This contribution aims to share my views and those of various more professional reviewers of a number of books I’ve read over recent months. Books referred to are as listed below.
- The Cartographer’s Secret by Tea Cooper [2021];
- Go As A River by Shelley Read [2023];
- The Digger of Kakoda by Daniel Lane [2022];
- Bill Wannan Selects Stories of Old Australia by Bill Wannan [1976];
- The Porcelain Moon by Janie Chang [2023];
- Rose by Suzanne Faulkner [2022];
- The Fossil Hunter by Tea Cooper [2022];
- The Bookbinder of Jericho by Pip Williams [2023];
- The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop [2023];
- Homecoming by Kate Morton [2023];
- The Naked Island by Russell Braddon [1952].
5th April 2023
‘The Cartographer’s Secret’ by Tea Cooper, published in 2021, 362 pages – the second of Cooper’s novels I’ve read, and completed the book over 2 days. Another one of those rural based novels, with a touch of mystery about it, and written as an historical novel, essentially dealing with the unsolved disappearance of the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt. An entertaining, easy to read Australian based novel – as with all local novels of this sort, I enjoy the historical element applied to a fictional story.
The book synopsis.
A map into the past. A long-lost young woman. And a thirty-year family mystery. The Hunter Valley, 1880. Evie Ludgrove loves to chart the landscape around her home—hardly surprising since she grew up in the shadow of her father’s obsession with the great Australian explorer Dr. Ludwig Leichhardt. So when an advertisement appears in The Bulletin magazine offering a thousand-pound reward for proof of where Leichhardt met his fate, Evie is determined to use her father’s papers to unravel the secret. But when Evie sets out to prove her theory, she vanishes without a trace, leaving behind a mystery that haunts her family for thirty years.
Letitia Rawlings arrives at the family estate in her Ford Model T to inform her great-aunt Olivia of a loss in their family. But Letitia is also escaping her own problems—her brother’s sudden death, her mother’s scheming, and her dissatisfaction with the life planned out for her. So when Letitia discovers a beautifully illustrated map that might hold a clue to the fate of her missing aunt, Evie Ludgrove, she sets out to discover the truth. But all is not as it seems, and Letitia begins to realize that solving the mystery of her family’s past could offer as much peril as redemption…………………..Described as a gripping historical mystery, the Cartographer’s Secret follows a young woman’s quest to heal a family rift as she becomes entangled in one of Australia’s greatest historical puzzles – a Daphne du Maurier Award Winner, 2021.
As reviewed by Gini Grossenbacher for the Historical Novel Society –
[a couple of errors below – her brother dies after a boat explosion, and the timeline between the two parts of the story is 30 years].
In 1880, at her house at Yellow Rock, New South Wales, talented Australian sketch artist Evie Ludgrove shares her father’s obsession with the famous explorer Dr. Ludwig Leichardt, who vanished in the Australian wilderness. After creating a map that follows her father’s leads and seeking The Bulletin magazine’s thousand-pound reward, she heads out into the wilderness on a quest to find Leichardt’s last known whereabouts. On her expedition, she vanishes without leaving any clues to her disappearance.
In 1911, following the loss of her brother Thorne in an automobile accident, Letitia Rawlings escapes her wealthy mother’s house in Sydney. She moves to Evie Ludgrove’s former dwelling to stay with her aunt Olivia, who remains haunted by Evie’s disappearance after twenty years. Captivated by Evie’s story and curious about what happened to her, Lettie follows points north from Yellow Rock toward Aberdeen. With the help of the drover Nathaniel and the blacksmith Denman, she embarks on a quest to follow Evie’s map and discover where she vanished. After a series of loops following the crash of her tin lizzie, the group makes startling discoveries that may lead her to Evie’s last known place.
Lettie’s growing attraction for Nathaniel highlights the social rift between the drover society and the landed gentry in Sydney. He becomes involved with Lettie in her search for Evie, helping her navigate her journey’s challenging physical and emotional landscape. Yet, they face an unknown future since they are from different social classes.
Tea Cooper’s meticulous prose and deft phrasing delight the reader. Her storytelling weaves the places on Evie’s map in tandem with the search Lettie makes so that the reader becomes immersed in a distant world. The reader yearns along with Lettie (and Evie, too) for the answer to Leichardt’s disappearance and wants Lettie and Nathaniel to surmount the chasm that separates them. This fascinating novel informs the reader about Australia’s storied past.
8th April 2023
‘Go As A River’ by Shelley Read, published in 2023, 305 pages – tuned out to be a beautiful story!
In summary form – Victoria Nash is just a teenager in the 1940s, but she runs the household on her family’s peach farm in the ranch town of Iola, Colorado—the sole surviving female in a family of troubled men. Wilson Moon is a young drifter with a mysterious past, displaced from his tribal land in the Four Corners region, who wants to believe one place is just like another. When Victoria encounters Wil on a street corner, their unexpected connection ignites as much passion as danger and as many revelations as secrets. Victoria flees into the beautiful but harsh wilderness of the nearby mountains when tragedy strikes. Living in a small hut, she struggles to survive in the unforgiving conditions with no clear notion of what her future will be. What happens afterward is her quest to regain all that she has lost, even as the Gunnison River rises to submerge her homeland and the only life she has ever known. Go as a River is a story of love and loss but also of finding home, family, resilience—and love—where least expected.
