READING FOR JULY - Wulf

WULF by Hamish Clayton

Review book kindly provided by Penguin Books New Zealand via Booksellers NZ

From its opening words this book grabs you by its visual imagery. That first page conjures up a land of power, secrets, strangeness, and above all the inevitability of terrible and frightening things about to happen. It is eerie reading this book. You know you are not, but it certainly feels as if you too are trekking through dense New Zealand native bush, wandering on a desolate sandy beach, sitting on a brig slightly off shore on gentle seas. And all the time knowing that you are a foreigner in this land, always with the sense that you are being watched and observed by the locals. Very uncanny.

At the center of this story is an unnamed crewman on the 'Elizabeth', an English ship that in this tale arrived in New Zealand waters in 1830 looking to trade with the Maori, specifically for flax. For such a man and his fellow crew members, this new land would not have resembled their homeland in any way. Neither would the bird life, the fish life, the plant life. Combine this with the tales about the land's fearsome inhabitants - warmongers, revenge-seekers, desirous of muskets, rumours of cannibalism - and the scariest of them all, the great chief Te Rauparaha, it is little wonder that the visitors are in such awe of this land.

On the 'Elizabeth' is a young man, Cowell, who joined the ship in Sydney. He has been to New Zealand before, can speak Maori fluently and is there to act as a middle man between the ship's captain and the Maori traders. He is also a marvellous story teller and over a period of time regales the mesmerised crew members with stories of the exploits and conquests of Te Rauparaha. Any New Zealand history book will tell you what an extraordinary man Te Rauparaha was, both in his ambitions and his brutality. Dubbed 'Napoleon of the South' he seemed to spend his whole life exacting revenge for many and various wrongs. Naturally the myths that had built up around this man were also many and various, being perfect fodder for the imaginations of the sailors. He became the Great Wolf, always there, watching and waiting for the right moment to attack.

Rumours of a huge load of flax coupled with the chief's desire for muskets eventually lead the 'Elizabeth' to Kapiti Island, Te Rauparaha's stronghold, lying just off the west coast of the lower half of the North Island. A waiting game begins, during which the tension slowly winds up notch by notch. You see, the Great Wolf is far cleverer than the white sea captain, resulting in a major clash of the two entirely different cultures. What is a moral and ethical dilemma for one is a perfectly acceptable negotiation and result to the other. The consequences are disastrous.

The 'Elizabeth' was a real ship, Cowell and Captain Stewart were real people, and the incident they all find themselves involved in did happen. This was only one of many encounters and clashes that the Pakeha visitor had with the local Maori. We generally learn about them through history books, objective and fact driven. Very rarely do we experience what it may have been like to encounter a people so different from oneself. And in a land that is so dramatic and awe-inspiring, and all the time threatening and unknown.

Reading this book is like reading poetry, but in a prose form. It is just so stunningly beautiful. Many New Zealand novels are dark, gothic and morbidly gloomy. This is not a happy tale either, but the writing is so full of colour and richness that it is almost as if it is all taking place in some sort of enchanted wonderland. Anybody with an interest in New Zealand history, or a love of the land will feel uncannily linked with this story and the people in it.

READING IN JUNE -Season to Taste; Ed King; The Street Sweeper

SEASON TO TASTE by Molly Birnbaum

In my much younger days I was in a flat with a nurse. She was a terrific person, great flatmate, lots of fun. I remember asking her one day why she always cooked the same thing when it was her turn to cook. She told me that it was the one of the few dishes she knew how the finished result would taste/smell as she had lost her sense of smell in an accident getting off a bus on her way to work one day some 18 months or so prior. Wow. This was something I had never come across before. But I never really thought more of it because she was so matter of fact about it and functional in every other respect; she certainly didn't appear to have a 'disability'. I remember visiting her after she had a baby a few years later and asking her how did she know baby's nappy need changing and she said she would have a look. Hmm, that's easy, makes sense I thought. She always the same perfume too; she said that she knew it smelt nice on her, so it was the only one she could wear. I only hope all these years later they still make it!

But I never really gave her loss much thought. We all have slightly dulled taste/smell when we have a cold or are not well, but of course it always comes back. Just imagine though if you could not smell freshly mown grass and what it reminds you of, or the smell of the ground/air after it has been raining, or the smell of your boyfriend's aftershave, or the smell of leaking gas, or the smell of your baby, or the smell of burning food, or clean washing dried in the sun, or the smell of a Christmas lily? Loss of sense of smell invariably involves loss of the sense of taste - imagine that disaster! All food apparently reverts to the basic tastes of sweet, sour, bitter, or salty without the subtleties that make the taste of one food different from another. White wine apparently tastes like a sugary drink, coffee is just plain bitter. I can't imagine what parmesan cheese would taste like; at least you wouldn't be able to smell it! Smell, you see, is completely tied up with how we see ourselves and our place in the world we live in.

This is what Molly Birnbaum explores and comes to terms with in her memoir of her own experience with loss of smell. In 2005, Molly, recently graduated from college is filling in the months before taking up a coveted place at the Culinary Institute of America by working in a restaurant. One day, out for a run, she is knocked over by a car. Although not life threatening, her injuries are bad enough - broken pelvis, bad knee injury and a head trauma. It is only when she is recuperating at her father's place some weeks later and she is offered a piece of home-made-fresh-out-of-the-oven apple pie that it hits her she can't smell, or taste. So ends chapter 1.

As cliched as it is, the word 'journey' is probably the most appropriate word to describe the next few years for Molly as she sets out to deal to her loss. A very spirited young lady our Molly. She doesn't want to deal with it, she wants to deal to it and get her smell back. And I am not giving anything away by saying that much of her smell does come back, but not to the same level of sophistication that the general population would have. And would we even know if we didn't have it. She is chopping rosemary one day, four months or so after the accident and suddenly she smells it. So begins her slow and frustrating road to understanding how the sense of smell works - physiologically, mentally and emotionally.

We learn how intimately the sense of smell is associated with memory and self-perception, why depression is so common in those who can't smell, how those who can't smell/compensate by concentrating on texture and use the other senses to relearn food enjoyment, how the brain actually processes smell and why dirty socks and parmesan cheese do smell like each other and yet so slightly different, the power of smell in healing sufferers of post-traumatic stress syndrome, what is involved in becoming a perfumier, how we learn what is a nice smell and what isn't, pheromones and why we never generally fancy our blood relatives. All sorts of interesting and relevant information and research.

Beautifully weaved into all the fact is what is going on in Molly's own life. Her slow and nerve wracking foray back into cooking, her difficulties in learning to 'taste' food again, her relationships, and how smells gradually come back to her. She is so adept at getting under her own skin and imparting this to us. Her biggest problem it would seem is that although she finds herself able to smell more and more, she can't actually put a name to the smell. This whole thing about smell is just so intriguing that I have found myself much more aware of smell since. I have found myself smelling the pages of the book, and putting my nose in containers of coffee, spices, different pots of honey, mandarins and lemons and that is just in my kitchen.

This is a great story of self discovery that is also very informative and relevant to us all. I loved Molly's style of writing: the culinary world may have lost a great cook/chef, but the world of writers and readers is very lucky that she has found a second career in writing. Take a moment to read her blog before she had her accident in the link and her talent for writing and love of food shines out.



THE STREET SWEEPER by Eliot Perlman

My rating - 5.0*

A story, a real story, that moves effortlessly from the present to the recent past, from New York to Chicago and back again, then to Poland, to Auschwitz, to Melbourne, from the American civil rights movement to Nazi camps to academia. The scope of the story, where it takes the reader, the vision of the author in successfully combining all these disparate elements is really quite awesome. The diversity and richness of characters, in fact they are more than characters, to the reader they become real people, is just as awesome. I can't commend this book enough. The story is gripping, the characters life-like and the message it leaves at the end will stay a long time, and should stay forever: tell everyone what happened here.

Now such a book with so much in it is not going to be short - 544 pages plus another 10 of notes, references, acknowledgements etc! But well worth every page.

