THE CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN by Sayaka Murata

Keiko Furukura is 36 years old. She has worked in the same convenience store since she was 18 - half her life. She is beginning to feel the pressure from her family that what she is doing is not quite normal, that here she is with no qualifications, working a blue collar job, no man, marriage or babies in sight. What to do? However nothing about Keiko is normal, so it's hardly surprising that although vaguely aware of her family's concerns, she is not terribly concerned or stressed about. Her life revolves around the convenience store: her personality and skills perfectly matched to the heavily prescribed manual and procedures that keep the shop ticking along. Highly valued, very much liked, Keiko is perfectly happy in her life and in her work. None of what bothers her family bothers her.

Nevertheless, with the arrival and subsequent sacking of a quite awful young man, Shiraha, Keiko weirdly sees a way to make herself normal. And so begins a very peculiar relationship which to the reader is a little alarming and not at all satisfactory. Shiraha is a lazy, misogynistic useless bully, gradually eroding away Keiko's uniqueness and self-possession. Until one day she is out shopping and has an epiphany.

Keiko is most intriguing - is she slightly aspergers? Possibly sociopathic? Does she have some sort of intellectual disability? Her need to fit in with the store culture, her strict adherence to the manual and shop routines, to be the best employee she is expected to be, in fact surpassing the expectation would make many of us uncomfortable and want to fight the system. But for Keiko she thrives in this environment - she is happy, content, recognised, acknowledged and rewarded in her job. Is this not what we all want in our working lives - a job we love, in an environment we love, and with people we relate to and like being with. Who are we to say that Keiko, in the eyes of her family and society is not normal?

This small and captivating book, translated from Japanese, is only 160 pages long, but every page is intriguing. The convenience store itself is a major character - the type of shop we do not really have in the West, much more than a corner store or 7-Eleven. For NZers more like a miniature The Warehouse where you can also buy your groceries, fast food and convenience foods. It's a delicious little book, funny, curious, and rewarding to read. 

TALKING TO STRANGERS by Malcolm Gladwell

When we meet people for the first time - a stranger - we are programmed to want a positive interaction with that person. We greet them courteously, as we have been taught; we look for body language cues and cues in what they say or how they say things that we are familiar with, that we can relate to. We want to be liked by this new person, and have a good exchange of whatever it may be - medical advice, shop assistants, the police, our children's friends, potential work colleagues, love interest. When assessing those we aren't quite sure about, we still look for common threads and characteristics, and when some time later we find that we have been had, that that person is not whom we had let ourselves believe they were... well, then we have that massive sense of betrayal, anger, feeling like we have been a fool of. It happens to all of us and for some the consequences of this, despite maybe a nagging doubt or a little intuition antennae flapping way, can be terrible, heart breaking and long lasting.

In this latest from Malcolm Gladwell, he has taken as his starting point an exchange that occurred between a young black woman from Illinois driving in Texas with out of state plates on her car. She had just left a successful job interview at the nearby university and was on her way back to Illinois to pack up her life and start again. She is pulled over by a white traffic officer and immediately the exchange of words gets off to a bad start. The officer's prescribed list of visual cues for trouble is working overtime as he dealtswith the young woman in the car. It did not end well. Two strangers for a whom a routine traffic stop went absolutely off the rails. But why?

In his usual brilliant narrative way, weaving anecdotes, court judgements, research papers, investigations, high profile news stories, the author makes his case as to why again and again in life we fail to read people properly. Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme; how Castro and his spies fooled their American counterparts; the sad story of Amanda Knox found guilty of murder in Italy simply because she didn't behave like a grieving friend should; the issue of sexual consent being given when one or both parties are clearly very intoxicated; the sports coaches and teachers who are also sexual predators and how they get away with it for years. All this and more the author covers in this fascinating insight into how we behave. In a world where we really do need to be kinder to each other, and yet also more aware and wary of those around us, this book is marvellous and easy reading. I love this author's books, I  have read them all, and own most of them, this is another really good one.  

QUEENIE by Candice Carty-Williams

A true delight of a novel - sparkling writing, original and very diverse characters each with their own wonderfully real voice. Yet beneath the funny and tortured surface plot, much deeper issues, worries and problems claw their way out to the surface. This story could be read by anyone and labelled as a Bridget Jones for black women. But by the sheer virtue of being about black women it immediately opens up numerous challenges that Bridget, in her white middle class world, never even had to look at, let alone deal with. There is a much darker side to being a young, single, smart career woman.

So young Queenie has the double whammy really - not only is she 25, highly career minded, looking for love and failing dismally, with the best bunch of girl friends one could ever hope to have. This gorgeous young woman is also dealing with being a black woman and all the challenges that can bring.  How dark she is, how white on the inside she is, how her hair is, how her figure is, how she dresses, how 'involved' her proud Jamaican grandmother and aunt are in her life, and most damaging and appalling really the ghastliness she has to deal with from men - none of whom are black like her.

