Recommendations for International Women's Day

International Women's Day is on 8th March so I thought this would be a good opportunity to recommend some of the fantastic fiction I have read over the past 12 months about women and their stories.  A common theme here is oppression of and discrimination against women (both contemporary and historical) and the characters in these novels are all likeable, feisty women determined to break free from the roles society has cast them in. They provide food for thought and a chance to reflect on these issues whilst also being hugely enjoyable reads.

The Girl With The Louding Voice, by Abi Dare

This highly readable, page turner of a novel which I devoured in just a couple of sittings tells the story of Adunni,  a 14 year old girl from a rural Nigerian village who longs for an education. The story begins by describing the poverty of her family and then she is sold: first as a bride to become the third wife of a middle aged man; and then into slavery as a domestic servant, so it is not always a comfortable read as it brings home the many ways that women are oppressed in Nigerian society. However there are also tender and joyful moments in what is ultimately an uplifting story of a girl who refuses to let herself be silenced and oppressed. Some readers might be put off by the dialect the book is written in but within a couple of pages your ear becomes attuned and it is like being there beside Adunni, completely part of the immersive experience of the book. SO good. 

American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummins

American Dirt is an explosive page turner that reads like a thriller and kept me completely hooked from beginning to end. I was initially pulled in by the quote on the cover from Ann Patchett : 'I couldn't put it down. I'll never stop thinking about it.' ; and I am able to report that this is not hyperbole - this really is the case for me as well! It tells the story of Lydia, a bookshop owner from Acapulco, as she goes on the run from a local drug cartel attempting to escape to the USA with her eight year old son. It is one of those books that leaves you a little wrung out emotionally when you finish it as I was often moved to tears or had my heart racing in fear. It is well researched and well written and leaves the reader horrified at conditions faced by migrants trying to reach the USA, hardships and difficulties often exacerbated by the fact that the protagonist is a woman. This is a fantastic novel that left me thinking about Lydia and her son long after I had finished reading.

A Room Made of Leaves, by Kate Grenville

Kate Grenville is one of my favourite authors (you can read more recommendations of her work here :http://thisreadingmummy.blogspot.com/2017/01/must-read-australian-booklist-for.html) so I was very excited to read her latest offering, another historical novel set in eighteenth century Sydney as Australia is being established as a British colony. The novel, based on real events and real people, tells the story of Elizabeth Macarthur, the wife of John Macarthur a British Army Officer often recognised as the 'father' of the Australian wool industry. Aged just 21, Elizabeth accompanies her new husband to the newly founded penal colony and we follow her as she carves out a life for herself on the other side of the globe with a husband she quickly realises that she does not love. Elizabeth is a spirited, likeable and fiercely independent  woman who works hard to break free of the shackles placed on her by the expectations of eighteenth century society and exacerbated by the male dominated world of the penal colony. This is a lovely read, beautifully evocative of time and place, and you leave it feeling that you have gained a friend in Elizabeth.  She is a woman famous for being the wife of her husband but this novel shows her as so much more than that - as a person with her own story. 

The Mercies, by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

The Mercies is another historical novel, this time set in seventeenth century Norway. It begins with a terrifying storm (a real event that occurred on 24th December 1617) that kills almost the entire male population of Vardo, an island in the far north of Norway, deep inside the arctic circle. The rest of the novel is an absorbing account of how the women left behind learn to cope firstly with life without their men and then with the subsequent arrival of a new governor who has come to enforce new sorcery laws and ends up leading a witchhunt. This is a fascinating and terrifying novel which completely transports the reader to another time and place, and a more detailed review can be read here: http://thisreadingmummy.blogspot.com/2020/03/book-review-mercies-by-kiran-millwood.html 

What novels highlighting women and their struggles against oppression and inequality would you add to this list?

Jane Harper, a crime writing force to be reckoned with.

A while ago I published a review of The Dry, Jane Harper's debut novel which blew me away (http://thisreadingmummy.blogspot.com/2017/03/book-review-dry-by-jane-harper.html ).

Since then  she has written 2 more books which are just as good. Each novel has a different setting and a different set of characters though the setting is always an isolated area of rural Australia. In each novel it is her description of the setting and dramatic evocation of the harsh and dangerous landscape which lifts her writing away from conventional crime writing and gives it an extra dimension. All the novels are exceptionally well plotted with a seemingly impossible conundrum to solve that is revealed cleverly, allowing each character to be a suspect for a while before drawing to a satisfying and plausible conclusion. The suspense and tension created is electrifying - I could not put any of these books down - reading long into the small hours of the night. 