The street sweeper is a young black man, Lamont Williams, who has recently been released from prison. He is on a 6 month probation term at a cancer hospital in New York, lives with his grandmother in the Bronx and is trying to locate his young daughter somewhere in the city. By chance he meets one of the patients, Henryk Mandelbrot, an elderly Jewish man who tells Lamont of his life prior to and during the war, ensuring Lamont commits everything he is told to memory. In another part of New York, at Columbia University, Adam Zignelik, an untenured history professor is finding himself without a job and living alone. His Jewish American father was closely involved in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and as a result Adam too has close friends who are also black. Through one of his father's old friends, William, Adam finds himself on a research project that will change his life and unite all these people and places that we are slowly introduced to in the story.

The whole crux of the book rests on Adam's discovery of a set of recordings made by a psychology professor in 1946. Henry Border went to Europe after the war to make recordings of the war experiences of displaced persons - DPs - mainly as it happens, Jewish survivors of the camps, principally the death camp Auschwitz. So now you know a lot of the story does not make pretty reading. But it needs to be told. Adam realises this too, and over the course of the following weeks he peels away the mystery of Henry Border, his family and the stories of some of the people in the tapes. And then like an intricate spider web the events and people of the past are brought together with Lamont, Henryk, William, Charles, Michelle and Sonia on a street corner in New York city.

Marvellous writing, marvellous story.




ED KING by David Guterson

Oedipus Rex meets Silicone Valley
Rating 4*
Genre - modern fiction

Sometimes a little knowledge can be a bad thing. So it was probably just as well I had only read one review of this book before starting it and that was some months prior so I had forgotten what it was all about. It becomes apparent fairly early on that this novel is loosely based on the Greek myth Oedipus Rex, a story I have only a basic knowledge of. Actually that is all you need to get the comparisons with the plot of this novel. If I was a student of Greek myths or ancient Greek dramas, I would be very disappointed in this novel as a modern retelling of the Oedipus story. But as I don't have such a background I was able to enjoy the book simply for its story telling. I had been led to believe it was a weird book. It has element of weirdness in it, and at times is pretty far fetched, but nevertheless very readable, satisfying, and quite a good story.

Reading the reviews of this book by such bodies as the Guardian newspaper, New York Times, and the Telegraph are almost as entertaining, diverse and interesting as reading the book itself, which hilariously won the Guardian's 2011 Bad Sex Writing Award. And it really is.

But this book is not hilarious or really humorous at all. The characters are not really very nice people. Their lives are focused entirely on self-gratification and material gain and this results in their unpleasant and tragic lives. We could blame the society they live in - our contemporary Western one - that is set up to allow such people to exist and procreate. And yet nothing really has changed since the days of Oedipus Rex - greed, lust, narcissism are as much a part of the human condition now as they were then; the means of attaining it are just slightly different. The story is told too in a manner very much like a parable or moral story - we don't feel we are part of the characters, it is almost as if we are observers of the action as it unfolds.

And so the story opens in 1962 on the US west coast with a very young Diane fresh from England spending the summer working as an au pair for a family in which the mother is in hospital. Lust doesn't take long to show itself and before long Diane is pregnant to her employer, Walter. Blackmail and subsequent abandonment of the baby soon follow. To make ends meet the very beautiful Diane becomes a high class hooker. Her empty life, and her determination to remain young and beautiful take her places that most of us would prefer not to go to. Meanwhile the baby is adopted by a Jewish couple and becomes Ed King. He grows up with a younger brother, Simon, in a perfect childhood full of love, support, encouragement, extended family - everything a child could want. And he is never told he is adopted. Both boys are brilliant mathematics students and end up getting into the new and exciting world of information technology - computers and Silicone Valley. Ed has a few issues in his latter teenage years, but like many teenagers comes through, showing himself to be a genius at what he does and very quickly begins raking in the money, the fame, the plaudits that go with it all. And naturally his path crosses with that of Walter and that of Diane during the course of his life.

While reading this book, it is difficult not to think about the nature vs nurture argument. Here we have two boys of different biological parents brought up in the same environment, both highly intelligent, ambitious and hard working. There is strong rivalry between the two but probably no more nor less than in many families. The paths of their lives do go in different directions, but again no more nor less than in any other family. While the characters of Walter and Diane are not very nice people, and Ed does inherit some of his mother's ruthlessness, he does have a heart and feels genuine love, compassion and sorrow for happenings in his life. I can't say I liked Ed, but I did feel that he was a much more rounded, balanced character than perhaps some of the others who were either good (Ed's adoptive family) or not so good (his birth parents).

A good read, with plenty to think about.

READING IN JUNE - AN UNEXPECTED GUEST by Anne Korkeakivi

AN UNEXPECTED GUEST by Anne Korkeakivi

“Review book provided by HarperCollins via Booksellers NZ”

For a blessedly short time I worked for this country's Foreign Affairs department, which included a two year stint in a foreign outpost. I thoroughly enjoyed my time aiding my country's foreign representation on foreign shores but realised fairly early on that I was not cut out for a life of protocol, being perfectly well behaved all the time, being impeccably dressed, thinking before I spoke, saying and doing as I was told. It was sort of like being a cardboard cut out for the country you came from. The further up the diplomatic ladder one climbed, the more, it seemed to me, Stepford-like people became. In particular the wives. Often not allowed to work in the countries they moved to, the wives had the children and saw them off to boarding school at a certain age, dealt with nannies, household staff, hosted cocktail parties and dinners for home country politicians or local dignitaries, attended such cocktail parties and dinners, played tennis when they could and to my young eyes, generally didn't seem the happiest of people. Sure they had a comfortable and privileged existence but I wonder how much of their real selves they left behind in the process.

So given the opportunity to read and review this book about such a woman I was very keen to see if my youthful prejudices still held sway in the nearly 30 years that have elapsed since my days in Foreign.

Slightly further up the food chain than I ever was, American-born Clare Moorhouse is married to Edward, a high-ranking British diplomat. He is in fact one lower than the British Ambassador in Paris. Now we all know that behind every successful man there is one very capable wife, and Clare has proven herself over the twenty or so years they have been married to be the perfect diplomat's wife. Intelligent, well educated, extremely attractive and beautifully presented, mother to two teenage boys (both at school in England), well organised, able to establish and disestablish a home every three years for a new city, discreet and charming, she is a career diplomat's wife and very good at it.

Over the course of 24 hours however, the facade that Clare has set up over the years develops a few cracks. It never crumbles but a slightly different woman goes to bed at the end of that 24 hours, a happier, more contented woman I might add.

The trouble begins one evening, shortly after the London bombings in 2005. The embassy and its staff are still on a high security alert, and everyone is just a bit edgy. Clare is given just on 24 hours notice, that due to the sudden illness of the Ambassador, she and Edward are required to host a very important dinner. If successful it would result in Edward being appointed to Ambassador in Dublin, a post he has always wanted. Clare herself is of Irish parentage, and has always felt herself to be as much Irish as American. However this possible move to Ireland opens some very firmly shut doors in her past.

While her mind is dealing with this, plus the short notice to put on a top-end formal dinner party, her younger son Jamie has been getting up to his own hi jinx at boarding school in England, and run away back to Paris. Not wanting to worry Edward she attempts to deal with this by herself, even to the point of hiding Jamie in the house so Edward does not get angry and thus distracted from the business at hand.

Going about her preparations the next morning for the dinner, Clare is troubled by her long-ago memories of Ireland and her involvement with an IRA terrorist, Niall. In the streets of Paris and the markets, beautifully depicted by the way, she keeps seeing images of this man, until later in the day he manifests himself. Believing all these years that he was dead, it is a huge relief that she isn't going mad, but he forces her to confront the reality of what really happened all those years ago in Ireland. At the same time as she is navigating around Paris she literally runs into a Turk. Their meeting and a subsequent assassination throws up a huge moral dilemma for her, that combined with her encounter with Niall and the troubles her son is having, enable her, just for a short time, to stop being Clare Moorehouse, perfect wife of high ranking career diplomat Edward, and becomes Clare Siobahn Fennelly again, her true self.

As a journey of self-discovery and personal redemption this is good writing. Clare is desperately trying to maintain a hold on her reality, the tightly controlled and managed life she has built up, and yet at the same time wrestling with doing the right thing. The author has lived the life of an expatriate, and in France too. Her love of Paris in springtime is very apparent; the city sounds gorgeous as do the markets, and the shops and the streets she is driven down. Having been a bit of an expat myself, she writes intelligently and realistically of such a life, particularly for women on whom the largest burden of such a life falls. Often they cannot work, they are there because of the husband's work, and it is up to them to set up the new household, sometimes every few years, sort out schooling, child care, shopping, build up social networks, deal with unknown and new health issues, culture shock and so on.