From Readings Review [March 2023] – “Nestled in the foothills of the Elk mountains and surrounded by sprawling forests, the Gunnison River rushes by the tiny town of Iola. For 17-year-old Victoria Nash, the day promises to be ordinary. But the mysterious drifter who crosses her path that afternoon will set in motion an unstoppable chain of events. Victoria will be forced to run for the forests, leaving her life – and her most precious possession – behind’
A general synopsis
On a cool autumn day in 1948, Victoria Nash delivers late-season peaches from her family’s farm set amid the wild beauty of Colorado, then heads into the village. As she nears an intersection, a dishevelled stranger stops to ask her the way. How she chooses to answer will unknowingly alter the course of both their young lives.
So begins the mesmerising story of split-second choices and courageous acts that propel Victoria away from the only home she has ever known and towards a reckoning with loss, hope and her own untapped strength.
Gathering all the pieces of her small and extraordinary existence, spinning through the eddies of desire, heartbreak and betrayal, she will arrive at a single rocky decision that will change her life for ever.
From Booklovers’ Review
Go As A River is truly haunting historical fiction.
Shelley Read’s debut novel has one of the most impactful Prologues I have ever read.
“My home is at the bottom of a lake. Our farm lies there, mud bound, its remants indistinguishable from boat wreckage. Sleek trout troll the remains of my bedroom and the parlor where we sat as a family on Sundays. Barns and troughs rot. Tangled barded wire rusts. The once fertile land marinates in idleness.”
This first-hand perspective really hammers home the impact of building dams has not just on the natural landscape, but also people and their history.
Go As A River is a literary novel in the sense that Shelley Read’s descriptions are uncommonly vivid, perceptive and nuanced. She brings alive on the page our capacity to connect with and derive energy from nature. But the Prologue aside, Victoria Nash’s heart wrenchingly stoic first-person narrative and painfully swift coming-of-age is basically told chronologically. There’s no overt structural complexity or linguistic swordplay so often found in the genre. For me this novel’s power stems from the depths to which it plumbs raw and authentic emotions.
In Go As A River Shelley Read explores with an engaging juxtaposition of sensitivity and pragmatism, the scars of bigotry, racism, war and women’s inequality. And more specifically the trauma some individuals had to, and in many contexts continue to, endure in society’s painfully slow journey towards open minds and hearts.
Like so many throughout history, Victoria Nash’s fictional life story was no Disney movie. She carried burdens larger than she ever should have had need to, but did so with inspiring grit, determination and dignity.
… I’ve come to understand how the exceptional lurks beneath the ordinary, like the deep and mysterious world beneath the surface of the sea.”
I highly recommend Shelley Read’s Go As A River to those looking for earthy, simply told yet powerful historical fiction that provokes reflection.
12 April 2023
I finished reading ‘The Digger of Kokoda [The Official Biography of Reg Chard] by Daniel Lane [published in 2022], 333 pages – in this book, 98 year old Reg Chard shares his story of courage and resilience on the Kokoda Trail [or Track] – a wonderful, enlightening read, inspiring, deeply moving, healing, but also sadly in part because of the nature of the story, horrifically traumatic, with vivid descriptions of the sheer extreme inculcated brutality, emotional detachment and unrelenting fanaticism of the troops our soldiers were trying to protect Australia from invasion in the early 1940s.!!.
Brief overview: Reg Chard endured hell as an 18-year-old Australian soldier who fought in 1942 on the infamous Kokoda Trail in World War II.
Ironically, Kokoda rescued Reg decades later when he decided to take his own life. After losing Betty, his wife of 66 years, the grief-stricken great-grandfather lost the will to live. But he found new purpose through educating young people, giving guided tours of Sydney’s Kokoda Track Memorial Walkway. On these tours, Reg relives Kokoda every day. He sees an image on the wall of a soldier – a comrade – who succumbed to disease weeks after the photograph was taken. He feels his heart beating as his patrol chases down Japanese troops who had mutilated women in a jungle clearing. He hears the war cry of a samurai sword-wielding officer charging towards him. And he tells these stories along the walkway, preserving the memory of those who never came home.
As one of the last surviving diggers of Kokoda, Reg Chard has become a custodian of its legacy. This deeply moving, healing and inspiring biography of the 98-year-old veteran tells us of Reg’s war in the jungle and how, 80 years after the battle that saved Australia, Kokoda still lives within him.
Some of the praises for this book.
