A STRANGER IN THE STREET by Deborah Burrows

A WWII novel not set in Europe for a change, but in Perth, Australia. Yes, there was a very real Japanese threat to Australia during the war, cities and communities on the coast at high alert at this time. Perth, being the main population area on the west coast was the base for all defence activity on that side. By January 1943, US troops were camped in Perth, as well as a number of returned Australian soldiers, injured and/or redeployed back to the home land.

Meg Easton lives in Perth with her mother and sister. She works in an admin capacity at the local police station. She is terribly unhappy as the love of her life has recently been killed in action in Africa, she simply going through the motions of daily living. Quite by chance, she meets in her street, her finance's brother Tom. Tom is recently back from active service, having been seriously injured and disfigured in fighting the Japanese. He has quite a senior position, but like many is having trouble adjusting to life back in Perth, as well as dealing with the ongoing pain and trauma of his injuries.

Is it coincidence or not that the day Meg first meets Tom, not far away is also the day that her neighbour is found murdered. Meg finds herself drawn into this murder mystery, involving both Australian and American soldiers and various others who may or may not be red herrings. It is actually a good story, nicely plotted, plenty of tension and suspense, but never really tipping over into  the suspense wielded by the likes of Lynda La Plante or John Grisham for example. A pleasant, easy read with a few surprises thrown in. What the author is good at however is reimagining for the reader what life in 1940s Australia was like. Her descriptions of residential streets, houses and gardens are vivid, as are how people dressed, including the soldiers, transport, what shops were like. I loved reading this side of the story, it really brought the city and the people who lived there to life. 

SMALL GREAT THINGS by Jodi Picoult

She just keeps getting better and better, does Jodi Picoult, her novels always relevant and timely. Her title is based on a quote by Martin Luther King Jr - 'If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way'. So not surprising that she is taking on the issue of race. But her novel transcends just the concept of race as being how you are 'labelled'. It goes much deeper, and looks more at the concept of personal identity, way beyond the idea of skin colour being how we are defined and how we define ourselves. It is simply a superb novel, with extremely complex ideas, troublesome to many, that have been woven in into a first class story of present day  race relations in the US.

Ruth is a nurse, extremely competent, professional, highly respected, working in a maternity unit of a hospital. She looks after women in labour, during and after the birth, as well as the new born baby. She is also black, proud of how she has made it in the white man's world, intelligent, well educated, at the peak of her career. She is widowed, her husband having died serving his country in Afghanistan, and she is the mother of 16 year old Edison, a top student, also on the path to success. 

One day she is working, helping a young couple who have just had their first child. Turk and Brittany Bauer are white supremacists, and take exception to Ruth being the nurse attending to Brittany and the baby. So they insist that she not be allowed to have anything to do with the baby or them. Naturally Ruth is extremely shocked, upset and angry. But it would seem there is nothing she can do about this requirement. In an unfortunate series of events - short staffing basically - the baby dies, and Ruth is blamed for his death. 

Suddenly she finds herself arrested, charged with murder, her life completely turned on itself. She is a black woman charged with murdering a white baby. Everything she had ever known about herself, the world she lived in, her life programme, her self belief, her future for her son is going to be ripped away from her. What becomes painfully obvious for Ruth as the novel progresses is that she is and always will be a black woman living in a white person's world. Her life, the life she has made for herself is really just an illusion, her success is 100% defined by how well she has coped with and adapted to the rules, the mores, the culture, the undercurrents, the everything that is the world of the white person. She might think she has successfully entrenched her place in her world, but in fact she hasn't and never will. 

Her lawyer is a public defender, a white woman, Kennedy, who also finds herself on a very long and unexpected learning curve; on the flip side, the public prosecutor is a black woman who is also confronted with issues she didn't think she would need to think about.  At the centre of all this of course is  newborn baby, dead from natural causes or otherwise. And the bereaved parents. 

