't read books about Ethiopia and the people who live there! This book could will change that and maybe make you read more about this ancient society.

Now the subject of this book is not about Ethiopia; the story however is set primarily in Ethiopia, at a mission hospital called Missing in Addis Ababa, the capital, in the time of Emperor Haile Salassie and dictator Mengistu. The hospital's doctors and surgeons are primarily of Indian origin, either through birth or through training. In the late 1940s, the paths of an Indian Catholic nun and a British doctor cross at the hospital resulting in the totally unexpected birth of identical twins Marion and Shiva, the tragic death of their mother, the breakdown and disappearance of their father. The twins are adopted and brought up by a husband and wife doctor couple at the hospital, in a wonderfully loving, stimulating and medical environment.

The absent of their birth parents cast long shadows over the lives of the boys and how they unfold. Being half Indian/half Anglo, they are never completely Ethiopian but being born and bred there, they feel Ethiopian and love their country and its people with complete passion. The twins are almost supernaturally close and forever bound, but are subject to the same betrayals and sibling rivalries as non-twins.

The political turmoils and upheavals of the 1970s (although for the purposes of this fiction these events take place five years earlier) change the lives of the main characters, in particular Marion. The breakdown of the relationship with his twin combined with the civil war result in him leaving Ethiopia for the US, where he qualifies as a surgeon specialising in trauma surgery.

The story is narrated in the first person by Marion, beginning rather weirdly while he is still in the womb which lends the narrative a slightly magical quality. Plenty of the novel is in the third person too, giving the background to the myriad other leading characters in the story - Shiva, their adoptive parents Hema and Ghosh, their birth parents Sister Mary Praise Joseph and Dr Thomas Stone, and other people involved in the lives of the boys and the hospital. But the story is primarily that of Marion Stone, his determination to forge his own identity, honour the people he loves including his dead and unknown mother, become the doctor that his genetic destiny has determined for him.

Right from the beginning of reading this book I was reminded very much of reading Rohinton Mistry's 'A Fine Balance' - making a life worth living out of the chaos around you, the overriding importance of keeping your humanity and personal dignity when the forces are against you. The wonderful characters who seem to rise above everything that is thrown at them make this an inspirational read.

On reading a brief biography of the author, one must wonder how much autobiographical content there is in this story. He is also of Indian descent, brought up in Ethiopia, and is a professor of medicine at Stanford University. He would appear to have a deep love of his profession, and I have never read of surgical procedures in such grisly, stomach churning detail. Makes programmes like ER look like child's play. The power of the written word is so much more graphic than what is shown to us on a screen.

This is a very long book - some 550 pages of small font, but is so worthwhile. It never plods, its characters seem like real people - flawed, passionate, difficult, honourable, complicated. There is plenty to learn - about Ethiopia, about surgery, infectious diseases, twins, migration, even cricket!


THE HOUSEHOLD GUIDE TO DYING by Debra Adelaide

When you spot an interesting looking book on the bargain tables at New Zealand's largest bargain retail store for the glorious sum of $5-00, in other words as much of a bargain as you can possibly get, you really must wonder why it is there. After all, books that find themselves on the bargain tables anywhere are generally there for one reason only. So, it was with some trepidation that I started reading this, and without doing any googling of it prior.

The subject matter also was the cause of some trepidation - 30-something Delia Bennet, mother and wife, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and is planning for her death, or as the back cover says, realizing that it was now 'time to get her house in order'. Hardly the happiest of topics for a leisure reader. Cancer, like taxes, does not discriminate on the basis of age, sex, colour, creed, socio-economic status etc. One, however does not die of taxes. And, we know about taxes, we confront them daily, but death is really something we know very little about and not something we face on a daily basis, or really that we like to talk about.

My feelings of trepidation, being price and subject matter, however were groundless. Despite the undoubtedly sad and difficult subject matter, this is a story of such warmth, love, remorse, tragedy and humanity told in such an achingly normal sort of fashion that it has stayed with me long after finishing.