- ‘Reading the story of Reg Chard and his fellow servicemen only reinforces how grateful we all should be to the soldiers who sacrificed everything in order for us to have the privileged life we often take for granted. These men were full of bravery, courage and conviction yet were regularly battling against the odds in the knowledge they may not see out the day. Every word of this story has meaning, importance and impact and I for one am indebted to those who have served our nation to make it what it is today.’ – Steve Waugh
- ‘The Digger of Kokoda is a gripping read about an all-Australian hero, Reg Chard, who like so many of that WWII generation had greatness in him, only revealed when he was called on to put everything on the line for his country. This biography evocatively portrays the hardships of the Kokoda campaign, the sacrifices made, and the irrepressible spirit of the Australian soldiers and nursing sisters. Bravo the lot of them, and this book.’ – Peter Fitzsimons
- ‘The lessons and life experiences of Reg Chard are ones all Australians today could learn a lot from. The Digger of Kokoda was very honest and gave me a new perspective and understanding of what they went through and why. Warm, moving, heartbreaking and inspiring in equal measure. The greatest lesson I take from Reg is his quote: “Make the most of life, because no matter how bad something may seem, life goes on – just make sure you go with it.”‘ – Emma McKeon
- ‘A lifetime ago, no series of battles were more critical nor horrendous than those of the New Guinea campaign – Kokoda and the likes of Sanananda. Reg Chard was a typical and thus extraordinary digger who fought in those battles and survived, to this day mourning and honouring his many mates who fell. This brilliant account by Daniel Lane, of Reg’s war service, reminds us all of the price of peace so many of our predecessors have paid. A great story.’ – General Sir Peter Cosgrove
- ‘I have an immense respect and admiration for Reg Chard – the Digger of Kokoda. He’s a genuine Australian hero whose story could help teach our nation’s youth the importance of resilience, grit, and mateship. Reg, and others like him, should be honoured in our school system to ensure the Anzac/Kokoda spirit thrives . . . reading this man’s powerful story is a perfect start to guaranteeing that.’ – Danny Green
- ‘Reg Chard’s biography transported me straight back to the jungle in New Guinea and rekindled memories of walking the Trail later in my life. The written word of the Kokoda Trail will last long into history like the track itself. The Digger of Kokoda is essential reading for any Australian.’ – Keith Payne VC
- ‘The Digger of Kokoda offers a deeper understanding of what it means to be an Australian and the inspiration to be a better person.’ – Dr Brendan Nelson
‘In a world where an internet outage is deemed a catastrophe, The Digger of Kokoda is a masterclass in perspective and relativity. If this book doesn’t get you to the Dawn Service on Anzac Day, nothing will.’ – John Schumann - ‘Grittily honest, told with great sensitivity, this is the finest account of Kokoda by a front-line soldier that I’ve read. Reg Chard, only 18 when he fought the Japanese in Papua, tells much more than another “mud and blood” story. Now 98, he shows how the experience touched his life and, in an extraordinary twist, saved him from his own demons after his wife died. The true story of a boy soldier who faced some of the worst battles of the Pacific War.’ – Paul Ham
- ‘In Reg Chard’s compelling account of Kokoda, we gain a unique insight into war’s madness … The Digger of Kokoda is a modern digger’s time capsule full of the human lessons of war and soldering that never change.’ -Anthony ‘Harry’ Moffitt
- ‘Reg’s memoir reminds us of all the extraordinary acts committed by ordinary people and fills a Digger like myself with pride in the honour of donning the same badge they wore.’ – Damien Thomlinson
- ‘Raw, vivid and searingly honest, Reg Chard’s personal account of Kokoda is one of the most moving I’ve ever read. From the nightmare of Eora Creek to the terrible swamps of Sanananda, I felt I was right there, and it’s not a pretty place. One of the last true voices, Reg reaches across the decades to remind us of what our men did, and how much they endured.’ – Michael Veitch
The author, Daniel Lane, has been a sports journalist for over 30 years, including time with Australian Consolidated Press, AAP, Network 10 and the Sydney Morning Herald. He has written 18 books, and scripts for three televised documentaries/shows. He has visited the battlefields of Gallipoli, the Western Front, El Alamein, Singapore and Malaya, and for decades has interviewed veterans of the Boer War and both world wars, including Kokoda. The biography of Reg Chard, The Digger of Kokoda, is his first military memoir.
13th April 2023
This was a little book given to me by a friend back in 2013 – I had kept it in my car glovebox, and was reading a few pages at a time when waiting for an appointment, etc. I finally decided to take it out of the car, and finish it. ‘Bill Wannan Selects Stories of Old Australia ‘ edited by Bill Wannan, published in 1976, with 158 pages. This edition published by Sun Books, Melbourne.
An interesting selection of stories, and poems from the past, some a bit doubtful as far as comprehending the point of the story was [especially the odd poem], but overall a worthwhile historical collection.
‘Australia’s great store of folklore so richly mined and revived by Bill Wannan contains gems that can be readily retold – he called them ‘tales of common acceptance’. Stories which have been passed from generation to generation, traditional stories, folk-tales and bush jests – often changed as they were retold to assure them of a permanent place in Australia’s folk literature.
There are 28 stories and poems, arranged in order of their first appearance in print, and provided with a brief historical background to both story and author..
The collection is a valuable rendition of some of the common themes of Australian folklore, such as the noble savage, the ghostly happening, the lost child, the swearing teamsters and bush giants, gentlemen convicts and bushrangers
23rd April 2023
Born in Taiwan, author Janie Chang has lived in the Philippines, Iran, Thailand, and New Zealand. She now lives on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, Canada with her husband.
Janie Chang’s latest novel [The Porcelain Moon, published in 2023] is an historical novel about a little-known piece of history, that of the 140,000 Chinese workers brought to Europe as non-combatant labor during WWI, and ‘employed’ by either the British forces, or the French – 90,000 of them as part of the British Expeditionary Forces, while the rest were signed up with the French working for private French companies in war related industries and in agriculture. When the Americans entered the war, the French loaned about 10,000 of the labourers to the Americans.