Jodi Picoult is a genius in how she brings all this together, and holds the interest compulsively for 450 plus pages. This will stay with you for ages after, every time there is some race based controversy in our society, or more particularly in the US, you will be reminded of this book, of the message in it. It is good reading - the best reading is that which makes us think, which makes us question, puts us in another person's shoes, and that is what this does. 

A DYING BREED by Peter Hanington

Thriller alert, thriller alert! Another excellent recently published thriller, this time focusing on the exciting, adrenaline fuelled world of being a foreign correspondent in dangerous spots. A sobering reality check too - the world of being such a foreign correspondent is not glamorous, has extended periods of boredom and waiting around, fellow journalists are doing it just as hard. They are all part of 'a dying breed', at the mercy of the owners of the various news channels they work for.

The hard core veteran of news gathering in this novel is William Carver, who knows his work inside out, keeps his nose close to the ground, nurtures and looks after his local contacts, increasingly disillusioned with his bosses, the ethics of news reporting, and what the listener/viewer does not get to hear/see. His office is Kabul and the tragedy that is Afghanistan.  His nemesis is his employer, the BBC, who don't like his unconventional methods, their inability to manage him as they would like, and often their non-reporting of what he thinks is worth reporting. He reports to Rob Mariscal, also a hard man who has been on the broadcast scene for many a year, cynical, embittered, but still loyal to a story.

Carver is in Kabul, on the eve of Presidential elections - an unpredictable and nerve wracking time for everyone. A bomb goes off in a tailor's shop killing a number of people including a local official. When Carver finds out the story is not being reported as he thinks it should, his excellent nose smells that something is not quite right with the bombing, and with his translator Karim, sets about trying to get to the bottom of the situation. To try and rein him in, Mariscal sends a young, wet behind the ears producer, Patrick Reid, to Kabul to 'assist' Carver. It isn't long before Carver, Reid and Karim discover that there is considerably more going on than meets the eye, putting themselves in more and more danger as they work to expose the real reason for the bombing in the tailor shop.

This is a great thriller, given added spice and upping the danger level with edge of the seat narrative and vivid descriptions of a semi-destroyed Kabul, its buildings, markets, seediness, shady dealings and disrepair. The country itself is famous for its rugged and unforgiving geography, and how alienating it is to Westerners - journalists, mercenaries, military personnel and anyone else who finds themselves at the mercy of the land. Or the locals. It is also an alarming reminder to us, yet again, how the truth, the news is manipulated to suit an end, and who really does wield control of the news. It is certainly not the journalist. Quite frequently through the book, the chemical weapons story that resulted in US/British invasion of Iraq is referred to, which as we all know now was a complete lie. There is also a most interesting section on the opium trade, how that too has been taken and exploited, manipulated and controlled by invaders for their own ends, to the complete detriment of the Afghans themselves.

So, within the thriller narrative there is also a dark and despairing message. It is unlikely Afghanistan, bordered by Iran, Pakistan, China and ex Soviet countries, will ever be what it once was - a proud nation of beauty, productivity, harmony and strength. But it is certainly the perfect place to plot a story with the themes of good and evil abounding.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF EVERYONE WHO EVER LIVED by Adam Rutherford

SO much fascinating and informative material in this marvellous book. Part history lesson, part biology lesson, part philosophy and social commentary, so much going on here it is all a bit of whirlwind. I wish I had a photographic memory, then I could randomly quote whenever I heard people saying all sorts of rubbish like there is a gene for cocaine addiction, there is a 'transexual gene' that makes men feel like women, or there is a gene for height, or best of all, there is a gene that tells you what time of day you will die.

All wrong, wrong, wrong.