However I did find the minutiae of Clare's life incredibly dull, her superior abilities at managing her staff were patronising, no wonder her cook was so grumpy; her thought processes alarming - how anyone can spend so much time and mental energy analysing and re-analysing the events of years gone past with no conclusion I do not know. In terms of her moral dilemmas, the encounter with the Turk is I think the only truly significant thing that occurred and I did struggle with how an episode in the past where nothing bad actually happened to her could suddenly take on monumentally enormous implications. The teenage son business was just annoying - an overindulged spoilt mummy's boy who needed a dose of consequences for actions. Plus there was just a shade too much French dialogue, not always paraphrased into English; you would need a basic reading level of French to follow Clare's conversations with those around her. It does lend a certain 'Francais' to the story but if you can't read French simply a nuisance.

It troubles me a little that it would appear not much has changed for the wives of diplomats over the last thirty years, and that is was probably for the best for myself as well as my country that I did find employment in other areas!

READING IN MAY : Snowdrops; Long Train in Winter; The Girl Who Fell From The Sky

SNOWDROPS by A.D Miller

You move to a new place - city, country, continent. No one knows you or anything about you. You can become anything or anyone you want to be. You can leave behind the detritus of your old home/city/country/life and start again. You can live a life different from the one you left. The more different the place, the more different you can become.

Nick Platt is 30-something, a lawyer, who is now in his fourth year working and living in Moscow. He speaks Russian fluently, knows the city and feels he has a pretty good handle on the place. In the early 2000s, when the novel is set, the former Soviet republic is in the throes of embracing capitalism, creating oligarchs and millionaires overnight. Nick works for a company that aids this process - setting up and managing deals between Western funds and Eastern resources. Moving faster than the pace of change can keep up, it is hardly surprising that moral and ethical lines are crossed, and that the lines between good and bad, legal and illegal, moral and corrupt are blurred until they become indistinguishable. How easy is it for someone born and brought up in a straight line place like Britain with its centuries old justice system and Christian ethic, to be corrupted by a society where all the rules have recently been thrown away, living on your wits, and trying to outdo your opponents is really the only way to get ahead?

Quite by chance one day, or is it by chance, Nick meets two beautiful sisters. An intense romance and love affair develops between Nick and one of the girls, Masha. In true capitalist fashion Masha works for a mobile phone company in customer services, and her sister is a student who also waits tables part time. Or are they. They introduce Nick to their elderly aunt, Tatiana, who lives in a flat gifted to her by previous regimes. She wants to leave Moscow and retire to a new apartment block in the suburbs of Moscow. Nick's services as a lawyer are enlisted to help the transactions go smoothly. It becomes apparent fairly early on to the reader that something is not quite right in this set up, and it is also apparent to Nick that every step he takes in his relationships with these women takes him further off the true north of his moral compass, but yet he seems incapable of getting himself back on track.

At the same time as this little scenario is unfolding, the company he works for is involved in brokering a deal between a US bank and the Cossack who is acting for an energy company looking at drilling oil off the coast and piping it overland. Alarm bells are ringing all over the place, but again Nick and his partner, who is Italian, simply allow it all to happen. It is almost as if they have now been in Russia long enough to have had all the moral and ethical vestments of their previous lives fall off them. This is most marked when about half way through the story, Nick goes back to England for Christmas to see his parents, his siblings and their families. Yes, just like all good Russian novels and movies, they all seem to be set in the depths of winter and no one seems to be able to do winter quite like the Russians. The title 'Snowdrop' refers to a corpse that has been covered by snow over winter, and then as spring begins, the thaw reveals the body.

At his parents' he just can't seem to find his feet or his heart for these few days. Now we all know family Christmas can be a fraught business but his attitude is one of such non-involvement that you can't help wonder if he really does have reason to hate his family. Getting back to Moscow of course, where he suddenly feels alive and at home, you then know that he has probably been there too long! If you were in the tropics, it would be called 'gone troppo', in Russia I don't know what they call it, but all I can think is that the heart and soul have been iced over.

So of course as we become more certain the house of cards is going to fall over, we watch with increasing fascination as Nick clumsily negotiates his way around, trying to deny what is going on but continuing to facilitate the process. He narrates the story in hindsight some years later to a person we assume to be his fiancee. Either he is talking directly to her or writing a letter, but however he is doing it, his means of story telling is almost like a confession, a complete unburdening of his soul, almost as if he is seeking forgiveness.

This is dark, foreboding writing. Nick has made a very small world for himself and in reading I almost felt a sense of suffocation as he finds himself sucked further and further into the vortex. The writer lived in Moscow for three years as correspondent for 'The Economist'. He writes beautifully of the city - its physical structure, and very atmospherically of its dark side, its underbelly, of which there is plenty. None of the characters with the exception perhaps of Tatiana and Nick's elderly neighbour, who represent the old Russia, are very nice people and I am glad I am not Russian. An unsettling story, touching on the dark side of our inner selves, and perhaps a morality tale on what can happen when you try to shed your old skin to take on a new one.

A TRAIN IN WINTER by Caroline Moorehead

War does not discriminate in its treatment of men and women. Those of the fairer, weaker sex are treated just as appallingly and brutally as their menfolk. Most of it of course we never get to hear about: war historically being men's business, women and children simply collateral damage. But from time to time, there emerges first hand accounts of small pockets of individuals who all suffered, with amazingly some surviving. Such a small group out of all the millions incarcerated and murdered in Nazi concentration camps during World War II were 230 women from France. Arrested in France, they found themselves imprisoned in small groups in a number of prisons in France, then in January 1943 brought together and transported by train to Auschwitz. Of those 230 women only 49 returned.

Through interviews with a few of the remaining living survivors and the families of those women no longer living, the author who has a background as a human rights journalist and is also a prolific biographer, has compiled an absorbing, harrowing, intensely sad, respectful and thoroughly researched biography of this group of women. This is the story of their incarcerations, their transport, their truly appalling time in Auschwitz and their ultimate survival. The key to their survival was the women themselves - their constant vigilance, care and support of each other, their shielding of each other from prison guards, their absolute determination that they would do their utmost to fight against what was going on around them.

The women were all ages, ranging from 17 years old to mid-70s. They were from cities, towns, villages, the countryside. Most were born in France, some born in Spain, Poland and Belgium who came to France when they married Frenchmen. They were school girls, farmers' wives, rich, poor, doctors, teachers, shop owners, writers, mothers, Christian, Jewish, communist - just like the myriad variety of women we have in our own communities. They really had nothing in common before the war, but once France was taken over by Germany (the first chapter gives an excellent and concise background to this take over) they were united in their hatred of the Germans, their pride in being French and their determination in making life as difficult as possible for the Germans. These women were all arrested by the Germans, essentially for crimes of resistance. From the 17 year old school girl seen dabbing an anti Nazi slogan on a wall, to operating a printing press, to distributing pamphlets, to harbouring Jews, escapees, allied airmen, to helping people pass over the demarcation line, to running errands, to simply being friends with the wrong people, completely arbitrary arrests in some cases.

Their time together in the prisons in France began the bond-building process that was to be so crucial to their survival in the Polish camps. Many of the women had their menfolk shot/hung by the Germans, most of them left behind children, a number of them were interrogated/tortured themselves. The 'getting-on' was not without difficulties as you would imagine bringing together such a disparate group of females in such trying circumstances. But by the time the decision had been made to send them en-masse to the camps, those bonds were firmly in place. And boy oh boy did they need them.

We know about the brutality of the camps, the appalling living conditions - these after all were death camps, you weren't supposed to come out alive. And yet reading about these camps again is just as awful and horrifying as every other time we have read or heard about them. That any of these women did is a miracle in itself. Some died the day they arrived in the camp - the shock being too great to bear; many of them died of dysentery or typhus in the first couple of months, many just simply collapsed in the snow and didn't get up again, many were beaten to death or just randomly picked to be gassed that day. The odds of anyone surviving or being in the wrong place at the wrong time were impossible to calculate.