The Chinese were in fact the largest and longest-serving contingent of non-European labor, manpower that kept the machinery of war running. Afterwards they cleared up battlefields, and cleaned the rubble from devastated towns, so that the local population could start to get back to a normal life; they cleared the trenches and bomb craters, ridding them of decomposing corpses of men and animals,, abandoned equipment, clothing and blankets. . This was particularly the case with those employed by the British military who insisted they had to fulfill their contracts before being allowed to return home. Most were peasants and only about 20% were literate, and the British in particular took full advantage of their lowly status. And while as non- combatants they supposedly were to work behind the frontlines, those lines continually shifted, and many died during their time in Europe from aerial attacks, wartime incidents and accidents, and from disease.
How they were treated [apart from the general hostility from the French population to hundreds of foreigners being present during and after the war, remembering that in 1911, a Census revealed only 238 Chinese living in France], in particular by the British, quite often depended on which military commander was in charge of a particular group
Well, the book ‘The Porcelain Moon’ is a tale of forbidden love, identity and belonging, and what we are willing to risk for freedom., a beautifully written story about this little-known piece of history from the 1st World War, presented for the readers as an historical novel of that time. Worth a read, another lesson in history.
General summary
France, 1918. In the final days of the First World War, a young Chinese woman, Pauline Deng, runs away from her uncle’s home in Paris to evade a marriage being arranged for her in Shanghai. To prevent the union, she needs the help of her cousin Theo, who is working as a translator for the Chinese Labour Corps in the French countryside. In the town of Noyelles-sur-Mer, Camille Roussel is planning her escape from an abusive marriage, and to end a love affair that can no longer continue. When Camille offers Pauline a room for her stay, the two women become friends. But it’s not long before Pauline uncovers a perilous secret that Camille has been hiding from her. As their dangerous situation escalates, the two women are forced to make a terrible decision that will bind them together for the rest of their lives.
Set against the little-known history of the 140,000 Chinese workers brought to Europe as non-combatant labor during WWI, The Porcelain Moon is a tale of forbidden love, identity and belonging, and what we are willing to risk for freedom.
From the Asian Review of Books
During the Great War, 140,000 Chinese laborers were recruited to work in England and France in order to free up men in those countries to fight. Janie Chang uses this corner of history as the backdrop of her new historical novel, The Porcelain Moon. While the two characters at the center of the story—a young Chinese woman named Pauline Deng and a French woman named Camille Roussel—are fictional, Chang indicates in her author’s note that many of the landmarks and other details of the Chinese labor camps she writes about are based on real places.
Pauline is orphaned at a young age after her parents die in an automobile accident and is taken in by her uncle Louis. She moves from Shanghai to Paris a decade before the war when her uncle and cousin Theo set up an antique store called La Pagode, a real shop dating back to the late 1920s. The Dengs take their time getting used to their new city.
During their first weeks in Paris, the three of them lived in a small hotel, a pension de famille, while her uncle looked for a building suitable for both store and home. Sometimes Theo and Pauline went with him, trailing behind as he inspected one building after another, accompanied by an estate agent and a translator hired through the Chinese consulate in Paris. More often than not, one or two men from Paris’s small community of Chinese merchants also joined them, curious to meet the new arrivals and eager to offer opinions.
Louis finds the perfect building on the Rue de Lisbonne for both La Pagode and their home. The Dengs establish their new business in Paris and a decade later the story jumps to Noyelles-sur-Mer, a rural town that faces the English channel. It’s there that Chinese workers would be employed three years into the war.
On a fine April afternoon in 1917 the first Chinese laborers arrived on the train from Calais. They formed rows of four on the platform and then marched smartly through town, following a British officer to the new camp. The entire population of Noyelles—women, children, and old men—rushed out to see them. Children ran alongside the impromptu parade.
Louis wants Theo to return to Shanghai to marry the woman betrothed to him years earlier, but in order to delay this inevitability, Theo finds work as a translator in the British Chinese Labour Corps, which ran this outpost in Noyelles. He meets a young married woman named Camille in Noyelles and falls into a dangerous affair with her. At the same time, Pauline is pursued by a creepy Chinese national named Mah while her interests instead lie with a young foreign correspondent named Henri Liu.
Camille has her own ties to China, although nefarious. She grew up surrounded by almost as many Chinese antiquities as found at the Dengs’ La Pagode. Her father Auguste had been in the military in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion.
When Auguste’s troop was dispatched to rescue European civilians and soldiers inside the International Legations, under attack by Chinese Boxers and the Imperial Chinese Army, he had been told they would be fighting barbarians. But everything he saw, the architecture and gardens, the exquisite craftsmanship, the private libraries, told him otherwise. They were plundering a civilized society.
And plunder they did. Auguste went to confession as soon as he could, but the priest assured Auguste he was just doing his duty as a soldier and that what he took from Peking was simply “spoils of war”. Auguste was haunted by this all his life and made his own confession to Camille while he was on his deathbed.
Other parts of the story also take on a Hollywood ambiance, as most of the loose ends seem to be resolved by the end of the book. Even so, Chang’s storytelling is compelling because she combines this cinematic story with an overlooked part of the Great War.
By Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author
rom the critically acclaimed author of The Library of Legends comes a vividly rendered novel set in WWI France about two young women—one Chinese, one French—whose lives intersect with unexpected, potentially dangerous consequences.
“East meets West in World War I France. In The Porcelain Moon, Janie Chang exhibits her signature trademarks—lyrical prose, deftly drawn characters, and skillful excavation of little-known history—to give us a rare jewel in a sea of wartime fiction!”
22nd May 2023
For readers of history – a book about a subject and personality that’s probably not familiar to most people – ‘Rose’ by Suzanne Falkner, published in 2022. Not an easy read with regular quotations in the original French used by our correspondent, the main character in the book. This is the extraordinary voyage of Rose de Freycinet, the stowaway [with the knowledge and approval of her sea-faring captain husband] who sailed around the world with him, for love over the years 1817-1820.
I found this a fascinating description of a world sea voyage of that time, which included visits to much of the Pacific area, South America, and Australasia as well as a stopover in Sydney Cove in 1819, and much earlier, a period on the isolated west coast of the new colony. Beginning with an exploration of the voyages of Nicolas Thomas Baudin (1754 –1803) , a French explorer, cartographer, naturalist and hydrographer, most notable for his explorations in Australia and the southern Pacific, many of which outcomes were in conflict with the explorations of Matthew Flinders. Those voyages provided the impetus for the three year journey by Rose’s husband, Louis de Freycinet.
From the book summary – ‘In 1814, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, nineteen-year-old Rose Pinon married handsome naval officer Louis de Freycinet, fifteen years her senior. Three years later, unable to bear parting from her husband, she dressed in men’s clothing and slipped secretly aboard his ship the day before it sailed on a voyage of scientific discovery to the South Seas. Living for three years as the sole female among 120 men, Rose defied not only bourgeois society’s expectations of a woman at that time, but also a strict prohibition against women sailing on French naval ships. Whether dancing at governors’ balls in distant colonies, or evading pirates and meeting armed Indigenous warriors on remote Australian shores, or surviving shipwreck in the wintry Falkland Islands, Rose used her quick pen to record her daily experiences, In doing so, she became the first woman to circumnavigate the world and leave a record of her journey”.
Those writings – through her diary, and letters to her mother and sister [most of which took six months or more to reach their destination in France, if they arrived at all] – form the basis of the story of this journey. While various histories of Rose have tendered to doctor her writings to make them more acceptable to the reaching public. Falkiner’s novel reveals them as they were written. If you can get through a very concise and detailed piece of writing, through 404 pages – where while now and then, Rose’s French is not always translated into English and which ends with an excellent summary of Rose’s legacy to history, and a section on the translation techniques used – cope with all that, and it’s worth the effort,.
29th June 2023
This book is titled ‘The Fossil Hunter’ by Tea Cooper, an historical novel, published in 2022, 374 pages. Another somewhat unusual story, the usual mix of historical facts and the kind of novel which I generally enjoy, also the 3rd of her books I’ve read in recent months. A story dealing with archaeology and that general vein of subject matter..
A fossil discovered at London’s Natural History Museum leads one woman back in time to nineteenth century Australia and a world of scientific discovery and dark secrets in this compelling historical mystery.
Buried secrets. An ancient fossil. And one woman’s determination to unravel a nineteenth-century mystery.
Australia, 1847. The last thing Mellie Vale remembers before the fever takes her is sprinting through the bush with a monster at her heels—but no one believes her. In a bid to curb Mellie’s overactive imagination, her benefactors send her to visit a family friend, Anthea Winstanley. Anthea is an amateur palaeontologist who is convinced she will one day find proof that great sea dragons swam in the vast inland sea that covered her property millions of years ago. Mellie is instantly swept up in the dream.
Australia, 1919. Penelope Jane “PJ” Martindale arrives home from the battlefields of World War I intent on making peace with her father and commemorating the deaths of her two younger brothers in the trenches. Her reception is disappointing. Desperate for a distraction, she finds a connection between a fossil at London’s Natural History Museum and her brothers’ favorite camping spot. But the gorge has a sinister incident from seventy years ago, several girls disappeared from the area. When PJ uncovers some unexpected remains, she’s determined to find answers about what happened all those years ago … and perhaps some closure on the loss of her brothers. Weaving together these two timelines, The Fossil Keeper offers everything you need – history, mystery, suspense, romance, and startling discoveries that will keep the pages turning. Praise for The Fossil “This elegant dual narrative historical from Cooper follows a young woman as she pieces together the fate of a 19th-century paleontologist …
“This elegant dual narrative historical from Cooper follows a young woman as she pieces together the fate of a 19th-century paleontologist … Cooper’s confident prose and deep empathy for her characters will keep readers hooked as she unspools her intrigue-filled mystery. Historical fans will want to dig this one up.” — Publishers Weekly
Tea Cooper writes Australian contemporary and historical fiction. In a past life she was a teacher, a journalist and a farmer. These days she haunts museums and indulges her passion for storytelling.