Force of Nature centres around a corporate team building weekend in a remote nature reserve. A team of 5 women set out on a hike and only 4 return to the rendezvous point. What happened to the 5th woman? The missing woman, Alice Russell,  is the whistleblower on the current case of Aaron Falk (the detective from The Dry), a money laundering investigation, so Aaron and his colleagues begin looking into her disappearance. It soon transpires that the relationships between the 5 colleagues were filled with mistrust and suspicion and everyone has a motive for wanting Alice out of the way.

Again, the setting takes centre stage as Harper deftly shows the reader just how frightening it would be to be lost in the impenetrable forests she describes.

The Lost Man is Harper's latest offering. I just finished reading it and I literally could not put it down.  It is a little different from her previous two novels in that Aaron Falk does not feature. In fact there are no real detectives or police investigation at all. Instead the focus is completely on a handful of characters within the Bright family. 

The novel opens with Cameron Bright being found dead on the boundary of his vast cattle station in outback Queensland. The autopsy confirms that he died from dehydration having walked away from his vehicle. The police believe he walked away deliberately, opting to end his own life, but the family thinks differently. His brother Nathan (Cameron's closest neighbour, but still a 3 hour drive away) ends up investigating the circumstances of his death and working out what actually happened. There are few characters and therefore few suspects owing to the geographical isolation of the setting, which is vividly brought to life. Again, Harper uses the setting to build tension as the remoteness and isolation increases the pressure on the characters and begins to show the cracks in the outwardly perfect family life of the Brights. Everyone is suspicious of everyone else and the reader is cleverly led to suspect everyone in turn before we find out what took place. This is a fast paced thriller with likeable, believable characters and an incredibly well described setting that completely drew me in as a reader. Definitely my favourite of her novels so far.

Jane Harper writes thrillers that are so much more than thrillers. I can't recommend them highly enough and I can't wait to read what she writes next!

Book Review: The Dry, by Jane Harper

This is a very good read. I read it in one sitting - it truly is one of those books that is impossible to put down!

The book opens with Aaron Falk, a Melbourne police officer, returning to his hometown in the Australian outback after a twenty year absence, to attend the funeral of his childhood best friend Luke Hadler. Luke, his wife and their young son were all found shot dead and it looks as if the only person who could have been responsible is Luke himself. The town is in the grip of a fierce drought and tensions are running high throughout the community as farms and local businesses are beginning to fail. At the request of Luke's parents Aaron begins to dig around, looking into the deaths, but he is keeping secrets of his own from twenty years before - secrets that he thought only he and Luke shared. The more time he spends in the town, the more it becomes apparent that these long buried secrets are threatening to resurface. Do they have any bearing on what happened to the Hadlers? 

The setting is what sets this apart from other thrillers and Jane Harper does a fantastic job of bringing the Australian outback to life and evoking the never ending heat and isolation. She shows how this heat and isolation can lead to incredible tension and frustration...which is a great for a thriller like this - just about every character in the book is a potential suspect as the drought makes people behave in ever more threatening and bizarre ways! Small town life with all it's gossip and small mindedness, coupled with the worries of life lived at the mercy of the climate make for high emotions and unusual behaviour all round. 

The plot is fast paced and full of twists and turns, several times Harper managed to lead me completely up the wrong path, having me suspect various people in turn and for a chapter or so I would be certain of that person's guilt before a plot twist led me off in another direction. Masterful stuff. So often I feel let down by the ending of novels like this, feeling either that the motive was utterly ridiculous or the character responsible for the crime was one that had hardly been mentioned in the book before and was just introduced almost incidentally to be the culprit, but this was not the case with The Dry. The ending was entirely plausible and a surprise right up until Falk himself begins to work it out.

An unusual and well written thriller that I would highly recommend.

Must-Read Australian booklist for Australia Day.

Today is Australia Day - what better way to mark it than recommending some great books about Australia and my favourite Australian authors??

English Passengers, by Matthew Kneale

This is a stunning book. Kneale writes about the whole Vctorian period, summing up racial, social and religious beliefs of the time, through a journey from England to the colony of Tasmania. Parallel to the story of the journey is the story of the Aboriginal people of Tasmania and their brutal treatment at the hands of the colonists. This strand of the novel is shocking and incredibly sad, but this is balanced, and somehow emphasised, by the humour (at times of an almost slapstick quality) that is prevalent though out the book. This book made a lasting impression on me when I first read it 14 years ago, and I would definitely recommend it.

The Thorn Birds, by Colleen McCullough 

I am sure that the seventies tv show did not do the reputation of this book any favours.... When you think of the Thorn Birds, most people think of a slightly trashy, overly romantic epic series that their mum used to watch and obsess about. However, if you can move past that, this is a fantastic book. I first read it as a teenager and I really fell in love with the Australia described by McCullough - the vast open spaces of the Outback where the family ranch lies. This book alone evoked a desire in me to visit Australia and see this incredible landscape imprinted in my mind from this beautiful book, and I am pleased to say that I travelled to Australia in 2000 and was indeed moved by its awesome landscape. A re-reading last year confirmed for me that the sense of place and the setting of the novel are the real stars of this book, but the plot of this epic family saga spanning several generations certainly makes for a gripping read. It is very long and there are very many characters (almost too many, as I felt at times that some of the characters were a little one-dimensional), but definitely worth reading, to totally lose yourself in another world- the beauty, splendour and isolation of the Australian Outback.