For all the surviving women, their liberation was simply the beginning of the next huge struggle. Their physical and mental health would never recover, many had lost husbands and children, homes, livlihoods. The struggle to live after the war was probably as overwhelming as the struggle to live during the war. Many felt guilty for surviving.

This book brought home to me two things. Firstly the power of the human spirit and how we do need each other to survive and live well. Secondly how we need to be regularly reminded about the brutality of man to man. We may not be able to do anything about it, but at least it touches the humanity in us.

THE GIRL WHO FELL FROM THE SKY by Simon Mawer

Ordinary people doing extraordinary things. That's one of the things that war does. And we wonder too, if we were placed under such pressures as having our country occupied by an enemy, would we too do find ourselves doing extraordinary things? Almost immediately after France was occupied by Germany in 1940, General De Gaulle, from his base in London, as head of the Free French movement, called on his compatriots in France to resist the German occupation at all costs so as to keep France free and restore the glory of France. Just a month later, the British Government formed the Special Operations Executive, a largely secretive organisation that was to undertake a variety of tasks including espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in Europe against Germany and its allies, and to use and aid the local resistance movements to achieve these aims. The SOE depended for its success on recruiting agents who could pass as natives of the countries they were placed into. Dual citizenship, years of living in the subject country, fluency in the language, an affinity with the country were all qualities highly sought after.

France was not the only country that the SOE operated in, but it is the subject of this novel, the latest by Simon Mawer, whose previous novel, 'The Glass Room' was short listed for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. Young Marian Sutro, with her English diplomat father, and her French mother has lived much of her life in Switzerland and also knows Paris very well. Marian works for the WAAF where her intelligence and steady nerves have her working in the Filter Room, a section of the Defence system where aircraft positions are plotted and recorded. She comes to the attention of a SOE recruiter. After having the dangers outlined to her, which are many, she agrees to join the SOE, and so her big adventure begins. She is sent to Scotland to a training facility where she undergoes a most extensive and intensive training course in all aspects of self-preservation, espionage, surveillance, wireless work and essentially survival.

And finally comes her big moment of being parachuted into France to begin her big adventure. To this point the story has trundled along at quite a leisurely unexciting sort of pace - really setting the scene for the second half. We are introduced to her fellow 'students' at the training camp, especially Benoit and Yvette. We are also introduced to her brother Ned who is a physicist and read about a Frenchman, Clement, a slightly older family friend who she had a mad crush on during her teenage years and who is now a nuclear physicist still in occupied Paris.

Once Marian, now Alice, and soon to take on a third identity, lands in France, we are immediately plunged into the adrenalin laced, terrifying, stressful, and exhausting life of the partisan/resistance worker. From the countryside of the still unoccupied south west France to German-infested Paris, Marian attempts to do the tasks she has been assigned. Which I won't divulge here! The contrast in the writing style is quite pronounced and the book very quickly becomes a page turner. While very much a tale of good vs evil, it is primarily the story of Marian's growth: from a young, naive, perhaps bit spoilt, bored girl into a highly trained, sophisticated, professional, self aware woman. And never once do you let your guard down.

The stories of women resistance workers have been told many times and in many different forms over the decades. But whether they are true as in the life of Nancy Wake or fictional as in Sebastian Faulkes' 'Charlotte Grey' or William Boyd's 'Restless' they still have the ability to make us wonder how we would behave, leave us in awe and above all humble us. A most worthwhile read.

Review copy supplied by Hachette NZ via NZ Booksellers.

READING IN APRIL - Georgy Girl; Cuban Heels; Salvage the Bones; Far To Go; They Shoot Horses, Don't They; Our Lady of Alice Bhatti.

GEORGY GIRL by Margaret Forster

'Hey there Georgy Girl, There's another Georgy deep inside, Bring out all the love you hide, and oh what a change there'd be, the world would see a new Georgy Girl'. Anyone growing up in the 1960s and 1970s would instantly recognise that song by the Seekers, from the film by the same name.  Being a little girl myself at the time, I always wondered about this Georgy Girl person, and then I found this book! This is Margaret Forster's third book, published way back in 1965 when she was only in her mid-twenties herself. Is any of it autobiographical? I sincerely hope not! I wonder if she knew people who had the characteristics of the people she writes about - maybe. They are certainly very diverse, and actually none of them particularly likeable.

First up there is Georgy's parents who are in the employ of the wealthy but childless James Leamington. They are bitter and disappointed about their lives. The only joy in their lives, if you could call it that, is their daughter Georgy, now in her early twenties, trying to make her own life, but with really no idea on how to go about doing it. Mr Leamington has always treated Georgy as his own child, paying for her education and helping set her up as a dance teacher. A sad and lonely man in his late 40s, he makes Georgy an offer that she refuses, wanting to make her own life for herself.

Georgy is actually quite a nice person and not stupid, but is a complete doormat for other people to walk all over. She flats with the truly awful Meredith, a narcissistic spoilt brat of a person who rather bizarrely is a classical musician. Meredith is pregnant to her boyfriend of the moment, Jos, with whom Georgy is madly in love. In a peculiar turn of events, Jos and Georgy end up together, looking after the baby that Meredith refuses to have anything to do with. In such circumstances the relationship is doomed from the start, with Georgy giving all her love to the baby, and none left over for Jos.

It sort of all works out in the end and Georgy would appear to be happy in the final decisions she makes. But I can't help wondering, in the new wave of feminism sweeping through the 1960s, if her decision really was the right one. It is almost as if she is caught between the very traditional and clearly defined values of post-war England and the new hedonism and opportunities available to young women of the post-war young generation. Maybe a sequel would reveal how the next few years of Georgy's life may have turned out.

Rather than enjoyable I did find the book interesting, but I didn't really find any of the characters very enjoyable! They were all really quite awful and unlikeable. Georgy could have been likeable, but I was annoyed at her because she didn't really like herself and spent most of her time trying to please others. It was really only towards the end that she did begin to find that other Georgy inside and begin to make decisions for herself instead of for others. Much more 1960s.

CUBAN HEELS by Emily Barr

Ah, chick lit. What a delightful little divergence from the realities of our usually mundane lives of work, children, family, friends, dog walking, food shopping,  peace and quiet, not necessarily in that particular order. Attractive, successful, slightly flawed heroine strikes a bit of a rocky patch; attractive, successful, not at all flawed hero in the background just waiting to pick up those broken pieces...a light frolicky bit of froth.

And then there are the slightly darker novels, which although distinctly still chick lit, have sinister overtones, characters who aren't what they appear to be, who do strange and peculiar things. As our heroine does in this particular story.

Poor Maggie's life has fallen to bits. Her long term relationship is over and she has moved from Edinburgh all the way south to Brighton. Her job at American Express is actually something else, her parents live in France, her very pregnant sister in Norwich: she is lonely, depressed, directionless. Quite by chance she finds she can eavesdrop on the lives of a young couple, Libby and David, who live in the building she lives in. Libby has just had their first child and is having some trouble adjusting from being a high-powered lawyer to being a new mum. Maggie listens into all this and begins to see the couple as her only friends and yet she finds she can not actually bring herself to introduce herself or even contrive a meeting.

David has the opportunity to learn Spanish for a year so that he can be in charge of his employer's Madrid office. And what better place to learn in than Cuba! Libby and David's decision throws Maggie into a complete tail spin and she resolves to also go to Cuba and become a part of this family who have become so important to her.

Bizarre behaviour by any stretch of the imagination! Despite the very peculiar and ridiculous coincidence of Maggie just happening to be in Cuba and learning Spanish at exactly the same time as her neighbours, life for all three of our characters starts off very well. The three of them get on extremely well and Maggie finally feels as if she has found a place to belong and people to belong to. But lingering over everything that Maggie says, thinks and does is the tragedy of her younger sister's death when Maggie was just thirteen years old. It takes a while for this to be disclosed to the reader, and as we find out more of what drives Maggie, slowly the delicate wall of self protection she has built around herself begins to crumble away.

All of course is satisfactorily resolved in the end, but it is a bit of dark and deadly path before we get to that point. I know chick lit is escapist, but at times this did stretch the imagination! It is a deeper story than your average chick lit, and actually quite well written. Characters are believable and well rounded, and the plot addresses a number of issues probably quite pertinent to many modern young women - relationships, ticking biological clock, adjustment to motherhood, sexual abuse, the nature of friendship, and how our modern lives contribute to loneliness and isolation in our communities.