The ten best things out of dozens that I learnt from this book, and that I want to retain in my memory bank, are as follows:
1. Race is not genetic.
2. You are born either male or female
3. The peoples of Africa are more genetically diverse from each other than all the peoples outside Africa are from each other.
4. We all have a small percentage of Neanderthal in us.
5. The 'warrior' gene does exist, and rightly or wrongly is being used as a form of defence in criminal trials.
6. People of European descent generally are not lactose intolerant
7. All people of European descent have Charlemagne (8th century AD) as their common ancestor
8. Red heads will not die out due to climate change
9. Scottish Celts are more different to Welsh Celts than either are to the English; people from Cornwell are more closely aligned to the Breton Celts in France than they are to the English
10. Do not have a child with your first cousin

And so it goes on, and on and on. Truly fascinating stuff.

Extremely difficult to make science reader friendly, and despite my best endeavours,  I just skimmed over all the business about the human genome and almost daily advances in knowledge, the billions of genes we have, the proteins, enzymes, what the alleles do, the ins and outs of Charles Darwin's and Francis Galton's theories of evolution.

What is clear over the centuries, is how we as human beings, have attempted to classify ourselves and others around us simply based on looks, tendencies, religious practices, perceived cultural norms and ways of doing things. This book goes some way to dispelling many of these variables. There will always be people in our midst convinced of their own superiority or knowledge base as to where and how the rest of us should be classified. It is up to us therefore to educate them, and a book like this is a fine start. 

NUTSHELL by Ian McEwan

Odd, very odd, extraordinarily clever, somewhat disconcerting, there is a lot to consider, digest and ponder in this latest novel, the fourteenth by Ian McEwan. Also brilliant, weird, and alarming. For a start, the whole story, all 200 pages of it, is narrated by an unborn child, 8 months gestation, from the increasingly confined space of it's mother's womb. We don't know the sex of the baby, but it is quite clearly Hamlet, and the story is yet another retelling of Shakespeare's tragedy. The baby's mother is Trudy (Gertrude), who is married to John, but is now living with her lover, Claude (Claudius) who is John's brother. John is a poet, semi-successful, Claude is a property developer who has his eye on the London house Trudy lives in. John is a huge inconvenience to Claude, and in true Shakespearian style, needs to be disposed of. The two of them hatch a plan to murder John, much to the baby's distress and anger. The baby in turn, hatches it's own plan of revenge against its mother and lover for the murder of its father.

A simple tale you may well think, and that in a nutshell (ha, ha) is what happens in the story. It's brilliance comes, not just from the unique and unexpected style of narration, but also on the commentary the baby makes about relationships, the bond between mother and child, father and child, the unwanted presence of the stepfather - all classic stuff of tragedy since the days of Ancient Greece. We also get a most beguiling and revealing look at life in the womb - the comforting and familiar noises of Trudy's digestive system, the increasingly confined space the baby is living in and the frustration of this, baby's examination of the cord and how it could possibly strangle itself, the ghastliness of Trudy and Claude's lovemaking, the pleasure of the alcohol rush when Trudy partakes of more than she should. It is wonderfully fascinating.

What is not so fascinating, for me at least although many other reviewers seem not to think so, was the endless and out of control commentary on everything in the world. Everything the baby knows comes from the exchanges Trudy has with people in her everyday life, and from what it hears on the radio via the earbuds Trudy wears. Honestly, 99% of it is waffle, has very little if any bearing on the story, and for me is just padding. I realise we have to suspend belief just a bit - an unborn child narrating a murder - and this part of it was fantastic, but the rest of it..... I just did not get the endless ramble. Still, this is a novel definitely worth reading for its sheer brilliance and innovation. 

THE CHINESE PROVERB by Tina Clough

'If you save somebody's life, you are responsible for them forever'. This is quite a burden to take on, and is the Chinese proverb at the centre of this gripping, very readable, action thriller.  Hunter Grant, retired army veteran at the age of 38, looking for the peaceful life after a bruising time in Afghanistan, finds himself back in the conflict zone, taking on the responsibility of saving then looking after the life of another.