Moving between the present and the past, Delia decides to add to her successful series of household management guides by writing the ultimate guide - The Householder's Guide to Dying. Her past guides have covered the erstwhile subjects of home maintenance, laundry, garden, and kitchen. In addition she continues to answer questions in a very acid fashion in a newspaper advice column on same household matters. Faced with a death sentence, and being a practical, organised sort of lady, Delia forces herself to deal with planning her own funeral, what advice and messages she should give her two young daughters, what type of coffin she should choose, a daily timetable for her husband on family management and so it goes on. And let's not forget the five pet hens. As she does her research, she documents it all into a manuscript for publication into her final book.

Facing up to your death of course, means that you also have to deal with the demons of the past. Delia traces her steps back some fifteen years, leaves her home in what I presume is Sydney, and goes back to Queensland where, as a pregnant teenager she gave birth to a son. And that is all I will say about this particular strand of the story because the events that took place when she was a young woman shaped the woman who is now coming to terms with this latest and last challenge in her life.


I really, really liked this book. Being a mother and wife, and dealing on a regular basis with cancer patients, I thought this would be a desperately sad and morbid book, totally sentimental and a complete slush-fest. It is sad, I had tears in my eyes at several points, but it is never morbid and throughout you are aware of how much life there is going on around Delia all the time. More importantly for Delia, and hence the reader, how life will continue when she is no longer around, and how it can be joyful. Now if all that sounds a bit too new-agey, I am probably not doing a very good job writing this, because I am the most un-new-agey person ever.

I wondered while reading this if the author had suffered herself from cancer, there is such a personal feel to the writing. I later found out that her son was diagnosed with leukaemia, and successfully treated for it while she was writing the book. Hence the empathy for her subject I guess, and perhaps some sort of catharsis too. I find it a little disturbing that a book long listed for the Orange Prize should end up on a bargain book table!



THE SLAP by Christos Tsiolkas

This is a sensational book, and not because when you get to the last page, you put it down and think 'Awww, that was just lovely'. Lovely it aint, but sensational it certainly is, because it puts the spotlight on the modern urban society - in this case Melbourne - we live in and makes us think, very hard, about that society. If our society is like the one portrayed in this novel, it is not a pretty place to be. To really capture the entirety of our modern urban society, the novel is told from the perspectives of a wide range of the people in our society's - a three year old; school age children; teenagers; men and women single, married, divorced; adulterers; gay and heterosexual; those with children, those without; wealthy, middle class, struggling; old and grandparents - all mixed up in a cultural melting pot of Greek, Indian, Aboriginal, Muslim, Jewish and white Australian. With the exception of the children and the elderly couple, all the rest of the characters swear like there is no tomorrow and seem to spend vast portions of their lives stoned, drunk, both, and/or thinking about or having the best sex ever, with or without their spouses.

So what is the story that all these characters are telling? A bit like an Agatha Christie novel, the scene is set at a family barbecue with all the characters present, where the crime is committed. That is the characters described above - an enormous amount of diversity in a suburban back yard and the perfect setting for a bucket load of tension to develop and explode. Which it does, slowly but surely building up to the very obnoxious, undisciplined and over-indulged three year old being slapped by one of the guests, the father of a six year old about to dealt to with a cricket bat by the younger child. Horrors you think, and if you are a parent, I bet that at some stage in the past you too would have liked to have smacked some out of control child that was not yours. In this story it happens, and you see how easily it happened.

The BBQ is immediately over, and a chain of events is set in place by the child's parents that will not have a happy ending. But the book is not entirely about the saga of the slap. It is much much more about the lives of the characters as the slap resonates through their relationships with each other. The interesting thing I found while reading this, is that the slap itself had very little effect on how all these relationships and lives would have worked out anyway. Most of them were, in the author's (excessive overuse of) words f***ed anyway - dysfunctional marriages, friendships, parent-child stuff, in-laws - the list goes on. The slap is just another nail in the very many coffins.

Does it sound like the sort of book you really want to read? Probably not. It is not an easy book to read, the subject matter is not pretty, things that happen certainly made me feel uncomfortable, and most of the characters are not likable at all. But that is what makes the story so powerful - they are unlikable and do and say things you might not like, but they are very human, just like all of us, and the things that go on are very believable. It is almost as if the author has switched a spotlight onto our little suburban 21st lives and shown us the nasty stuff just beneath the surface.

This book has won a number of literary awards and deservedly so too. Next time I travel to Melbourne I will look at the people in the street in a slightly different way!!! Although those in Auckland are probably no different.