I don't read a lot of chick lit because it can all be a bit fluffy and ridiculous, but this was a good story, with a number of unexpected occurrences and I really quite liked it. I now want to go to Havana - just as interesting a character as the real people in the story. Not so sure about Brighton however...

SALVAGE THE BONES by Jesmyn Ward

Remember Hurricane Katrina that hit the south east coast of the US in August 2005? This became the most expensive natural disaster in US history. Virtually all the media coverage we saw of this event was focused on New Orleans: the apparent lack of preparation, the flooded streets, floating corpses, the inability of the city to cope afterwards, the President's apparent lack of interest - I am sure you remember. But what we never really saw or heard about was the devastation in neighbouring states and communities. Especially Mississippi. This state was the hardest hit by the hurricane, with all areas suffering widespread damage. 235 people died, most of them in the coastal areas, which is also where the greatest damage and destruction occurred. In common with New Orleans and those images forever imprinted on our minds, is that it was the poorest who suffered the most. Mississippi, along with Louisiana and neighbouring Alabama are among the poorest states in the country. The effects of such a disaster are going to be much greater on the poorest than on others.

Such a family lives in the fictional Mississippi coastal town of Bois Sauvauge. Four motherless children left largely to bring themselves up: 17 year old Randall - way older than his years; 16 year old Skeeter who lives only for his fighter dog China in whom he sees the source of financial salvation for the family; 14 year old Esch, pregnant and desperately trying to deny it; and 7 year old Junior, who never knew his mother and is almost feral. Their father has never gotten over the death of his wife, and tries his absolute best to parent and provide for his children, but the family's hand to mouth existence makes this an almost impossible task.

Beginning twelve days before Hurricane Katrina strikes, Esch narrates the family's attempts to prepare for the storm which they know is going to be bigger than anything else they have had to deal with. The children try to stock pile food, their father works on getting bottles filled with water, and on ways to protect the house and shed, Skeeter proves to be a better mother to China and her pups than China is herself. Esch loses herself in morning sickness, her mad crazy love for the teenage father of her baby, and having no mother looks to the sorceress Medea from Greek mythology for inspiration and direction.

Each chapter is one of the twelve days. At the core of each chapter is the ominous threat of the approaching storm, the exhausting heat and humidity, the dirt and dust the family lives in, the constant hunt for food. But also the enormous love andhige reliance these children have on each other for the survival of their precarious family unit. Their father is really a background figure simply because he is so powerless and ineffectual, plus he is often drunk. Their relationships with each other, and with their peers in the local community are what are what drives them - the rivalries, love affairs, the graphically violent but beautifully drawn dog fights, and Skeeter's utter devotion to the dog.

This book won the National Book Award 2011. Very inspirational, it is a marvellous story. It is raw, it is violent, there is little stability in these kids' lives, but above all they have each other. And that is a difficult thing to tear apart, something not even Hurricane Katrina has the power to do, although she has a damn good time trying.

OUR LADY OF ALICE BHATTI by Mohammed Haniff

This is the latest novel from Mr Haniff, writer of the brilliantly clever and satirical 'A Case of Exploding Mangoes'. This novel was set around the plane crash that killed Pakistani President General Zia in 1988, along with a number of other dignitaries. Long listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize, this is a many faceted, ingenious, very tightly plotted and held together novel. Such a great read I couldn't wait to start this latest novel from Mr Haniff. Not quite in the same class I am afraid.

Once again, he takes a whole raft of issues that seem to characterise the complete inability of Pakistan to get its act together. Unlike India just next door. Primarily this is a novel about the lowly status of women in Pakistani society, but also takes up religion - Christianity vs Islam; corruption; the state of the hospital system; untouchables; the power of the police; crowd hysteria and riots - a huge variety of issues. Alice Bhatti is at the centre of the novel. Alice is a nurse, Catholic, she has a certain healing gift, and has just started a new job at the Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments in a poor part of Karachi. She has to navigate her life around the usual list of misfits that are part of hospitals - corrupt doctors, injured criminals, officious supervisors, rich and poor dying mothers and their sons - and all the time really trying to do the right thing. She reminded me so much of the very human TV character Nurse Jackie.

She rather suddenly and unexpectedly falls in love with a most unlikely husband in anyone's book - Teddy Butt, about as unlike Nurse Jackie's husband as you could possibly get! Teddy is, I am afraid to say, thick. Not a brain in that skull of his. He is an apprentice to the Gentlemen's Squad of the Karachi police, in other words tidies up and disposes of the human messes that the Karachi police make in their daily line of work. I just did not understand this love affair, not at all. Its reason for being, the courtship, why she ever married him, the fact that the marriage takes place on a submarine!! It is just so fantastic as to be ridiculous.

Being considerably smarter than her husband, Alice cottons on rather quickly that her husband is not as ideal as she led herself to believe he would be and the storyl finishes fairly soon after that.

And that I afraid to say is all that goes on in this novel. Alice's daily life is used as a backdrop for the author's commentary on how Pakistan is doing in the 21st century, and it is not doing very well at all. It is not so much what he is trying to say, however, that is disappointing; it is that compared to 'Mangoes' it isn't said very well. This book really goes nowhere, I thought all the characters unrealistic and not well drawn, it felt very disjointed and jumpy to read, and parts of the plot were just plain silly - the submarine, the miracles that take place. All in all a most disappointing read.

THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY by Horace McCoy

This is a remarkable book. First published in 1935, and apparently never out of print since, at just over 100 pages, this novel brims over with suspense, desperation, and tragedy. At the same time we are shown a darker side of the Hollywood dream that so desperately captures young people across America and the world. The reason perhaps for this book's durability and continued relevance? That young people still pursue the Hollywood fame dream with as much determination, stubbornness, and stupidity now as they did then. How all this can be conveyed in just over 100 pages is really quite amazing, and yet not a single word is wasted, and there is not a single word too many. Beautiful and mesmerizing writing that haunts us long after the finishing.

It is during the Depression, Los Angeles, mid 1930s. Robert, the narrator, is in the dock about to be sentenced for the murder of Gloria. Both are drifters from small towns, both are following the American Dream of money, fame and success by coming to Hollywood and making it big in pictures. Desperate times call for desperate measures. We know from the first page it ends in tragedy.

Robert recounts how he meets Gloria in the street and she talks him into entering a marathon dancing contest. These dancing contests were a major form of entertainment during the 1920s and, increasingly the Depression of the 1930s. For the participants, some of whom became very successful and followed the marathon circuit around the country, they were a major form of income as the prize money was quite sizeable for the time. For the desperates and wannabees, taking part, developing a gimmick, becoming a crowd favourite were crucial to be noticed by promoters, movie agents, producers who would go to the contests looking for talent. These marathon dance contests would go on for weeks - the contest Robert and Gloria enters is for 2500 hours. It is hardly surprising that you would go slightly mad taking part in such an event, and that is probably what happens to both Robert and Gloria as they fight with every ounce of their beings to stay in the contest. The cover epitomises perfectly the desperation of each couple as at all times the dancers have to be on their feet and moving.

Even though this novel was written nearly 80 years ago it has as much relevance now as it did then. In the pursuit of money, fame and success people will always resort to desperate and dangerous methods. And at the same time there will be heartbreaking sadness and futility. Like one of Aesop's fables, such a strong message conveyed in so few words.

FAR TO GO by Alison Pick

From December 1938 to September 1939 approximately 10,000 Jewish children left the countries of Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland and Germany for England on organised transports that came to be known as the Kindertransport. A number of different organisations and religions were involved in the huge project of saving the children's lives as it became apparent in the late 1930s that Hitler was determined to exterminate all traces of the Jewish race in Europe. The intention was that after the war the children would be reunited with family members, but of course only a very few of the children ever saw any family members again.

This is the story one such family who gave their son a second chance at life by putting him on one of the trains that would ultimately take the boy to a new and safe life in England. Pavel and Anneliese Bauer are a young couple of Jewish descent but non-practising. They live in a town in the Sudentenland, which prior to WWI was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. After the war, the area became part of the newly created Czechoslovakia. Being populated mostly by ethnic Germans, it was high on the list of priorities for Hitler to reclaim in the expansion of his German empire.