A single man, he lives in Auckland, and also has a cabin deep in the bush north of the city. While staying at his place in the bush for a few days, he and his dog Scruff stumble upon a young woman, almost dead, exhausted, hypothermic, malnourished, terrified, and clearly abused. This is Dao, the one whose life Hunter saves, and whom he becomes totally responsible for. Skilfully the writer reveals the bare details of Dao's story while Hunter does his best to give her immediate care, warmth and food. She has been held captive by a brutal man called Bram on a remote coastal farm - chained, beaten, abused, threatened, alone, her mother having died, in a constant struggle for survival. The real person in charge however, is a sinister and frightening character called the Boss, who turns up from time to time at the farm wearing a Darth Vader mask, thus unrecognisable, calling the shots.

Even though she has escaped, Dao is still in danger, Hunter in turn now also finding himself the target of the bad guys. The story takes place over 15 days, with Dao and Hunter trying to stay alive, trying to find out Dao's history, where she came from, her real name, and ultimately, uncovering exactly what has been going on at the farm. Everything around Dao is scary and unfamiliar, her having been hidden away for so many years. Even though the reader is familiar with city life, shopping malls, driving, eating out, for Dao this is all very unfamiliar. We see this through Dao’s eyes, giving a slightly sinister undertone to the urban/suburban scenes, threatening and a little unsettling, so contributing perfectly to the evil brewing.

The main focus of the story is on the relationship between Hunter and Dao. It could easily become exploitative, with Hunter having the position of power, especially considering what Dao has come from, what is normal to her.  But no, not once is there any hint of impropriety, taking advantage or exploitation. This Hunter is one heck of a guy, taking his position of guardianship very seriously, at all times aware of the peculiar and compromising position he is in. He has some great women in his life - his two sisters Willow and Plum, and his best friend Charlie, who was in Afghanistan with him. These three women help him in his care of Dao. As Dao's confidence, trust and self-worth blossom, the nature of the relationship between Hunter and Dao changes, but it is never sleazy, uncomfortable or weird. Perhaps because the writing is by a woman?

I doubt if the plot would move so fast in a real-life situation - this is one very damaged young woman, still in considerable danger - but it is a great 15 day ride. Plenty of action, great characterisation and very believable characters. This is a thriller, a whodunnit, at times scary and violent, edge of the seat stuff but constantly tempered by the relationships between Hunter and Dao, Charlie and the two sisters. So much packed into 300 pages. A great story, deserves to be widely read and publicised. “

EATING WITH THE ANGELS by Sarah-Kate Lynch

I don't care what others say about Sarah-Kate Lynch's books, I love them. They are formulaic yes, exotic and romantic settings lushly and sensuously described, there is a young woman immersed in some sort of crisis, usually involving a broken heart, there are older and wiser people who guide and help our young heroine to a better, happier and simpler existence. Plus there is always lurrrve. What a recipe, fool proof, delicious and satisfying to read. She must get such a kick out of writing these escapist fluff-tales, they are just so intensely enjoyable to read.

Connie Farrell lives in New York. She is a restaurant critic, married to Tom who is a chef. She is on her way to Venice for a second honeymoon, but unfortunately Tom never turns up for the flight, so she wings her way to Venice alone, upset, defeated and worried about the future of her marriage. But this is Venice, you can't possibly be alone here! So after locking eyes with a gondolier, Marco, she finds herself on a whirl wind love-food feast of Venice.

There are hints in the narrative that things aren't quite right with Connie. A sudden collapse sends her back to New York, lying in a hospital bed, suffering from amnesia, with a life she doesn't recognise. What on earth happened to her, where is Marco, where is Tom? And why on earth is her horrible mother sitting on the end of the bed? Worst of all she has lost her sense of smell and taste, rendering her career as a restaurant critic completely redundant. What is a girl to do?

It is clever, surprising, full of twists and surprises. Adorable. Not so for a range of other reviewers who think it too cliched with stereotyped characters, Connie not at all resembling a born and bred New Yorker, the dialogue clunky, but I don't care! It's entertaining, easy to read, full of surprises, flawed characters, new beginnings and lurrrve. Wonderful stuff.