MAGPIE HALL by Rachael King

It seems to me that much New Zealand literature has a dark and sinister thread running through it. Dark secrets lurk in the minds and souls, there are deaths aplenty that occur in mysterious circumstances, or other unpleasant events, which all seem to emanate from events that occurred in years gone by. What's more they all seem to take place against a backdrop of the country's dramatic landscape, its isolated communities, the wild coastal areas. The books of Maurice Gee immediately spring to mind, as do the likes of John Mulgan's 'Man Alone', or Keri Hulme's 'The Bone People'. There seems to be a preoccupation with death, and none of it a particularly nice death! Now Rachael King has made her contribution to the ranks of these macabre writings with this, her second novel.

Set in the present day in the very white Anglo-Saxon New Zealand region of Canterbury, the story centres on Rosemary Summers. Rosemary has returned to the farm of her recently deceased grandfather to whom she had been very close and from whom she had learnt taxidermy. Amongst other things. The farm and its homestead, Magpie Hall, have been in the Summers family for four generations, and naturally, as one would expect, there are plenty of secrets and skeletons in the cupboards. Rosemary is attempting to complete her thesis on the Victorian Gothic novel and hopes that the peace and quiet and privacy of the homestead will help her to complete her work.

Parallel to Rosemary's story with its own dramas is the story of her great-great-grandfather, Henry Summers, who was a passionate and obsessed collector of native flora and fauna. At all costs. It was he who built Magpie Hall and established the farm some 100 years prior.

This novel reads like a Victorian Gothic novel, with overtones of 'Jane Eyre' and 'Wuthering Heights'. And let's not forget Alfred Hitchcock. There is always an element of danger and something not quite right; a certain amount of spookiness and unhinged madness permeate the whole story. This is very compelling writing, the author would appear to adore the Gothic novel as form of story telling, and it shows in the atmosphere she has created in this modern day version of the genre. I loved this book, most satisfying, and by way of bonus I learnt a lot about taxidermy - I am glad I am not a vegetarian, it would have made quite harrowing reading otherwise! On a more serious note, the story also highlights how native wildlife such as the huia became extinct primarily due to the relentless pursuit of it by greedy collectors. Very poignant.

OCTOBER READING - Ghost Train to Eastern Star; Two Lipsticks and a Lover; Day After Night; The Good Mayor; The Long Song

THE LONG SONG by Andrea Levy

Andrea Levy centres her novel on a dark chapter in British history - the last years of a 300 year history of slavery in Jamaica. In the first quarter of the 19th century, July is born to Kitty, a field slave on the Amity plantation. Her father is the brutal white overseer, so July is a mulatto. Not that this makes her life any easier, but purely by chance she is literally taken from her mother's arms and ends up as a house slave living in the big house as the personal maid to Caroline Mortimer, sister to the English owner of the plantation. July's life is by no means easy, but she is smart, has excellent instincts and quickly learns to manipulate her mistress, and eventually the new white overseer, fresh off the boat from England, idealistic and noble.

At this time there were strong moves in Britain to abolish slavery, but naturally it took a while to filter through to places like the Carribean. In 1831, the slaves in the area of Jamaica that the novel is set in, revolted against the British landowners. The revolt as one would expect. was quickly and violently and cruelly suppressed with plenty of reprisals against the slaves, but it did result a few years later in slavery in Jamaica being abolished, and the slaves being freed. Although the changes brought about by the stroke of a pen in London took considerably longer to take place at the grass roots of plantation life somewhere half way around the world. Suffice to say that July's life is never an easy one, but it does make a superb story.

Not only is the story riveting, but the author has chosen to tell it through the eyes of July as an elderly woman, telling it her way, to her son, who wants the story told his way. In dribs and drabs the son 'encourages' his mother to tell her story, in wonderful parent-child dialogue, the son of course wanting every detail possible and the mother wanting to keep some things secret. It is almost as if there are two stories going on in this novel.

The best thing about this story is the rich use of language. July is of slave birth and so has no chance of growing up speaking the 'Queen's English',let alone being able to read and write. Her way of speaking and telling a story is a complete corruption of English as we know it. It is colourful, colloquial, idiosyncratic and has a whole rhythm and music to it that English English does not, making it a joy to read and enjoy. On first reading there were sentences that just did not make sense, but like all good writers, she makes us re-read the sentence to get the sense.