The Bauers live a very comfortable life with their five year old son Pepik and the boy's nanny, 21 year old Marta. The story is told from Marta's point of view. She would appear to have no family; she considers the Bauers her family and even though she is their servant she seems to genuinely love and care for them, especially Pepik. She is young, naive and finds herself increasingly conflicted as Hitler and his Nazi tentacles rapidly spread across Czechoslovakia. She is seduced by Pavel's married business partner, the latter realising how much he has to gain by being Pavel's friend and ultimately his betrayer. Marta is possibly typical of how many non-Jewish people found themselves behaving during these years. Jews had been part of their communities forever, and they now found themselves having to face actions and make decisions that they probably knew were wrong, but didn't know how to deal with.

As for the Bauers, they refuse to believe that the world as they know it is going to end and, as time goes by they realise they have left it too late to get out of Czechoslovakia. And so they have to make the heart breaking decision to send their child away, never knowing what may have happened to him.

Running parallel to Marta's story is the story of another woman, a researcher who, in the present day, is putting together the stories of the children who came to England on the Kindertransport. This character is important to the story, but it does take a frustratingly long time for the relevance to show itself. It is almost as if we are fed titbits, enough to keep us interested but not enough to tell us all!

I am not giving anything away by saying that, as one would expect, the story is heart-breakingly sad. Jewish parents left in Prague was never going to end well, and many of the Kindertransport children did not have happy childhoods in their new lives. The book is beautifully written; we feel the Bauers pain and confusion, Marta's conflicted life, and the sadness that is inevitable.

The author herself is half Jewish. Her grandparents fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and took five years to make their way to Canada. Still frightened they raised their children as Christians and it was not until the author was a teenager that she discovered her heritage. Her grandparents' pre-Holocaust life
inspired her to write this story which was long listed for the Man Booker Prize 2011.

READING FOR MARCH - Sideways on a Scooter; There But For The; Pigeon English; The Churchills

THE CHURCHILLS by Mary Lovell

It is quite a daunting prospect to review a book about such a monumental person as Sir Winston Churchill. Google his name and pages and pages of stuff are listed. Any one of these provides a potted biography, lists of his many outstanding achievements, the ups and downs of his political career, his talents and interests, his personal and family life, his memorable quotes, trusts, speeches and books he wrote. The latter a career in itself.

So the purpose of this review is not to tell you about Sir Winston's life, but about this particular book which sets out to document it. And what a book it is. It sheer size alone is huge - running to 670 pages, with the last 100 pages comprising bibliography, notes, appendices and a most impressive index; chock full of photographs; and a comprehensive family tree. All of which I regularly referred to.

Beginning with the origins of the family dukedom (awarded by Queen Anne in 1702), the first chapter gives a brief but fascinating history of the family up till about the middle of the 19th century and the time of the 7th Duke of Marlborough. Sir Winston's father, Lord Randolph, was the third son of this particular Duke. From then on the book focuses in huge detail on the life of Winston, literally from cradle to grave.

The research the author has put into this book is quite staggering. I always find it quite remarkable how people in our recent past kept so much of their personal written correspondence. This is now such a rich source of information about daily life, issues, and relationships of those who until quite recently really were living amongst us. I am thinking of letters that Winston wrote at boarding school to his parents, or the heart felt letters and notes that he and his wife Clementine wrote to each other constantly through out their marriage. Not only has the author managed to find her way through all this material, but somehow she has the ability to put it all together in such a way that at times you feel as if you are invading someone's innermost thoughts, or being given permission to wallow in the salacious gossip and lurid details of the lives of the British aristocracy. Will email and Facebook ever provide us again with such a rich and thoughtful insight into lives?

There is plenty of scandal and gossip throughout this book. Quite startling too I have to say: a whole appendix devoted to whether or not Lord Randolph died of syphilis, for example. And one look at the extensive family tree, with Winston and his brother Jack in the center of it, shows that they are the only ones who were married only once. So much for 'till death do us part'. There certainly wasn't much of that around! Fascinating reading.

But it is not all social climbing, bed hopping, and saving face. I doubt whether Winston would have had the impressive career and political life he had if it had not been for the support, devotion and undying love of his wife Clementine. She herself was an amazing woman and became a life peer, as well as a Dame. Her own war service as president or chairperson of various service groups earned her enormous respect and recognition. Yet her role as Winston's life long partner will be what she is forever remembered for. As the saying goes, behind every successful man there is a great woman.

From childhood Winston set his sights on a career in politics. His love of toy soliders and battle planning meant a defence career was also a foregone conclusion. To make these subjects interesting and readable to the average reader is quite an achievement; there were perhaps only a few pages when I felt I had read enough about that particular political machination (plenty of them), or the intricacies of a certain military action. The one section that did have me riveted however was the appalling debacle at Gallipoli in 1915-1916 when Churchill was the First Lord of the Admirality. As a result he received much of the blame for the disaster. Coming from New Zealand, the battle of Gallipoli features very heavily in our history and national identity as it also does for Australians. We know a lot about this battle in this part of the world. So to have the author so vividly, concisely and simply tell the story, for me, was one of the main things I have taken away from this book.

What I also take away from this book is that the world is sorely lacking in leaders with the outstanding qualities that Winston Churchill had. I can't think of a single leader in recent years who has the ability to inspire people,to not be afraid, who, as the author tells it, is not in the job for personal glorification or sees the job as a means to his own ends. The author clearly loves her subject; her admiration for the man and what he achieved in his life time and for his country is enormous. Whether this is a failing of the book I do not know, as I have not done any research or previous reading of Winston Churchill. The author has however, compiled mountains of material into a most readable and fascinating account of Britain, Europe, its leaders, movers and shakers over almost ninety years and for that reason alone it is worth reading.

Mary Lovell has written biographies of some very interesting well-known and not so well-known people and families - the Mitford sisters, Beryl Markham, Amelia Earhart and Jane Digby, plus others. I have read two of these other biographies, both of which were easy, enjoyable and informative, but also large reads!

PIGEON ENGLISH BY Stephen Kelman

This book was one of six books to make the short list for last year's Man Booker Prize. So as with the Man Booker books, I was expecting a challenging, but not necessarily likeable read. And I got likeable, but not very challenging.

It is the story of Harrison Opoku, an 11 year old Ghanian boy and recent immigrant to London with his midwife mother and older sister. One can only imagine the culture shock this family would be feeling moving to live on the 9th floor of an apartment building on a London housing estate. The author grew up on a housing estate in Luton, so he has first hand knowledge and experience of life in a setting we generally associate with inner city poverty, ugliness, deprivation, violence, drugs, and anti social behaviour. In other words not a very pleasant place to live or raise a family.

The story is narrated by Harri, as he is known, trying to make sense of this very different world he is living in, the complicated relationships and pecking order, trying to sort out where he wants to be and who with, and in the process, finding himself doing and saying things he knows are wrong, but feels compelled to do just to belong.

It is a savage place he is living in. A teenage boy he knows from school - a half friend he calls him - is stabbed to death in the street. Harri didn't see the murder but does see all the blood, the policeman standing guard, the fear and sadness in the adults. He resolves to find the murderer and bring him to justice, and so like the Hardy Boys and the Famous Five before him, he amasses clues, makes careful observations with his newly acquired binoculars, sets traps until he finds his mark. Unlike the Hardy Boys and the Famous Five however, he also has to stay on the right side of the local estate gang - Dell Farm Crew: their petty violence and acts of intimidation, plus the usual teenage issues - drugs,alcohol, sex. Harri also has to deal with homesickness and his lack of knowledge about such things as CSI, his mother being called a fuzzy wuzzy, and why his aunt has no fingerprints.

As adults we generally respond well to books written through the eyes of a child. We may not have experienced old age, or illness, or a serious accident, or intrepid journeys, or careers as forensic detectives, magazine editors or prominent lawyers, or even parenting. But the one thing we all have in common is childhood. Reading such books reminds us of our own childhoods and how we saw the world of the adults around us. Books such as 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night', 'Room' and 'Spies' focus on very large issues that are totally beyond the realm of a child to comprehend; the child narrator being a major catalyst in the unfolding action of the story. I feel that the author is trying to do much the same thing here with this winning formula, but for me it doesn't seem to work as well.It is almost as if he is trying too hard. Not a lot happens in this book - Harri tries to stay a good boy, tries to find a murderer and tries to stay on the good side of the gang. That is it.