Red Dog, by Louis de Bernieres 

Any dog lovers out there should definitely read this book, and have the tissues handy. It is a very short book recounting the life of Red Dog who travels around the unforgiving Pilbara region of north-west Australia (a little like the Littlest Hobo) and the relationships he forms with the various people he adopts. Louis de Bernieres manages to make both the landscape and the people come alive and he writes with a great deal of warmth and affection. A little gem of a book.

The Slap, by Christos Tsiolkas

This book is fairly controversial and has provoked polarised opinions in reviews. Personally, I thought it was great - uncomfortable to read, yes, and it does not do much to promote your faith in humanity but compelling none the less. 

At a barbecue in suburban Melbourne, a 4 year old child is slapped by someone who is not his parent. The fallout from this is huge - a court case ensues and marriages, friendships and families are divided over which side to take. 

There is a very large cast of characters and each chapter is told from the viewpoint of a different character so the reader views events in many different ways. Several of the characters are deeply unpleasant and their actions at times repellent, but in an almost voyeuristic way, you have to keep on reading. 

This is a very thought-provoking novel touching on issues such as: identity, racism and how it feels to be an immigrant trying to integrate whilst holding on to your own culture and traditions; corporal punishment; different  parenting styles and the right of people to parent in the way they see fit; and the difficulties of marriage and family life. I think it is definitely worth a read, but afterwards you may not be able to say that you "enjoyed" it.

Now for my 2 favourite Australian authors - I would pretty much recommend anything they have written, but describe a couple of favourites here....

Peter Carey:

True History of the Kelly Gang - this won the Booker prize in 2001 and it's easy to see why. It is a novel unlike anything else, where Carey completely transports the reader to the 19th Century and the life of the notorious bush ranger, Ned Kelly. Carey has written in the voice of Kelly, uneducated and barely literate and this is what helps to totally immerse the reader in the time and place, but also means that it can be hard to get into. A page turning adventure and a mind-blowing accomplishment from this talented author.

Oscar and Lucinda - Another Booker prize winner. This time an epic story of undeclared love between two very unusual characters (Oscar and Lucinda!) spanning two continents and most of the 19th century. It is the beautifully drawn characters that really make this novel. It is rather long, but stick with it, the writing is fabulous!

30 Days in Sydney: a wildly distorted account - Carey returns to Sydney after a seventeen year absence and writes about his experiences, trying to find the essence of the place. It is very readable and as someone who has visited Sydney at around the time he was writing this I found it very interesting. This short book is hard to categorise - it's not a memoir and it's not a travelogue or guidebook, but the personal stories share space with the history and geography of the city. Sydney is a unique city and this book manages to convey a real sense of the place and its diverse inhabitants. 

Kate Grenville:

After reading The Secret River, I was hooked by Grenville's writing and went on to seek out as many of her other books as I could find. The Secret River and Sarah Thornhill are 2 of my favourite ever books. They deal with culture clashes between early white settlers and the the indigenous people on the banks of the Hawkesbury river in the18th and 19th centuries, and are described in detail here:http://thisreadingmummy.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/ten-books-i-would-recommend-to-everyone.html

I was then inspired to read Searching for The Secret River,which is Grenville's fascinating account of how she researched and wrote The Secret River and how the book grew from research about her own ancestors. It is not often that a reader gets a glimpse into the mind and process of a writer and this is a real treat, allowing a little understanding of how an idea becomes a novel. Very readable and enjoyable and compliments the novel perfectly. 

The Lieutenant is another novel by Kate Grenville set in Sydney at the time it was first established as a British settlement. The eponymous lieutenant is Daniel Rooke, an astronomer sent out with the First Fleet, who is uncomfortable with the way his colleagues attempt to interact with the local Aboriginal people. The novel documents his burgeoning relationships with the Aborigines and how this is viewed by his military colleagues. It is interesting to learn that the character of Daniel Rooke is based upon the real person William Dawes. 

With The Idea of Perfection Grenville proved to me that she could write about subjects other than the early colonisation of Australia. This novel tells the story of the unlikely romance blossoming between Douglas Cheeseman and Harley Savage, two people who have given up on love. The setting is an eccentric small town in rural NSW and both the setting and characters are wonderfully drawn. Grenville brings their awkwardness, embarrassment and affection vividly to life in this touching and gently humorous tale.

I'd love for you to comment and share your own Australian favourites.