16th July 2023
A wonderful read – ‘The Bookbinder of Jericho’ by Pip Williams, published in 2023, of 438 pages – a beautifully written historical novel, set during the years of WW I, and into the period of the post-war world wide plague. It is basically written through the eyes of the women of that time in Britain [and in first person narrative by the central character, a bookbinder named Peggy] and relates especially to the effects of the war on employment in Britain as women are required to take over many of the roles formerly carried out by their menfolk, the consequences of the arrival of Belgian refugees repatriated to Britain after the devastation of that small nation by the Nazis, and the lives of the many volunteer nurses and others on the immediate front lines of battle. In the words of one reviewer – ‘‘Heart wrenching and bittersweet, The Bookbinder of Jericho is a lovingly woven story of hardship, longing and hope. Pip Williams writes with great insight and fascinating detail of working-class women, the war effort and World War I refugees. It was such a pleasure to spend time with these completely charming women.’
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A couple of promo reviews.
- In 1914, when the war draws the young men of Britain away to fight, it is the women who must keep the nation running. Two of those women are Peggy and Maude, twin sisters who work in the bindery at Oxford University Press in Jericho. Peggy is intelligent, ambitious and dreams of studying at Oxford University, but for most of her life she has been told her job is to bind the books, not read them. Maude, meanwhile, wants nothing more than what she has. She is extraordinary but vulnerable. Peggy needs to watch over her. When refugees arrive from the devastated cities of Belgium, it sends ripples through the community and through the sisters’ lives. Peggy begins to see the possibility of another future where she can use her intellect and not just her hands, but as war and illness reshape her world, it is love, and the responsibility that comes with it, that threaten to hold her back.
- In this beautiful novel from the internationally bestselling author of The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams explores another little-known slice of history seen through women’s eyes. Evocative, subversive and rich with unforgettable characters, The Bookbinder of Jericho is a story about knowledge – who gets to make it, who gets to access it, and what is lost when it is withheld.
- ‘A boldly feminist novel that sings with the joy of life and the miracle of the printed word. Williams’ second novel was absolutely worth the wait.’ – Ben Hunter, fiction category manager [Booktopia]
Writing for Readings, by Kate McinIntosh
This story begins in July 1914, several years after Esme hid her first word in The Dictionary of Lost Words. Another young woman is hard at work, this time at the Oxford University Press. The Press was (and still is today) responsible for publishing academic books of all kinds, and the ‘girls’ fold and sew the pages together at the bindery, only ever seeing tiny sections of the pages, a line, half a sentence, enough to tease but not to know. For Peggy Jones, the not knowing is almost too much to bear. Having left school early to help her mother and twin sister at the bindery, being surrounded by books and yet kept away from a decent education, hurts more than she could ever admit. That the bindery sits across the road from Somerville College, a women’s college created when women could not obtain a degree, only adds salt to the wound every working day. And to be folding page after page and not a single one of them written by a woman – why should it be ‘a woman’s place to inspire stories, not to write them’?!
With the outbreak of war, life changes for Peggy. While her sister, Maude, is ‘one of a kind’ and Peggy has always felt responsible for her, that feeling has only increased since the death of their mother. An opportunity arises for Peggy to try to get into Oxford, but her class, role as a carer, her gender, and self-doubt all hold her back. Can she be everything she needs to be to all of those around her, and fulfill her dreams as well? (What woman hasn’t asked herself that exact question at some point in time?)
Williams has given us a historical novel full of relevance for today. She describes a world where women were held back by a lack of education and a voice. Over one hundred years later, women are still prevented from attending school in some countries, and class can still dictate how much a person can achieve. And yet, what I loved most about this story was that in a book about the importance of having a voice and being able to express yourself, it is the characters who say the least, those of Lotte and Maude, who still haunt me. The empathy, the love and the steadfast stubbornness of all of the women in this book make it a joy to read, and the passion for creating something beautiful, something that will last, will resonate with everyone who has ever held a treasured copy of a much-loved book in their hands.
A thoroughly enjoyable, at times disturbing, story – I recommend it to discerning readers out there 😊
19th July 2023
Written in the first person again – “There were things that I wanted to say. Things I knew I couldn’t say but needed to tell someone. And then the things I knew I should say. What they wanted to hear. There is never only one version” [perhaps a reflection of life generally!!].
The outline – Novelist JB Blackwood is on a cruise with her husband, Patrick, to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Her one-time professor, Patrick is much older than JB. A maverick when they met, he seemed somehow ageless, as all new gods appear in the eyes of those who worship them. He is a film director. A cult figure. But now his success is starting to wane and JB is on the cusp of winning a major literary prize. Her art, that has been forever overseen by Patrick, is starting to overshadow his.
For days they sail in the sun. They lie about drinking, reading, sleeping, having sex. There is nothing but dark water all around them. Then a storm hits. When Patrick falls overboard, JB is left alone, as the search for Patrick’s body, the circumstances of his death and the truth about their marriage begins, with all the wrong, sometimes right, assumptions made by the media and public about their relationship!!
The Sydney Morning Herald review [by Helen Elliott, on April 7th] is worth sharing here.’
That Friedrich Nietzsche. You might roll your eyes and wonder if he could still be saying things folk in 2023 might find interesting. Well, get past that moustache and listen. Here is what he said about desire: “Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.”
He wrote this acute line nearly 150 years ago. And here, in The Anniversary, Stephanie Bishop is doing the forensics on Nietzsche’s astute line in a stout new novel. Because women had yet to be invented, his truth was purely male. Stephanie Bishop’s truth is purely female. She has this enigmatic epigraph (never neglect the epigraphs) from Simone de Beauvoir: “To be sure, the future of the woman I have been may turn me into someone other than myself.”