The subject matter is tragic, violent, heart-rending, far too visual and ghastly in places to be called enjoyable. But July's refusal to give up, to keep on trying to make things better for herself, her ability to turn situations to her advantage give this story enormous energy and hope, and like many other books I have read and loved, it shows the power of the human spirit to overcome and beat adversity. Read this and just love this woman for the survivor she is.






THE GOOD MAYOR by Andrew Nicholl

I got to the last page of this many-paged novel - 465 pages - , closed the book, and said out loud, "Gorgeous, just gorgeous". What a lovely, wonderful, passionate, delicious love story this is. Not at all soppy or syrupy but oh so romantic, with rich, delightful writing and so full of hope!

Tibo Krovic is the mayor of the town of Dot, an average town in some far off corner of north-west Europe (I think). Dot has the river Ampersand running through it, and the neighbouring rival town is called Dash. Krovic is a very good mayor, honest, popular, humane, and single. He has been desperately in love with his beautiful, voluptuous, generous-spirited and unhappily married secretary Agathe Stopak for quite some time. Never did the path of true love run smoothly, and it certainly doesn't in this story. As the reader, at times you have to suspend belief just a little bit, but it just adds to the charm and delight of this story. Bizarrely this novel is narrated by a saint, the patron saint of the town called St Walpurnia, a 'bearded virgin martyr, whose heart-wrung pleas to Heaven for the gift of ugliness as a bolster to her chastity were answered with a miraculous generosity.'

This is a big book and I have written much longer reviews of books much smaller than this one. There is nothing more to add, it is just so enjoyable and as The Scotsman newspaper says 'Enchanting'.









DAY AFTER NIGHT by Anita Diamant

WWII continues to be a very rich and diverse source of material for novels both entirely fictional and those based on historical incidents. One such incident was the escape in 1945 of 200 refugee immigrants in a British illegals displacement camp in Israel with the help of Jewish settler partisans. The escape happens towards the end of the story, but the escape is not really what the book is about. It is about four young Jewish women, none older than 21, who have all been displaced by the war in Europe. Polish-born Shayndel was orphaned during the war and ended up fighting with partisans; Dutch-born Tedi is half-Jewish and spends most of the war in hiding until she is betrayed and sent off to a camp; Leonie is Parisian who is saved by brothel keeper, and has a miserable time trying to stay alive as a prostitute; and finally Zorah, also Polish who manages to survive the horrors of the concentration camp. All very damaged emotionally and physically, they find themselves in Israel as there is really nowhere else for them to go and they are promised that Israel will finally be the home they are looking for.

The girls are just four of the couple of hundred men, women and children in the camp where they have to learn to live a normal life again, to trust people and build relationships and friendships. There are nightmares to get through, symbols such as the barbed wire of the camps reminding the internees of the concentration camps, physical health to rebuild.

The establishment of the state of Israel by the British and the United Nations forms the background to the story, the displacement of the Palestinians barely rates a mention, and the British come across as the enemy with the exception of a few of the the British running the immigrant camp.

So is it a good book? Well, good plot, interesting characters, plenty of action and tension, but something is missing. I felt like I was reading a narrative: he said, then she said, then she said. It just felt a bit too one dimensional. The richness of writing that made 'The Red Tent' so special and memorable, for me, just is not there. Maybe it is not supposed to be there, the subject matter of internment camps and the tragedies of the people who find themselves there perhaps do not lend themselves to rich, beautiful writing. Still it is book worth reading simply for the history it chronicles.








TWO LIPSTICKS AND A LOVER by Helena Frith Powell

"Unlock your inner French woman...". How do they look so sleek, so glamorous, so slim, wearing such gorgeous clothes, with such beautiful hair,and such immaculate faces? And all those temptations-delicious wines, oh-so-tasty cheese, that crusty, soft bread???? Why can't us Anglo-Saxon women have such style, look so effortlessly good?

Well, let me tell you, it takes effort, and plenty of it. Ms Powell moved from England to France with her husband and immediately felt like a frump. So in the process of discovering her inner French woman she interviewed and spent time with many beautiful French women to discover what really goes on. In short a lot of money is spent, a lot of time is expended, eating habits are abnormal, having girlfriends means competition - for men, having a career is not encouraged, having babies is really a bit of drag and terribly unsexy. But on the upside, women of all ages are adored and respected by men, they are encouraged to be intellectual, to think and to express opinions, and to take lovers. These are the things Ms Powell discovered in her research and what she wrote her book about.

