fourth estate – Aussie Reviews

Ache, by Eliza Henry Jones

Annie has never been the sort of person to have nightmares. But since the fires on the mountain, her dreams have changed. They have developed a pattern, as though the fire changed the landscape of everything inside her. The ridges and curves.
Her dreams are steady, the same things flickering across each night. Ash and bubbles and dark water that movs like waves.
Since the fires, since leaving her nana on the mountain, Annie has dreamt of ash. She’s dreamt of drowning.

A year ago, Annie was visiting her grandmother up the mountain when a terrible fire ripped through the area. Since leaving her nana behind to die, Annie has tried to keep her life in the city from completely falling apart. But her daughter, Pip, is traumatised, her husband Tom is angry, and Annie herself is haunted by what happened. Now, she needs to go back to her childhood home to try to get her mother’s life back on track. But being there also means confronting her own demons, and helping Pip find equilibrium.

Ache is a moving story of survival and rebuilding in the face of adversity. A whole family, and a whole community, have been impacted by the fire, and Jones captures the range of emotions and experiences which might be expected from such an event as well as examining the ways survivors can find a new normal in order to move forward.

Beautiful.

Ache, by Eliza Henry Jones
Fourth Estate, Harper Collins, 2017
ISBN 9781460750384

Mercy Street, by Tess Evans

As he steps out under the dome of stars, he finds a prayer on his lips – not a prayer to a distant god, but a prayer wholly domestic, wholly earthbound.
Don’t let them take her away…I couldn’t bear it.

After a long and happy marriage, George’s life has changed since his wife Penny’s death three years ago. Now he lives alone, and his only friends are his old mate Redgum and his sister Shirl, who pops in regularly to check on him. He misses Pen, but he doesn’t want more friends or company. He’d rather be alone.

So when he meets single mum Angie and her daughter Rory he doesn’t want to get too close. But Angie unexpectedly saves his life, so George feels he owes her something. And Angie, who isn’t used to people being nice to her, makes the most of it. Gradually, George’s reluctant involvement blossoms into something rich and fulfilling but when he faces losing Rory, the girl he comes to love like a granddaughter, he finds himself on the wrong side of the law.

Mercy Street is a warm hearted story of an unlikely hero, dealing with themes of family, security and cross generational friendships. With a host of moving moments, there are also laughs and a wonderful depth to both the setting and the cast of the novel.

A beautiful book.

Mercy Street, by Tess Evans
Fourth Estate, an imprint of Harper Collins, 2016
ISBN 9781460751046

Asking For Trouble by Peter Timms

A bright yellow convertible slithers into the gutter outside my gate. Flashy. European – or Japanese with European pretensions. Too obviously pricey, anyway. For a while, nothing happens, then the driver’s-side door swing open and out steps a rather attractive blonde. Young, pert and lissom, if a bit over-presented. The silky blouse, the stilettos, that skirt so tight she has to wiggle it down over her bum. Swinging a read-leather bag over her shoulder, she gathers a clipboard from the seat, then pauses to peer up at the house with that all-too-familiar expression – evaluating, appraising, judging, doing the mental arithmetic. From the way she quickly looks away, I gather she’s spotted me peeking out from behind the curtains.

Frankly, I’m getting heartily sick of these people. I wish they’d just leave me alone. Although I must admit she’s a cut above the paunchy middle-aged blokes they usually dispatch in my direction.

Harry Bascombe is an old man, and he’s not doing it gracefully. He lives alone in his family house, rarely venturing out. But an unexpected request has him revisiting his past and remembering details long buried. The story flits back and forth between that final year of primary school and the present. The past is 1956 Melbourne with its social mores, playground politics and the anticipation of the Olympic Games. Harry was a diffident child, bullied and navigating a challenging home life. It is that year that a journalist is interested in. Harry has to revisit a traumatic time and decide just how much of it he wants to share, and with whom.