J. B. Blackwood is a novelist in early middle age. She has just heard that she has won one of the glittering literary prizes and is expected in New York to accept it. Her partner, Patrick, is a famous film director and public intellectual and considerably older. J. B. had met him when she was taking his course at university, she so in awe that she could scarcely speak, and “he one of the most beautiful and elegantly dressed men I had known: crisp shirts and shiny Italian shoes.”
But things happen – desire happens – and they become lovers. They marry. The anniversary of the title is the celebration of the 14th wedding anniversary, the year of ivory, symbolising patience and stability.
J. B. books a luxury cruise of 18 days, starting from Alaska, travelling through Japan and ending in America. The cruise is booked before she knows about the prize because she is determined to do something pleasurable and romantic with an altered Patrick, a man always frantic with work, who falls asleep in front of television and, most appallingly, is no longer elegant. He is even disinclined to showering. The prize ceremony can be tacked on to the end of the cruise, so ever So this bleak tale rolls out. In a wild storm in waters close to Japan’s northernmost island Hokkaido, there’s an accident. Patrick falls overboard and his body is not found until days later. The novel, at this point, turns into a thriller. Or perhaps a mystery? The courteous Japanese investigators seem to believe that someone pushed him into the sea, and J. B. is escorted from the ship to face endless questioning by people who are from a very different culture. The Japanese assume her guilt.
But we are allowed to enter into another tale, told by her, the almost-famous author who, it seems, is no longer the passive, admiring young woman who was only too happy to sleep with the famous professor when he invited her into his taxi one wet night. To her credit, she did not know immediately that he had a partner with a very new baby.
The baby, Joshua, is now an implacable, hurt 17-year-old and it is his behaviour that causes J. B. to insist on the cruise. One established fact about desire is that it has consequences in the real world.
The Anniversary has a wide list of characters, all necessary to the plot, but it is narrated by J. B., so we are constantly in her head. It takes energy to remain there because, like hearing other people’s dreams, it just is not that interesting much of the time. Deep into the book she writes about her own way of writing and compares it to Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the famous 1975 film by Chantal Akerman in which Akerman let the camera stay for a very long time on the face of the female actor.
“We watch her watching her thoughts, watch her having them, sitting so still at the glass-topped dining table.” J. B. continues to explain that when she is writing a novel “there is always something I am waiting to find out”.
The Anniversary is bejewelled with lovely moments and undeniably exquisite writing, a fine education about desire, but perhaps we have to wait too long before we know what we need to find out. It is, though, never less than an admirable and ambitious investigation into some troublesome contemporary things about men and women and the forces of desire, not just sexual but creative desire.
Marcel Proust, always helpful, should have the last word: “Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.” Proust? Nietzsche? De Beauvoir? Still here, still relevant, still necessary.
From The New York Times [C.J.Hauser, July 16]
In love, in art, in crime, what is done intentionally and what is done unintentionally? This is the question at the core of Stephanie Bishop’s fourth novel, “The Anniversary.”
When we meet our narrator, J.B. Blackwood, a mixed-race Australian author, she has just learned she’s won a major literary prize for a still-unreleased semi-autobiographical novel. The news hasn’t been announced publicly and she has yet to tell her husband, Patrick, a white, British, indie-darling filmmaker 20 years her senior and her former college professor. It will be a nice surprise for him, she tells the reader, but after the international cruise she and Patrick have planned to celebrate their 14th anniversary and to get away from their troubles at home in England.
On the cruise, Patrick and J.B. fight, Patrick gets drunk, and then falls overboard during a storm. Afterward, authorities search for, and find, Patrick’s body; J.B. winds up giving a witness report to police officers in Japan; and she is feted onstage at the prize ceremony for her novel, all in the same week. The cause of the accident and the high-profile publicity for J.B.’s book in the wake of Patrick’s death form the plot of the story, but it’s J.B. herself, an unreliable narrator at once completely confessional and narratively coy, who is the major engine that drives it.
The first half of the novel is eventful and atmospheric. J.B. describes the circumstances of her life — a mother disappeared in her youth, an affair with her professor-now-husband and even his death — with what feels like an eerie calm. Yet this narration turns deliciously complex when the known facts are reshaped as J.B. returns to them with increasing honesty and nuance. In its latter half, “The Anniversary” grows into a feminist commentary on the nature of mysteries and marriages.
Bishop skillfully invokes and revises the “forbidden passion” trope of a relationship between an older teacher and a young ingénue. J.B. tells us that as a student, she climbed into a cab with Patrick both to avoid the rain after a seminar and to satisfy her girlish crush, a small choice that changed the rest of her life. “Maybe I wanted only to want,” she recalls, “but did not really know what it was, exactly, that I desired.” In a virtuosic move, Bishop allows her narrator to recall the early days of their relationship in a romantic way only briefly before revealing the grotesqueness of the power imbalance between the lovers.
The insights throughout the novel, especially the second half, are astute and affecting (“It was here that I discussed the structures of power which a woman’s art must wrestle with before it is permitted to flourish,” J.B. thinks of the author’s note she added at the end of her novel), but the reader might feel wearied by their volume. The meta-conversation in the book is smart — What does it mean to tell a true story? Who is responsible for what? — but it also swamps the action and leaves the novel a little unbalanced and unsatisfying.
