Elma Turner book chat - November
This is an adventure story, based in Thailand in the mid-1990s, where a group of young travellers discover an earthly paradise, a beach in a National park where they decide to live, illegally. Richard, the narrator, is disaffected and psychotic as he recollects his time here. Things fall apart
Fiona Kidman All the way to Summer
Short stories however it reads more like a set of excerpts from something else. Prickly characters. The stories talk of love in different ways – dysfunctional marriages, affairs, unrequited love. Unsatisfying.
Author is a Native American from Oakland where I’m from. His first novel There, there about the Native American Urban community in Oakland, was nominated for a Pulitzer. This is both a prequel and sequel of that novel. A clear, stark picture of trauma over generations. A lot of the characters have addiction issues and are stoned much of the time which I found hard to read. Believe the book needed editorial assistance.
Nancy Tucker The first day of Spring
Chrissie is a neglected and hungry 8 year old who has a secret ( she kills a toddler). This gives her a feeling of power. Fifteen years later she has a 5-year-old herself and her neighbour has a 3-year-old. Suspenseful thriller . Difficult and unpleasant detail.
Tracey Chevalier The glass maker
Set in Venice in 1486. The story focuses on the Rosso family from Murano in the Venetian lagoon and spans 5 centuries. Orsola is a woman who works secretly through the centuries honing her craft. Her beads are worn by empresses and courtesans. Josephine Bonaparte and Casanova are just two of the historical figures we meet. A charming novel.
The author lives in Hawkes Bay and has written and illustrated this beautiful graphic novel set in NZ . It looks at the lives of two sisters in the colonial era and their trials and prejudices they faced ( one trains to be a doctor in Edinburgh). A compelling book full of photos, family trees. Sepia toning is very effective.
A woman goes to A & E at Wellington hospital and is sent home with painkillers. She returns and is rushed to the operating theatre where gifted surgeon Elizabeth Taylor is in attendance. Something goes wrong during the laparoscopic surgery when a lumbar artery is punctured. The woman goes to recovery, but her health declines and she dies overnight. The head of surgery is onto making the surgeon’s working life untenable. Compelling story of human fallibility. Recently made into a movie and set in Auckland.
Silvia Vasquez-Lavado In the shadow of the mountain
A Peruvian-born mountaineer and humanitarian tells the story of how mountain-climbing helped her and group of sexual abuse survivors from a group she sets up called Courageous Girls, process old traumas. As a 6-year-old she was abused by a young man working on her parents’ estate. She wins a scholarship to study in the US and works as an executive but gets locked into self-destructive behaviour and alcohol abuse. Raw and courageous memoir.
The story of the breakdown in a marriage. Gill is a painter whose main subject is his wife, Irene. Irene is an alcoholic who wants to stay married for the children. Gill reads her diary, so she starts another false one and hides the other. Gill is violent to Irene and the children but apologises afterwards. Irene is afraid he’ll get custody if she leaves. They do have genuine love for each other. They are both Native Americans so a lot about customs. While grim reading there is redemption, and the complexity of the relationship makes it a good novel.
Finalist in the Ockham NZ book awards. This novel uses a sci-fi setting to talk about the current world. Some humans are turning into giants so its decided to make spaceships and blast them into space. The focus is on three giants and their journey. Their Spaceship is powered by noise so they have to keep talking. Also, they will keep growing if they go silent. The second half of the book is about the protagonists’ lives before they were giants. All linked with prison a theme. The third part of the novel has them reaching a black hole where the ship implodes, they meet aliens and are guided to another world where they can be happy. Weak ending
Daniel Silva A death in Cornwall
24th in the Gabriel Allon series ( head of MOSSAD) . Allon retires to Cornwall. He’s also a gifted artists and restorer of paintings so is asked to trace a stolen Picasso. Two people are murdered during the theft. Author discusses money laundering, the Panama papers and Pandora papers ( ways to avoid tax). Good thriller/
The story of Eric Blair’s ( George Orwell’s) life as a trainee policeman in Burma for five years. This experience led him to become a writer. The Raj doesn’t come out well. Blair was a loner. Repetitive and obvious that Eric disliked the police. No diaries or letters so Theroux is imagining of it in novel form.
Phan Que Mai Nguyen Dust child
An absorbing tale of two sisters, an American veteran and an Amerasian man whose lives intersect. Set during and after the Viet Nam war in Saigon, the author has based this novel on the study of the Amerasian population in her doctorate( children born to Vietnamese mothers and American soldiers) and although ideas have come from this research it’s a captivating & moving novel.
Loved this book by journalist and researcher and Dunedin writer. It’s an historical mystery novel focusing on Diego Velasquez’s 1656 royal portrait, Las Meninas. The Infanta Margarita features along with her father King Philip IV , the queen, family and other court staff. The novel has a dual timeline from the 1990s when Alex, an intern at the Courtauld Institute of Art getting hooked into investigating the painting further as her mother did before she died suspiciously. There are ghosts, demon-worshippers, an uncanny link between Alex and Princess Margarita and lots of Gothic elements. Fabulous
Friendship and professional jealousy fuel this nail-biter. Set in the present, two friends spend 6 weeks at a villa near Orvieto, Italy where a brutal murder took place in 1974 involving rock stars and writers. The villa has its own story and this is what I loved about it - ’houses remember’ being the first sentence of the main character Emily’s new novel. Very entertaining psychological suspense and well-read in the audiobook version available on Libby.