As an exercise in self-discovery it is fairly light hearted, and she does manage to find her inner French womanliness! But I really did have a problem believing that ALL French women lived their lives like this. The women she interviewed all seemed to have lots of money, lots of time, were high profile either as society women, fashion shop owners, ex-models, actresses, successful career women and so on - women who are expected to look and be fabulous all the time.

As an aside I googled 'French Women Images' and came up with pages and pages of gorgeous beautiful women until I got to page 9, and there was a fat French woman which took me to an article in the Daily Mirror 19/09/2006 called 'Myth of Thin French Women Exposed' claiming that a third of French women are overweight. How beautifully refreshing I thought. They are normal after all!! Time for a glass of wine and some gooey cheese on a thick piece of crusty white bread. Or maybe a croissant...



GHOST TRAIN TO EASTERN STAR by Paul Theoroux

Twenty five years ago while living in a Pacific tropical paradise, I would visit the two very small English language book/stationery shops at least weekly to feed my reading appetite. Being very small shops there was a very limited range of books, so I had to expand my horizons somewhat and found myself reading books I would never have normally read, like Paul Theoroux's 'The Great Railway Bazaar'. Even though I was quite young still at the time, and it had been written by a sad, grumpy man some 12 years older than me who was going through some very major domestic strife, it left a lasting impression on me. His intense curiosity, his sense of adventure, his cantankerousness, the freedom of a life on a train was such a fantastic combination to read about. He was a grumpy bugger though, opinionated, little patience for many of the different societies and peoples he met, and I don't think he had a great deal of fun!

So thirty three years after that journey in 1975, Paul Theroux, now in a much better head space decides to retrace his steps on that epic train journey. His first journey took him through Italy, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Japan and across the vast expanse of the USSR. Already you will see that that particular journey would be quite a different undertaking now! Yugoslavia is now a number of different countries; the communist states have been over run by capitalism, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan are off limits to anyone of a Western hue. So the journey takes the author slightly north of these troubled countries through some of the now independent states of the former USSR - all the -stans; India is neck and neck with China as the world's fastest growing economy; the war is over in Cambodia and Vietnam; and is Russia any further ahead than it was some 40 years ago? To top it all off, the journey takes place some 16 months after the devastating Boxing Day tsunami. So a lot to write about!

The author is still cantankerous, obviously does not tolerate fools easily, and as the review in the Los Angeles Times said, "One of the problems Theroux presents to the careful reader is the fact that he's a compelling writer who is essentially unlikable. In part, that's a consequence of his blimpish judgments on everyone upon whom his disapproval settles...". But I think he is a much happier man now, his domestic life would appear to be pretty good, he certainly is not as angry, age would appear to have mellowed him as it does to us all!

His journey by train is, in a word, fantastic. I loved it, loved reading about where he went, what he saw, what he ate, the people he met, the changes he observed from 30 years ago, in particular the impact of technology and Westernisation. But the book is also about his own personal journey, comparing the man he was 30 years ago with the man he is now, and that is also fascinating to read about. He is now somewhat reflective and, shock, horror, traces of humility creeping through!

This is a long book with a lot of reading, but well worth it, and if at all possible, try to read the first book at the same time.

SEPTEMBER READING - What The Dog Saw; The Breaking of Eggs

THE BREAKING OF EGGS By Jim Powell

The late 1980s/early 1990 saw the collapse of the communist states in Europe; symbolised most potently by the destruction of the Berlin Wall. Democracy and capitalism poured into a myriad of new states and countries and everything became well with the world again. But, as usual in these economic and political upheavals very little if any thought is given to the peoples going through the upheavals. In this novel, 61 year old Feliks Zhukovski, Polish born, long term resident of Paris and citizen of France, die-hard leftist, and successful writer of a travel guide book to the communist bloc countries is one of those people.

The fall of the Wall is the catalyst that shakes and rattles the cage of a life that Feliks has carefully created for himself since his mother shipped him as a 9 year old boy and his older brother off to Switzerland shortly after the Germans took over Poland. Being half-Jewish in Poland in 1939 was not the place to be. The end of the war found Feliks one of the many millions of people displaced in Europe and he found himself living and working with those of a communist persuasion, finding a sense of belonging and meaning in all the chaos that was post-war Europe. And as the years go by, he remains convinced of the glories of communism and life goes on. Quietly and uneventfully.