Still, when we return to the action at hand, Bishop’s scenes are engaging and unsettling. As J.B. becomes a suspect in Patrick’s death, she returns to Australia for the first time since she got married. There she reunites with her sister and niece, and their moments of conflict are riveting. They have an uncanny, dreamlike quality, unfolding without J.B. quite being able to participate in them fully. Eventually, J.B. becomes disoriented about which parts of her life are memory and which parts are her own fictional creations; which parts were her choices and which were the outcomes of her passivity?
“The Anniversary” is similar to contemporary books like Meg Wolitzer’s “The Wife” and Liane Moriarty’s “Big Little Lies” in the ways it tackles gender and power, but it offers the pleasures of the Gothic novel too — houses and relationships full of secrets, and a narrator with an uncertain grasp on reality. When J.B. first explains her marriage, it seems that she is telling us a romantic tale, but as the details pile up, the story starts looking like something else entirely. J.B. is a very good narrator, but I suspect she is not recounting her saga for the reader — she’s telling it for herself.
30 July 2023
Another wonderful read, albeit a lengthy novel – ‘Homecoming’ by Kate Morton, published in 2023, with 631 pages. A quotation from near the end of the book, which touched a nerve, I think.
“Most of the time, though, Percy was alone. Being old, he had come to realise, was like being stuck inside an enormous museum with hundreds of rooms, each crammed full of artefacts from the past. He understood now why the elderly could sit, seemingly still and alone, for hours on end. There was always something else to take out, t look at from a fresh angle and become reacquainted with”
From Kate Morton website, we read:
Adelaide Hills, Christmas Eve, 1959: At the end of a scorching hot day, beside a creek in the grounds of a grand country house, a local man makes a terrible discovery. Police are called, and the small town of Tambilla becomes embroiled in one of the most baffling murder investigations in the history of South Australia.
Many years later and thousands of miles away, Jess is a journalist in search of a story. Having lived and worked in London for nearly two decades, she now finds herself unemployed and struggling to make ends meet. A phone call summons her back to Sydney, where her beloved grandmother, Nora, who raised Jess when her mother could not, has suffered a fall and is seriously ill in hospital.
At Nora’s house, Jess discovers a true crime book chronicling a long-buried police case: the Turner Family Tragedy of 1959. It is only when Jess skims through its pages that she finds a shocking connection between her own family and this notorious event — a mystery that has never been satisfactorily resolved.
Some brief opinions of Kate Morton’s writing”
Kate Morton is the award-winning, worldwide bestselling author of The Shifting Fog (known internationally as The House at Riverton), The Forgotten Garden, The Distant Hours, The Secret Keeper, The Lake House and The Clockmaker’s Daughter. Her books are published in 38 languages across 45 territories and have been #1 bestsellers around the world. She holds degrees in dramatic art and English literature and lives with her family in London and Australia.
2nd August
‘The Naked Island’ by Russell Braddon [ex-POW], 1st published in 1952 [this edition 1975 ‘Australian Classics’], 266 pages. Shattering reading depicting life as a Japanese POW from someone who was there, written a few years after the war’s end. One particular paragraph towards the end of the book [page 207] sums up many of the sadly vivid descriptions of what went on, and the conditions under which the POW survived or died.
From Penguin Books……
The innocence of the young Australian soldiers sent to Malaya during the Second World War to halt the territorial expansion of the Japanese was quickly shattered by defeat and surrender. Russell Braddon, who himself became a prisoner of war, graphically describes the ghastly suffering and wanton neglect of the Allied soldiers in some of the most infamous Japanese POW camps, from Pudu in Malaya to Changi in Singapore. For more than three years he watched as these men were ravaged by disease, tortured, and deprived of their most basic needs. Braddon recounts his horrifying story with barely suppressed rage, but also with enormous admiration for the amazing ingenuity, spirit and determination of the prisoners, who created a semblance of order out of nightmarish chaos. His remarkable book makes grim but compelling reading.
From Amazon:
In 1941, after graduating from the University of Sydney, Russell Braddon enlisted in the Australian army. Together with thousands of other young Australian soldiers, he was sent to Malaya, where Allied forces were attempting to halt the territorial expansion of the Japanese. Although much vaunted as an impregnable fortress, Singapore proved instead to be a deadly trap, and Braddon spent almost four years as a prisoner of war after the city fell to the Japanese. This is not only the harrowing record of the years he spent struggling for survival in the notorious Pudu Gaol, in Changi, and in the tragic H Force on the Thai-Burma railway, but also of the equally brutal treatment of the native populations by the Japanese and the hollowness of the Greater Asian Co-prosperity Sphere they promised. Braddon emerged from Changi on swollen legs and ulcerated feet, from calls with desperate illnesses such as beri-beri and other starvation diseases, malaria and dysentery. Intelligent, tough, resourceful and tough in body and spirit, he was determined to surmount his ordeal. He even sharpened his mind by memorising the sole available book Mein Kampf! The Naked Island vividly portrays battle and prison life as experienced in the ranks. It is a tale of heroism, horror, squalor, starvation and disease endured with fortitude, ironic humour and extraordinary ingenuity.
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