The novel opens with Queenie undergoing a gynaecological  exam, the outcome of which plus the  recent dumping by her long time boyfriend tips her into a cycle of self-destruction, the root of which would appear to be her troubled mother abandoning her at the age of 11 to the care of her grandmother and aunt. Throughout the story we anxiously follow the self-destruction, her on-line dating, her sabotaging of her job as a writer for a newspaper, her wonderful friends always on the fringes giving her advice and support with delicious wit. Over a number of months Queenie does find her way out of the mire - after all in true Bridget Jones' fashion there is nothing like the optimism and energy of youth to keep one going, and we have to have a happy ending.

The deeper themes however hover over the exuberance and crazy path Queenie finds herself on. #blacklivesmatter makes an appearance, the awful men she encounters, how crucial it is to know and like one's self before finding love with others, and how white the world is that black people have to live and function in. It is humbling to read that the daily struggles of educated and smart young black people can be burdens and experiences that their white co-workers and friends will never have to cope with or overcome. 

THE SILVER ROAD by Stina Jackson

From the title and the cover the reader immediately knows that the landscape is going to feature heavily in this novel in the Scandi-noir genre of story telling. Unlike most Scandi-noir novels, this is not narrated from the police point-of-view, but it has all the bleakness, greyness, long periods of low light with  murder, misogyny, violence and moral corruptness that we have come to associate with novels, films and TV series coming out of the countries of Scandinavia. The setting for this novel is Sweden, in a rural area north of Stockholm. Towns are few and far apart, forest is everywhere, houses/hamlets are scattered, often hidden down narrow windy roads, surrounded by trees, silence, and the long silver road cutting a windy, lonely and endless track through the landscape. There are many secrets, everyone seems to have a dark side to their nature.

Lelle is a father, for the past three years haunted by the sudden disappearance of his only child, 17 year old Lina who went missing at a bus stop. Full of self blame, he has spent these years driving up and down the roads of the area looking for his daughter. Unable to do much over the winter, he spends all summer, day and night, driving, searching, asking questions, stalking Lina's boyfriend of the time. Nothing. He is beyond caring about himself - his diet, his personal hygiene, his wife - he is a mess. The third anniversary of Lina's disappearance is looming, and he is almost at the end of of his tether.

Meanwhile there are two new arrivals in the area. 17 year old Meja and her mother Silje arrive from Stockholm to begin a new life with Torbjorn, a man Silje met on-line. Silje herself is a mess and has been for many years. There is no doubt she loves her daughter but she has very few parenting skills and is almost incapable of looking after herself. Meja's life has been one of upheaval; she is well used to her mother's wild fancies and destructive life style. But being stuck out in the middle of nowhere with her crazy mother and this strange man is almost a step too far for her. Left to her own devices much of the time, she soon gets to know a family in the area who take her in, and treat her as one of their own. Then another local teenage girl goes missing.

There is slow build up to the menace and the danger that the reader knows is going to happen at some stage. Some on-line reviews have not liked this lack of action for much of the book, but I loved it - the ominous dark and dangerous landscape, the numerous men including Lelle himself any of whom could be responsible for these disappearing girls. Meja's curiosity and need for normalcy as well as friends in her life, the compassion of the local detective, the menacing presence of Lina's ex boyfriend. And always that sinister setting - very unsettling and ominous. I loved it. 

YOU WILL BE SAFE HERE by Damian Barr

The author is a British columnist, playwright and writer. He has a NZ connection, last year receiving a University of Otago Scottish Writer's fellowship based at the Pah Homestead in Auckland.  I wonder if this is where he put the finishing touches to this outstanding novel. He says on his website he is a story teller, and oh my goodness, he certainly knows how to tell a story, weaving fact into fiction, creating characters and a story that will stay with you long after reading.

The setting for this novel is another sad chapter in British colonial history - the Boer War of 1899-1902. I wonder how many times people are ashamed of the history they have come from, because this is certainly a shameful time, with the forced incarceration of thousands of Boer women and children into what were the first concentration camps, and which were the blueprints for the Nazis in the 1930s. The novel opens with Sarah van der Watt and her 6 year old son Fred being taken from their farm which is burnt to the ground in front of their eyes, to a camp where they are told they will be safe, well looked after and cared for during the course of the war. Like that is going to happen. The reality of course is quite different, awful really. Sarah manages to keep a diary, forbidden by the camp officials, over the months she is there. In reality, there was a woman who did manage to keep a diary during her internment and this part of the novel is based on those writings.