So to be confronted in 1991 with all the stuff from his past leads to Feliks going on an unexpected adventure of personal discovery, and in the process laying all the demons of his past to rest. And that is all I will say about what happens!

What really struck me while reading this was how drastically and irreversibly war and conflict affects the ordinary man/woman at the bottom of the heap for the rest of their days. Over the past seventy years we have been saturated with war survival stories - fiction and non, movies, TV mini series until you would think that we scream "Enough!" But no, it just does not seem to happen like that. And a war survival story told like this one continues to keep the interest level high. I really enjoyed this story, lots of feel good happenings and a few reality checks thrown in, but not too over the top on the emotion meter, although I did feel a tear well up at one stage!

The author would appear to be very interested in the political and economic doctrines of the past couple of hundred years or so - democracy, capitalism, communism, socialism. He seamlessly interweaves all these into the story, and we watch Feliks move from one to the other as he tries to sort out his own meaning of life. But there is an awfully large amount of it through the novel and at times I did find it heavy going. However this does not detract much from what is a great story and very real characters.

WHAT THE DOG SAW by Malcolm Gladwell

What makes the writing of Malcolm Gladwell so interesting and compelling to read is that he looks at the everyday stuff of life just a little bit differently from the rest of us. He must have been an incredibly curious child, probably driving his parents completely crazy with question after question about absolutely everything. And most of the stuff he writes about is stuff that from time to time may flash through our minds, but there it stops. In 'Outliers', for example, he looks at why Asians are so good at maths. This is something we all generally know, but how many of us have actually given it any deep thought? Or in 'The Tipping Point', we accept fashion trends as something we follow because that is what in the shops. But Gladwell takes the example of the sudden and unexpected increase in popularity of people wearing Hush Puppies shoes, of all things.

His latest book is a collection of essays he wrote between 1996 and 2008 while he was working for 'The New Yorker' magazine. Should we really be banning pit-bull terriers, are they really as dangerous as they seem? Why do some people choke or panic when under stress, and what is the difference between choking and panicking anyway? Why are mammograms not necessarily as reliable as we think they are? And why, in the 1950s, did it suddenly become socially acceptable for women to start dyeing their hair when it had always been the domain of hookers and chorus girls? Malcolm Gladwell attempts to find out the answers to these curly questions and a host of others.

It is, of course, intriguing reading, funny, interesting, 'well fancy that'. And he writes it all in such an easy to follow fashion, despite all the facts, figures, reports, trials, examples, interviews that he uses to illustrate and prove his points.

If you look at the review in an esteemed publication such as the New York Times Gladwell does come in for some criticism over the lack of 'technical grounding' on his subjects, his tendency to be genarlise in his writing and to include the reader in his reasonings: the royal 'we'. But as another review observed, he does not profess to be an expert in any of the subjects he writes about. His overwhelming curiosity and writing ability are more than enough to keep the reader engaged, to make us think further about the world we live in and how we try to rationlise what is going on around us.

READING IN AUGUST - Ned and Katina; The Spellman Files; The Elephant Whisperer; A Week In December; Book Book

BOOK BOOK by Fiona Farrell

Read a brief biography of the author and you will find a most versatile writer who has written novels, short stories, plays and poetry. She has received a number of literary awards and held a number of residences. Fiona Farrell is one of NZ's most prolific and successful writers, and it all started in Oamaru, home of the more famous Janet Frame. I don't know from reading this book how much is fact and how much is fiction. But it is clear that much of this book is autobiographical. And at the centre of it all is her love of books and reading, and how they are closely associated with events in her life as they unfold.

The story is told in the third person being Kate, a child growing up in Oamaru with her family, her school days, teen years, going to university in Dunedin, falling in love, marrying, travelling to and living in Oxford, then Canada, having babies and rearing children, returning to New Zealand and onto middle age. Which is where the story opens. Kate is sitting reading books from her father's bookshelves, a book about ancient wars in Persia, while a modern day war is also happening in the same part of the world. There are parallels of course between the ancient war and the modern war.