There is also the most annoying distraction - the pigeon, just one of many hundreds of pigeons that nest on/in the apartment buildings. Harri chooses one pigeon as his special bird, his guardian, and at random places in the story the pigeon gives his perspective on what is unfolding beneath him. It really adds nothing to the story, and other than one crucial piece of action towards the end, boy and bird do not have any direct contact with each other. The bird may be the symbol for some sort of guardian angel of the boy, but because the two don't actually communicate with each other it all seems a bit far fetched.

However, the despite all this, the quality of the writing saves it. As English is a second language for Harri and his family, his inner thoughts, his conversations with his mother and sister are strewn with his own language. Hutious, which seems to mean frightening/scary/weird and is the perfect word to describe much of the strangeness Harri sees around him; asweh for I swear; his sister constantly telling him to 'Advise yourself', a fabulous universal phrase which seems to mean anything from sort yourself out, stop lying, grow up, shut up, get out of my face! The conversations Harri has with his new friends are also funny, wry, very diverse and imaginative. Making sense of a playground sign that says 'Say No to Strangers', trying to make his cheap trainers look like Adidas ones, falling in love with a girl in his class. Now these would not be out of place in many children's world view.

But this is not a funny or happy book. It is worth reading to once again be reminded of the desperate lot of many immigrant families to Western cities and impoverished areas, the random violence that frequently occurs around us, the aimlessness of many young people with little education and few prospects. But then again you may not want to read it, because we have daily reminders of all this on the nightly news, the newspapers and You Tube. Better perhaps to read some escapist fantasy fiction or a bit of light chick lit.

THERE BUT FOR THE by Ali Smith

Well, this is a most peculiar book, very surprising and ingenious, quite different from anything you are likely to have read in the recent past or in the near future for that matter. Even the title leaves you thinking something is a bit odd...

The very meandering plot revolves around Miles Garth, an ethical consultant, somewhere in his forties, who, one night at a dinner party in Greenwich, gets up between courses, makes his way upstairs to the spare room and locks himself in. Indefinitely. You would probably get up and isolate yourself too if you were at a dinner party with guests such as were at this dinner party. Nevertheless we never find out why he takes this course of action, in fact the reason, whatever it may be, has no bearing at all on how the story unfolds. Almost overnight Miles becomes a cause celebre, with people camping out in the street to catch a glimpse of him, organising a food delivery by basket and rope (he is vegetarian and the owner of the house he refuses to leave only feeds him slim slices of ham slid under the door), and media swarming as media does.

Four people, closely and loosely associated with Miles narrate the four chapters - There, But, For, The. Anna met Miles on a bus tour of Europe some 20 years prior; Mark is Miles' boyfriend and had taken Miles with him to the dinner party; May is an elderly lady biding time and hating it in a rest home; and Brooke is a nine year old girl, highly intelligent, lively, bordering on precocious and loving it. There are other people too on the periphery such as the other dinner party guests, Mark's long deceased rhyme loving mother, May's husband and Brooke's parents as well as Jen, the dinner party hostess.

The message or theme of this book? Not entirely sure, but feel it has something to do with No Man Is An Island, or maybe he is, and one state or the other is neither a bad thing or a good thing. Confused?

So we play a bit loose with the point of the book but the real pleasure of this book, what stopped me from putting it down and thinking all a bit too odd really, is the writing. It is an absolute joy to read because Ms Smith is a master of words - puns galore (Brooke LOVES puns); witty clever dialogue used in such a way that the character of the speaker is revealed without us really knowing anything about them - the dinner party is fantastic reading (I read it twice); enlightening discussions about the word 'But' for example. Brooke is truly delightful, she would be an impossible child to have in a classroom, but her observations of the adults around her, her passionate interest in her home town of Greenwich as the place that Western time is measured from, (read symbolism for the time passing in the lives of the characters) marks her out as quite the most interesting character in the book.

The whole thing is really quite genius, I just loved her use of language, it dances all over and it all contributed to the package of what is quite an unusual book, but all in a good way. Even if I am not quite sure of its raison d'etre.

SIDEWAYS ON A SCOOTER by Miranda Kennedy

Yes, it is yet another book about India; there have been a fair few over the past four years since we lived there, and not all them have been reviewed! The country and its people baffle and intrigue, it frustrates and challenges, its all about globalisation and becoming an economic super power, yet deeply entrenched in its various cultures, religions and traditions. Its diversity and beauty and ugliness make your head spin. You can both love it and hate it several times a day, and yet, somehow, I don't know how, India gets under your skin, and stays there, forever.

As it did for journalist Miranda Kennedy in her five years living in Delhi, as Super Reporter Girl, fearlessly going where no female reporter had been before in this conflict-ridden region. Already you can see she has the capacity to laugh at herself. The core of the book really is this huge self awareness and self knowledge that she uncovers about herself, and completely without arrogance reveals to the reader. So not only are we reading a book about a young woman's life in a vastly different place from New York, we are also seeing her grow up, learn from what is going around her, develop deep respect for a culture and society so alien from hers, compassion for the people around her, with the final result being a totally different woman from the one who moved to India five years prior. In her family there is a strong wander lust with her great aunt having been a missionary in India for many years, and both her parents in their youth having spent time travelling there. She also draws a lot on the writings of Isak Dinesen who wrote 'Out of Africa' about a Danish woman living in Kenya during the early 1920s-1930s.

Of course such a 'journey' or OE as we say in this part of the world, short for Overseas Experience, could take place anywhere in the world that is not home. But to do it in India just makes it that much more intriguing, drastic and fascinating.

Being young and single, love and relationships feature fairly heavily in one's thoughts. From the beginning Miranda is struggling with her marital situation or lack of. Being young, female, single, working, living alone is a big fat no-no in India. So in the first chapter we learn of her problems in finding somewhere to live - no one will rent an apartment to her! To get a roof over her head she calls herself a married woman, her 'husband' making infrequent and increasingly difficult visits to her from New York. Of course that part does not end well, but she does have somewhere to live!

Her own search for love carries on behind the scenes with occasional and brief references, but the main subject matter is the concept of love and marriage in modern-day India. By far the majority of marriages continue to be arranged, although now, unlike a couple of generations ago, many such marriages have input from the young people themselves. Love marriages are still frowned upon, even by educated upwardly mobile middle class families. In poorer/less educated families, arranged marriages where the couple barely talk, if at all, before the marriage are still normal. Then there is the whole dowry question, the enormous expense to the bride's family, the idea that daughters have to be married off in birth order, the myriad problems for the new wife as she moves in to live with her in-laws, also still the norm. Let's not forget the issues around inter-caste marriage, young Indians from America returning to India for a wife - should she be modern or traditional or somehow combine the two? And what about the role the astrologer has in all this, with choosing the right pairing, the most auspicious day for the wedding, and so on. And all us Western girls have to agonise over in comparison is the dress!

Miranda develops very close friendships with two 'modern' girls - Geeta and Parvati and her two 'traditional' maids - Rahda and Maneesh, as well as a group of women she meets at a ladies only Muslim gym. Not only are we privy to their love or loveless lives, but Miranda opens our eyes to modern urban Indian life, where the majority of people are trying to retain the customs, traditions, beliefs and many rituals that are so much a part of any religion, all along caste lines against the 'Globalisation' taking place around them. Rahda for example is of high ranking Brahmin caste, and even though quite poor and having to perform maid duties, flat refuses to have anything to do with handling rubbish which is Maneesh's job as she is from the untouchable caste. Through their time being employed by the author, they learn to get along, which even fifty years ago would never have happened. They simply would never have had anything to do with each other.

As well as depicting the lives of the people around her and her interactions with them, in true journalist fashion, Miranda also gives lots of information about modern day India itself and its recent history. There is plenty about the institution or business of marriage, the caste system, Bollywood, women's place in society and much more.

Having lived in the place it is always good and reassuring to read that there are others with similar experiences to yourself. Even though she is totally unlike me in that she is a young, single, and working, lived there for 5 years rather than my 1, many of her experiences of day to day living ring true and are probably universal amongst the female expatriate population of a large Indian city. But I think anyone with a curiosity about women in other cultures, countries, and economic settings would enjoy this book.