Like waking a sleeping dinosaur, visiting the past can be dangerous and have unexpected consequences, even for those who were there. Harry-of-the-present isn’t a terribly likable character but his revisiting of the past begins to provide some understanding of his behaviours and some empathy. Truth and recollection begin to diverge as Harry revisits his unsettled childhood. Asking for Trouble is told in the first person and Harry is a truly unreliable narrator, prone to rewriting events even as they are happening. The action flits between the present as Harry decides whether or not to be part of a documentary about his past. The past and the present finally meet and the climax takes the reader to a place of uncertainty even in its inevitability. Peter Timms is an experienced writer of non-fiction and this is his first novel.

Asking for Trouble, Peter Timms Fourth Estate 2014 ISBN: 9780732298432

review by Claire Saxby, Children’s author and bookseller

www.clairesaxby.com

Chasing the Light, by Jesse Blackadder

This was the moment, after her twenty patient years, after her cheerful mothering, after her steadfast support, that he’d remember the adventurous woman he’d married, and the promise he’d made her. She took a deep breath, drawing in air to the bottom of her lungs, and tried to imagine an even deeper cold.
‘I suppose we’ll go on Norvegia?’ she asked.
‘Hjalmar said Norvegia tossed like a tin toy in the storms last year,’ Lars said. ‘I don’t want to take any risks. I’ll go on Thorshavn.’
It took a moment for his use of the singular to sink in. ‘You couldn’t go without me,’ she said.

Ingrid Christensen has always longed to visit Antarctica, but her husband Lars, a Norwegian whaling magnate, is reluctant to take her, until he realises that she could be the first woman to set foot there, a great honour for both of them, and for Norway. Soon Ingrid is finally southward bound, but she is not the only woman on board. Her travelling companion is Mathilde Wegger, a grieving widow who has been forced onto the trip by her scheming in-laws. The third woman is Lillemor Rachlew, a photographer who has cheated to get on-board and is determined to beat both of the others as the first woman to land on the frozen continent.

The three women could be friends, but they are very different, and they are competing for more than the honour of being first to land in Antarctica.They must also face the dangers of their journey, the horrors of seeing whaling enterprises for themselves, and the vagaries of the weather and of fate.

Chasing the Light is a fascinating tale based on the story of the first woman to set foot in Antarctica. Whilst a wonderful insight into the lives and times of the women who first ventured to Antarctica, it is also a marvellous study of human relationships and the lengths people will go to to meet their personal goals, as well as the ways those dreams can be shaped and altered by life experience and changed perspectives. The three women are as different as they are each in their own way determined, and readers will find each alternately endearing and frustrating. The twists and turns of their journey are fascinating and the outcome unexpected.

Chasing the Light: A Novel of Antarctica, by Jesse Blackadder
Fourth Estate, 2013
ISBN 9780732296049

Available from good bookstores or here.

Lost Voices, by Christopher Koch

Late in life, I’ve come to the view that everything in out lives is part of a pre-ordained pattern. Unfortunately it’s a pattern to which we’re not given a key. It contains our joys and miseries; our good actions and our crimes; our strivings and defeats. Certain links in this pattern connect the present to the pas. These form the lattice of history, both personal and public; and this is why the past refuses to be dismissed. It waits to involve us in new variations; and its dead wait for their time to reappear.

When Hugh Dixon overhears his father confiding to his mother that he is in trouble, Hugh is determined to help him. His father has a gambling debt which could be the ruin of the family, and young Hugh believes that he only person who can help them is his great-uncle Walter – a man he has never met and who his father will have nothing to do with. Hugh visits his uncle in the old family home, and a friendship develops. As it does, Hugh also learns of his family’s links to a notorious band of bushrangers in the mid nineteenth century. Later, events in Hugh’s own life have strange echoes of that earlier time.

Lost Voices is an evocative, absorbing book, with an intriguing double narrative. The book is divided into three parts, with the middle section telling the 1854 story of two escapees from Tasmania’s Port Arthur who return to their secret mountain hideout – but not before meeting a young Martin Dixon, who convinces them to let him accompany them to tell their tale. In the first and third sections of the book we follow the late teens and early twenties of Hugh Dixon, Martin’s great grandson, a hundred years later. If it were not for this father’s trouble, Hugh would not have met his great uncle and so learned the story of his grandfather.