The book then reverts to Kate's childhood and all sorts of books, fact and fiction, from all eras form the backbone to Kate's life. Kate/the author has a very deep love and almost spiritual bond with the books that have shaped her life, and this shines through. What also comes through very strongly is the post-war 1950s childhood and growing up in small town New Zealand, at a time when New Zealand is finding its own identity in the big world, and dealing with the aftermath of WWII. A number of other themes emerge as Kate grows up - university education for women, rise of feminism, mothers and daughters, career vs babies. The one that stayed with me the most was Kate's search for her own identity, particularly when she is in Oxford with her husband, as a 'colonial' in the 'home' country.

I found this whole book very moving. Reading about many of the books in the novel was like meeting old friends, and I can more than relate to Kate's love of and need for reading to keep her grounded and able to deal with the world around her.


A WEEK IN DECEMBER by Sebastian Faulkes

Two weeks before Christmas in 2007 in London the wife of a newly-elected MP is organising a large dinner party for those who are wealthy, or influential, or up-and-coming, or just simply different enough to be important to her husband's career. The husband never actually features in the novel, and the wife exists solely as the mechanism to bring these people together. In fact the invitation list has a very disparate bunch of people, the novel centering on several of them in this particular week. It seems as if the list has been devised to show the MP's wide and varied interests because it is difficult to see how this group of people would really have anything in common!

Anyway the dinner party is due to happen at the end of the week. Meantime there is seven days to get through. Amongst others there is a young man, Scottish by birth of Pakistani Muslim parents who have been invited to the dinner. The parents are the immigrant success story having made their fortune with lime pickles. The son, however seems to be spending far too much time exploring his Islam roots. Then there is Gabriel, a young not-so-successful lawyer, and his latest client, Jenni, who is a tube train driver with a rather fractured life history. There is also R Tranter who is a very successful if embittered and disillusioned book reviewer; John Veale, a most unlikeable character who has made millions and millions from hedge funding, and is in the middle of the deal of his life. Then there is the recent import to the local premier league soccer club, all the way from the hard life in Poland.

So what do all these people have in common? Very little if anything, except they are simply all living their lives in London this particular week. So what ia the novel about then? What ties all these people together? It is everything that makes up the First World, materialistic, consumer-oriented society we live in. From social networking, to religious fanaticism, to obsession with celebrity, mental illness, social isolation, family dysfunction, the list goes on. It is, therefore, a novel of social commentary, and Faulkes does not have very nice things to say about the type of society we have become. This message comes through loud and clear, but not so cleverly that Faulkes is still able to give us a great story, with complicated characters and lots of interlinking threads. I must say though that I was getting a bit glassy-eyed reading the intricacies and details of hedge funding and making money out of nothing.

THE ELEPHANT WHISPERER by Lawrence Anthony

I have never really been big on reading animal related books. I remember reading 'My Family and Other Animals' by Gerald Durell many years ago (when I was 12) because we had to do a book review of an 'adult' book. I was mildly amused by it, but never really felt 'engaged' with it. I have always had a cat or two or three in my life, plus we had a dog at one stage, but it has really only been since we have fostering motherless kittens over the past couple of years that I understand the 'art' of communicating with animals. It took a while but it has surprised me how little kittens of 6-8 weeks old have such very individual personalities and how, as a family, we have become 'cat whisperers'. For each pair of kittens the 'socialisation' challenge is get them to purr! Once they purr when we touch them then we know we are on the right track to having potentially gorgeous pets.

Anyway I digress, but all this has made me much more interested in animal type books. So when Sarah at book club raved about a book that her niece had given her about a man who had saved a herd of elephants I was, surprisingly, interested. Having been exposed to elephants in India also piqued my interest.

Elephants are truly incredible animals. I won't say anymore about the wonder of elephants because you need to discover it for yourself by reading this book so you too can be amazed. Lawrence Anthony has spent his whole life in South Africa and its surrounding countries, living mostly in the rural hinterland where he has built up a close and empathetic relationship with the land, the animals and the native Africans. He owns and runs the Thula Thula wildlife reserve in South Africa and finds himself landed with the monumental task of taking on a herd of wild elephants that are under threat of being shot. The enormity of this task is seen in the first 76 pages of the book which focus on getting the elephants safely corralled on the reserve behind 8000 volt fences. From then on Anthony's relationship with the elephants slowly develops and the reader learns a lot about the majesty of these animals. As well as life on a wildlife reserve - the other animals, gaining the trust and confidence of the native Africans, the development of the reserve as a tourist destination. It is all a most enticing mix. And I now want to visit a wildlife reserve in Africa!