READING FOR FEBRUARY : Tolkien's Gown; Miss New India; In the Sea There Are Crocodiles

IN THE SEA THERE ARE CROCODILES by Fabio Geda

Even if you don't read this review please do read the link on the author's name in the side bar.

You are a ten year old child. The last things your mother ever says to you before you go sleep one night are to never use drugs, never use weapons, and never cheat or steal. Then you wake the next morning and she is gone and you are totally alone, dependent only on your wits and the kindness of strangers for survival.

This book is that story. The author is an Italian novelist who works with children who have suffered immense hardship. In his work, he came across sixteen year old Enaiatollah Akbari, originally from a small village south of Kabul, and now recently granted political asylum in Turin, Italy.

The author in a his note at the beginning of the book calls this a work of fiction rather than a factual account as told to him by Enaiatollah. This is mainly due to the fragmented nature of the young man's memories resulting from the various traumas and events he went through, and the length of time covered in the story - some five or six years. He says it is a 'recreation' of Enaiatollah's experiences, with the journey 'painstakingly reconstructed'.

The story opens with ten year old Enaiatollah fleeing Taliban rule in Afghanistan with his mother for Pakistan, where he finds himself abandoned. It takes him five years to finally make it to a safe place in Italy. In the meantime he makes his way from Pakistan, to Iran, Turkey, Greece and finally Italy. At all stages he is subject to the whims of people traffickers, has to avoid border control, finds himself shipped back to Pakistan only to have to pay to get across back to Iran. He knows he has to keep going west, and he is always motivated by the occasional story he hears of boys from his home area, or of boys who have already been where he currently is who have made it to Italy. He endures the most dangerous and frightening border crossings that others in his group do not survive.

Once again, we can only marvel at how much endurance and hardship the human spirit can take, and in one so young. We marvel at the determination and tenacity to find peace and a safe place. At no point does he ever consider giving up, and maybe it is because he is so young, so naive, so filled with youthful optimism and energy, not yet damaged by lies, manipulation, dishonesty and fatigue that he simply keeps going, putting one step in front of the other. It also makes you think he must have had a guardian angel watching over him as he would have been just one of thousands of abandoned children trying to survive. And yet strangers are unbelievably kind to him and he does have some very good luck.

This is a very inspiring story, very humbling, and makes you wonder if you too would offer assistance to a dirty, bedraggled foreign child whose path you crossed.

MISS NEW INDIA by Bharati Mukherjee

All those off shore call centres - don't we just love to hate them and for all sorts of reasons. But probably what is the most annoying thing is they claim to be speaking to you from your home town and you just know that aint so. And do we ever think about the person behind the voice so desperately trying to sound Kiwi, American, English, Australian? Not really, because we just know that the voice is just another Indian voice out of probably a million voices in that vast land mass working in a call centre. Google 'call centres India': reading what is there will provide a most informative backdrop to this story.

But this story is not about call centres and not really about the people who work in them. It is about a young girl who wants to work in one, who thinks that once she has that job with a steady income, she has made it, she has escaped. Escaped from her preordained provincial rural small town life, escaped from the marriage that her parents are desperately trying to arrange for her, escaped from the tyranny of a future mother-in-law, domestic drudgery, and the chance to use her intelligence and sparkling personality.

And this is the core of the story and of so much of what modern day Indian society is like, especially for young women with some education and expectations. How do you marry the past with the future? Often one gets these sorts of conflicts when people from one culture or ethnic group move into another and the younger generation rebels against the values and expectations of their parents. But in India, this is happening within the country itself, as young people are better educated than their parents, see the Western consumer culture infiltrating all aspects of their lives, and want a piece of it.

So who is Miss New India? She perfectly captures this conflict. She is Anjali Bose, second and unmarried daughter of a traditional lower middle class couple who live in a small town in India's poorest province Bihar. Her father has always been a lowly clerk in the enormous and cumbersome bureaucracy of one India's many bureaucracies. His over riding mission is to have Anjali married off, and unlike his older daughter who was married and left her husband and whose name is now never mentioned, he hopes his daughter will be happy, that the marriage will be fruitful and that when he dies there is a son-in-law to preside over his funeral in good Hindu tradition. In her head however, Anjali is Angie. Beautiful, irresistible to men, perfectly poised to take on the world thanks to her excellent education from an American man who has lived and taught in the town for many years. He sees the potential in his young student and encourages her to take control of her life. Which she does.

After a 'journey', she finds herself in Bangalore, or Bang-a-lot as it is called by the young who have migrated from all over the country to escape the lives their parents have carved out for them. In Bangalore they have jobs, money, Western clothes, cell phones, a phone number, plenty of eating and drinking places to go to, some even a car, and no one to curb or manage their behaviour. No wonder the place is called Bang-a-lot.

So Angie finds herself literally thrown in the deep end of this very cosmopolitan, over populated, fast moving and to her eyes very sophisticated call centre city. She finds life is not quite as peachy as she has been led to believe it would be. How surprising. Constantly she is having to marry what she sees going around her with whether she should be doing it or not, what her parents would think, what her teacher would think. In fact I think she even stops thinking at times and just does! The New India is really quite a different place from the Old India.

So her life experience might be completely different from mine, but I found Anjali/Angie intensely irritating and stupid. Her whole life as she wants it to be has been learnt through Bollywood movies, although how she knows what to do on her first kiss when those movies never actually show one I don't know! As one would expect she is incredibly naive, having come from some little town in the middle of nowhere, and I really expected with her innocence of the world, and her misplaced trust in those around her, that more bad stuff would have happened. Parts of it are so fantastic it is ridiculous, and just like a Bollywood movie there is something momentous going on all the time.

But nevertheless, despite the contrived story line, there is actually a very good message in this book. The author is Indian herself. Fortunately for her, her parents saw the value of a good education and she now lives in America, as a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. I would say she is very well placed to be able to write such a story, having a foot in both worlds. Having lived in Bangalore myself, I was instantly drawn to reading this book. I can see exactly where the author is coming from and felt how she wrote about the city was very real. But I just wish she had chosen a character more believable and smarter than she thinks she actually is!

TOLKIEN'S GOWN by Rick Gekoski

This man is something else. He has been able to combine his mad passionate love of books and everything linked to them with the buying and selling of them for what could be regarded as ridiculous amounts of money. He is a dealer in books and associated paraphernalia such as manuscripts, chapters, and items such as JRR Tolkien's old college gown. Way back in 1982 he found it 'more fun to buy and sell books than to keep them. That way you kept acquiring interesting things, could suck the pleasure out of them, sell them, and move onto something new'. And that is what he has spent the last 30 years doing and, if this book is anything to go by, having an absolute blast in the process.

This little gem of a book takes a number of his best encounters with books and their writers and gives us a potted history of how the book came to be written and how he came to acquire a particularly valuable copy of the book - usually a first edition, or a copy annotated by the author with the special message to the recipient such as 'For Virginia Woolf from the author T.S Eliot' or 'For Rick Gekoski, the book which women like, from Graham Green'. Modern literature gold!

The author writes just like a child let loose in a sweet shop. His enthusiasm, his mad crazy energy, his marvellous sense of humour shines through in bucket loads and most importantly he doesn't seem to take himself at all seriously. On the book's endpapers there is a gorgeous photo of him in a tuxedo having a laugh with Dame Edna Everage and she features in one of the essays in the book. He adores what he does, and he loves telling people about it. These essays are based on a BBC radio series called Rare Books, Rare People that he broadcast on Radio 4. I would love to have heard him tell his stories, it would have been excellent entertainment.

There is nothing conventional about any of the authors selected by Mr Gekoski. They were/are all outstanding and memorable individuals whose books have created a stir/fuss/outcry/stampede/made a mark on the twentieth century landscape. And you will learn the most interesting stuff such as where the inspiration for Peter Rabbit came from, that JRR Tolkien designed the cover for 'The Hobbit' himself, that Jack Kerouac wrote 'On the Road' in six weeks on a 120 foot roll of teletype paper, that Graham Greene was also a mad passionate collector of rare books.

This is such an easy, entertaining and relatively quick read that will leave your head reeling with all sorts of interesting bits and pieces and lamenting the fact that becoming

a rare book collector could well have been the perfect career choice.