Part II of the novel has moved to the present day - 2010. A teenage boy, Willem, is being sent off to a training camp, to be made into a man. He is a quiet boy, loves his books and his dog. But his mother and her new man are finding him increasingly difficult to get on with, so see this as the only way to fix him. His grandmother is dismayed at what is going on, but has little say in the matter. The camp is an appalling place, run by a pair of sadists. It takes a while for the connections to be made between the present and the past, but it just goes to show one can never run away from the happenings of years previous. Again, much of this part of the novel is based on fact. These training camps did exist, the character of Willem and another boy are based as well as  the camp leaders on real people. You can google all this - names etc are given in the acknowledgements section at the back.

This is an outstanding book, powerful in its story telling, compelling and believable characters, dealing with shocking situations. The characters may all be based on real people, long since dead, but the author has made them so life like and real - such a skill. I loved this book, and despite its subject matter, it is definitely a favourite recent read.

MOONLIGHT SONATA by Eileen Merriman

Successful author of teenage/YA fiction has branched out and written her first novel for adults. I have read two of her YA novels and really liked them in their story line and character development, as well as being very relevant and current in dealing with issues so important to our teenagers. In this novel, designed for adults, she tackles incest - consensual rather than abusive which is a Pandora's box all by itself. I did a bit of googling on the subject and it would appear to be more common, though not at all accepted, than one would think. By the way I am not giving any plot spoilers in revealing that the core of this story is sexual love between family members and the taboo that it is. The last lines of the first chapter are a dead giveaway, as is the setting of a family reunion with a plethora of teenage cousins staying together at the beach over the summer holidays.

Widow Hazel has opened her home on a Northland beach - I visualise somewhere like Coopers Beach or Cable Bay - for New Year holidays to her adult children - Sully, Anthony, twins Molly and Joe, and their families, come together from around NZ, Australia and Middle East. Like all families there is bad history, the most momentous thing that has happened to this one being Hazel leaving her husband and the three sons, moving to Christchurch with Molly when she was only six for a six year period, during which Molly had no contact at all with her father and brothers, the separation from her twin Joe being especially traumatic.

The story is told in alternate chapters by Molly in both the present and in her past; 15 year old Lola who is Anthony's daughter, only very recently diagnosed with type 1 diabetes; and Noah who is Molly's 18 year old  son. The story only covers a few days over the New Year period, but a lot can happen in even just one day. The author has captured that unique NZ phenomenon - the family summer beach holiday where everyone is in close quarters, alcohol is involved, bit of cabin fever, childhood sibling issues resurface, set against the stunning background of the beach, the surf, the sand, running out of supplies, sunburn.

I am not so sure about her characters. Although quite distinct they are fairly one dimensional, with little development. They are all self absorbed which you can appreciate for the teenage characters, but not so much for the adult characters. For example Molly and her mother Hazel I did not like at  all,  both far too stuck in the patterns and behaviours of the past, unable and it would seem unwilling to make peace with each other. Molly is a smart woman - professor at a Melbourne university -  yet she has very little self awareness of how she behaves with her husband, her son and her siblings. So much rage there for a grown woman to be carrying around with her. Brother Sully I found annoying too - his wallowing in self pity, his awful daughter and unpleasant son; then there is Joe who is a bit like Peter Pan - never grown up and blithely unable to take on the responsibilities of being an adult. I did find the ending unsatisfactory.  Aside from being too neat and tidy, I am not sure it is sending out the right message as a way to deal with problems.

It's biggest problem  for me however is that it is neither an adult novel nor a teenage novel. It is not complex and nuanced enough for the former, but with teenagers as lead characters it certainly falls into the teen genre. And yet due to its subject matter with so much of the perspective being from the adult Molly is probably not what I would imagine teenagers would be engaging with.

ALLEGRA IN THREE PARTS by Suzanne Daniel

Allegra is 11 years old, living in suburban Sydney in the 1970s with her dad Rick and grandmother Mathilde at number 23, and grandmother Joy at number 25. Narrated by Allegra, she has little understanding of why this situation is so, only knowing that she constantly feels herself torn into two between her loving but vastly different grandmothers, and the emotionally distant figure of her father. She is a smart wee girl, extraordinarily sensitive to those around her, in the process navigating the classroom ghastliness of 11 year old girls and keeping her grandmothers happy.  Not easy when they can't stand each other.  Her growing friendship of fellow outsider young Aborigine girl Patricia further sets her apart from the rest of her class, but not from her teacher Sister Josepha. 1970s Australia is not an easy place for women, and the growing awareness Allegra is finding of the world around her puts her and those she loves on a collision course. Could leave you with a tear in your eye. This novel is marketed as teen/YA fiction/coming of age fiction. But is equally enjoyable and meaningful for everyone else. I loved this - all about what it means to belong to a family and to be loved.