Yet there are echoes between Hugh’s life and that of his long dead ancestor, particularly the pattern of uneasy relations between father and son. Martin heads off to live with the bushrangers knowing his father will not approve, but determined to follow a path of his choosing. Hugh too does this both in seeking out his great uncle’s help, but also in following a career in illustrating which his father has attempted to discourage him from. This exploration of the relationship between father and son is repeated in other connections in the book – including Hugh’s father and grandfather, his friend Bob’s relationship with a violent father and the bushranger Wilson’s relationship with his father.

There are other echoes and parallels – young men’s relationships with older women, the treatment of women and, importantly the concept of truly evil men. There is so much being explored that the experience may be different for individual readers, and the processing of these themes is likely to go on long after the reading finishes.

Whilst there is action and drama, this is not a fast paced book, taking time to read and to digest, but it is a satisfying, beautiful journey.

Lost Voices, by Christopher Koch
Fourth Estate, 2012
ISBN 9780732294632

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People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks

Of course, a book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artefact of the human mind and hand. The gold beaters, the stone grinders, the scribes, the binders, those are the people I feel most comfortable with. Sometimes, in the quiet, these people speak to me. They let me see what their intentions were, and it helps me do my work. I worried that the kustos, with his well-meaning scrutiny, or the cops, with the low chatter of their radios, would keep my friendly ghosts at bay. And I needed their help. There were so many questions.

Hanna Heath is used to working in the seclusion of her laboratory where she studies and preserves historical manuscripts and books. When she is summoned to Sarajevo to work on a recently recovered manuscript, she is swept up in the book’s mysterious past.

The Sarajevo Haggadah is a Jewish prayer book which has survived for centuries against remarkable odds. Hanna must work to preserve it, but at the same time wants to establish how the book has survived. What has kept it hidden and safe in the face of war and persecution of its owners?

The People of the Book is a beautifully developed tale of one book and its passage through time. As Hanna works to uncover its past, the reader is privileged to see chapters in the book’s past, with these instalments interspersed between Hanna’s own travels. These glimpses of the past tie in with some of the damage and relics found by Hanna when she examines the book, giving the reader an insight which Hanna does not have, in spite of her educated guesses. At the same time, Hanna must confront her own past, her troubled relationship with the book’s current custodian and her doubts about her abilities.

This a beautifully woven book, with elements of mystery, history and personal relationships combining to keep the reader absorbed and keen to find answers.

A masterpiece.

People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks
Fourth Estate (an imprint of Harper Collins), 2008

This book can be purchased online from Fishpond. Buying through this link supports Aussiereveiws.

Eating Lolly, by Corrie Hosking

Mumma’s childhood was warm with baking. She was a good girl. She was Mother’s Little Helper, The Wee Chef, an Apple Dumpling in a green pinny. Her time at home revolved around cooking with her mother. Baking together was as close as they ever got. Her mother had a shelf of bosom and Mumma stood in her shadow, in her darkness.

When Mumma is eighteen she is sent away, heavily pregnant, to live alone on a remote island. The island community is small, and Mumma keeps mostly to herself, but when her baby Lola Belle – Lolly – is born, she is determined to bring her up surrounded by love. Together Mumma and Lolly grow, in a life filled with baking and tastes and scents.

Their family expands with the inclusion of Mister, the shy son of a neighbour, and together the three of them make a life. But as Lolly grows she and Mumma both struggle with the secrets of their past and their present, and with their female forms.

Eating Lolly is a gentle, rich story of femininity, of family and of love. At times shocking and confronting, it explores the challenges faced by three generations of women in coping with life, with secrets, and with themselves.

A beautiful read, female readers especially are likely to catch glimpses of their own lives within.

Eating Lolly, by Corrie Hosking
Fourth Estate, an imprint of Harper Collins, 2008