As an aside the author was involved in rescuing the animals in the Baghdad Zoo after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. And that is another book in itself. He was gone from Thula Thula for six months, and not once during that time did the elephants come to the Lodge where Anthony and his wife lived. But on the day he returned to the reserve the elephants were waiting at the main entrance gates for him. How did they know? That is the magic...

THE SPELLMAN FILES by Lisa Lutz

On the surface the Spellmans are a very dysfunctional family. 30 year old David, the perfect child, who has 'escaped' by becoming a lawyer; 28 year old Isabel, the lead narrator who is desperately trying to find herself away from her family while she works for the family; and 14 year old Rae, really just a typical teenager trying to find her own place in the big complex world she lives in. Heading the family are Albert and Olivia, the parents, who run a successful private investigation business in San Francisco. Then there is Uncle Ray, ex-cop and health freak who after a cancer scare transforms the way he lives. All these people, in the daily management of their lives and each others as does happen in any family, do the wrong thing for the right reasons. That is, they all love each other desperately, but have mighty peculiar ways of showing it!

Isabel is the narrator. She really is a mess, desperately wanting out of the family firm, but not knowing how to do anything else. Her life is controlled by her over-zealous parents, each with their own peculiarities! The novel jumps around a bit at the beginning as the various characters and their backgrounds are introduced and I found it took a short while to get the drift of what was going on and who was connected with who. But once it got going, this is a rollicking good read, full of witty dialogue, funny happenings, unexpected twists and turns, and full of surprises. Extremely easy and quick to read, and highly entertaining, I look forward to reading the two sequels on my bookshelf. Apparently a movie is being made...I can only hope that it is as witty and sharp as the book!

NED AND KATINA - A TRUE LOVE STORY by Patricia Grace

A few years ago, after the death of Katina, Patricia Grace was approached by Ned and Katina's family to write the story of their love and life together. The result is not only a story of love, but also a story of two ancient cultures coming together, of urbanisation, of war, of families, of the best and worst of humankind, personal courage and above all hope.

Ned came from rural Northland, from a hard-working, self-sufficient Maori family. Katina came from rural Crete, also from a hard-working and self-sufficient family. In 1939, Ned was 20, and he immediately signed up to go to war. He joined the Maori Battalion and before he knew it, he was on his way to Europe with the rest of the Battalion. His war did not last long as he was injured during the assault on Crete. Along with a large number of other New Zealanders and Australians who were left on Crete after the evacuation, he roamed around the island, hiding in caves, trying to stay alive, and one step ahead of the Germans. He (and all the other soldiers) was aided by a number of families on Crete who risked their lives to feed and protect as best as they were able the fugitives. One of the families looking after Ned was Katina's family and very slowly love developed between the two. Ned was captured and spent the latter part of the war as a POW, but he never gave up hope of returning to Crete and marrying Katina. Which of course he did.

The couple sailed back to New Zealand, initially settled in Northland, had three children, moved to the Wellington area where they ran a number of successful businesses, before returning back to the extended family when they were elderly. This can't have been the easiest of marriages especially for Katina who left her roots, travelled to the other side of the world to a country she knew nothing about, alien food, language, culture and so on. This, I think, is the remarkable story, and one that I would like to have learnt more about.

An enormous amount of research has gone into this book and as a result it is extremely interesting, informative, and with plenty of history. There are lots of photos, copies of letters, documents and so on. The author has done a great job of documenting a crucial time in the history of two countries and peoples. And for me, herein lies the problem with this being a 'love story'. I didn't feel like I was reading about 'love'. I felt like I was reading a historical narrative, a report, an account of events. I felt detached from Ned and Katina, I didn't feel involved in their 'love'. There is plenty of courage, bravery, determination, tenacity and hope in this book, but as a reader, I didn't feel involved in it. It goes without saying that Ned and Katina were amazing people, of exceptionally high character and moral courage, and their story is very inspiring to anyone. I just wish I could have felt more involved with them rather than just simply reading about them! Hard to explain...