False Witness by Karin Slaughter

 

I learned from Karin Slaughter quite a while ago now that, contrary to my childhood fantasies,  Atlanta Georgia is not all peach tree streets but has its fair share of mean streets as well. It is 2021 and sisters, Leigh and Callie, are being forced to revisit their traumatic memories of 1998 and the involvement of two young girls, Harleigh and Calliope, with the evil Buddy Waleski.

Interestingly, the pandemic is threaded through the story in present day Atlanta with facts such as in the USA there have been 500,000 COVID related deaths and there are thousands of new cases daily, but people have to make a living and for the survivors life goes on. Although America has more than 10 times the population of Australia, 500,000 fatalities quite boggles the mind.

This is a dark story with graphic scenes of violence, drug taking and addiction. There is ugliness and horror coming from the mean streets but to counter all of that there is also goodness, kindness and, above all, love. Leigh, Callie and Andrew appear as children and as adults and the answer to the question about nature versus nurture comes down on the side of nature in each case, or at least that was my interpretation (I’m assuming Leigh and Callie had a nice father. You’ll see what I mean).

Karin Slaughter always has a deep understanding of her characters: their faults, their virtues, their weaknesses and their strengths. One lovely thing about this book is the people who love and respect animals, no matter their personal circumstances. My favourite character was Dr Jerry, the vet.

Published by Harper Collins

Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

 

A mint green, retro style bicycle lies on the side of the road, near a scattering of green apples. An intriguing opening to a totally absorbing, utterly brilliant story.

This is Liane Moriarty’s best book ever! I have loved all of Liane’s books and think of her as Australia’s Anne Tyler but this time she has outdone herself. 

This is the story of the Delaney family: father Stan, mother Joy and their adult children: Amy, Logan, Troy and Brooke. As is usual in Liane Moriarty’s books each character is drawn meticulously, allowing the reader to get to know and, in some cases, love them all, even those peripheral to the main cast.  Joy and Stan have sold their successful, long running tennis school and are living in the family home in an unnamed Sydney north shore suburb. The children have all moved out although Amy, the eldest at almost 40, comes home every now and then. Suddenly out of nowhere Savannah enters, making a profound impression on the lives of Joy and Stan and, consequently, their children.

The story is constantly fascinating and the suspense builds up quietly and deliciously (apple crumble, anyone?). The children’s lives, their past involvement with the superstar tennis player, Harry Haddad, and their growing uncertainty about the state of their parents’ marriage all become significant when a disappearance occurs causing much soul searching as well as physical investigation to be undertaken.

I would have hated to be given any more insight into the story than I have outlined above, before I began to read it. The twists and turns are exquisite!

Liane’s legion of fans will devour this book and new readers will become instant devotees.  It’s got to be 5 out of 5. What’s not to love?

Published by Macmillan

The Keeper of Miracles by Phillip Maisel

 

Phillip Maisel, OAM, is 99 years old. He was born in 1922 in Vilna which was then in Poland but which is now the capital of Lithuania. In 1939 when Phillip was 17 the Soviets invaded Vilna; although Phillip was a very bright boy who was expecting to go to university the Soviets declared his middle class family part of the bourgeoisie who must pay for the inequities of capitalism and Phillip should not, therefore, be allowed any further education. (Anti-semitism was already rife in Poland but Phillip had been hoping to join the 10% quota of Jewish students who were admitted to universities.) Phillip, being an idealistic young man, was drawn to the principles of communism, accepting his fate, and arguing about it with his father whose successful livelihood had been taken away from him by the communists.

When the Germans subsequently invaded Poland Phillip and his family were thrown into the horrors of life under nazi occupation. One way to survive was to have a skill which could be utilised so Phillip’s father put him forward as an auto electrician although Phillip had only ever seen a few cars in his life. His intelligence and ingenuity, though, helped him to teach himself how to work on German army cars and he became useful to his oppressors. Even so, he chronicles the incredible hardships and inhumane  treatment he suffered in various concentration camps throughout the war years. 

Phillip is a modest, self-effacing man who tells his life story in order to be one of the witnesses to the Holocaust which must never be allowed to be forgotten. He emigrated to Melbourne with his sister after the war and became a successful, valuable citizen of Australia and a prominent member of the Melbourne Jewish community. For over thirty years he has worked as a volunteer interviewer at Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre, recording the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. He has developed a technique of helping people to tell their stories with as much clarity and honesty as their memories allow, which is how he has presented his own testimony in this book. As well as the horrors he witnessed as a young man he has remembered moments of kindness he and his friends and family encountered. He is a brave, honest and generous man and his family must be overwhelmingly proud of him.

Phillip says many wonderfully inspirational things in this book and I was going to end my review on one of his quotes but on re-reading them I couldn’t possibly choose one. I would urge everyone to read this book, the life story of a truly good man.

5 out of 5

Published by Macmillan

The Promise by Damon Galgut

 

A few years ago we were invited to visit some people at their home in Pretoria, South Africa; their domestic staff lived in a little concrete house on the property and I pictured this place as I was reading The Promise. 

Thirteen year old Amor, the youngest of the three children of Manie and Rachel Swart, overhears her dying mother ask her father to promise to give to Salome, their maid, the house she lives in and the ground surrounding it. Salome has nursed Rachel through her illness and always cared for the family and Rachel wants her to be thanked and rewarded appropriately. Manie agrees and Rachel dies two weeks later.This then is the story of whether that promise is ever kept.

This is such a good book! The three children, Anton, Astrid and Amor, are all very different and their stories are told separately. The story spans the last years of the apartheid era to the present and touches incidentally on the fate of South Africa through its presidents from the glory days of Nelson Mandela and the famous World Cup to the big spending Thabo Mbeki (citing the fabulous and important O R Tambo airport) to the corruption of the Zuma administration: “The President’s friends have run off with the cash. No lights, no water, lean times in the land of plenty.”.  A white child learns of the role her father played under apartheid through the Truth and Reconciliation hearings and a black child comes to the full realisation of what equality is supposed to mean.

The characterisations of Anton, Astrid and Amor are deep and sensitive and real and they will stay with me. When I started reading the book I didn’t think it was going to engage me because it is written without any quotation marks and is all in the present tense; however, this very soon began to feel natural and easy to read and if I had given up after the first few pages I would have missed out on a beautiful, meaningful experience. I hadn’t heard of Damon Galgut before this and I will look for his previous books now.

This books rates 5 out of 5 on all levels.

Published by Vintage

Slough House by Mick Herron

 

This is the seventh book in the Jackson Lamb series. It is a dark story and, having seen the excellent docu-drama series, The Salisbury Poisonings, I was quite prepared to accept and be intrigued by the fictional goings-on contained therein. 

Two things are happening to the slow horses: they are being used as target practice for Lady Di’s trainee spooks from Regent’s Park but as well a more sinister element has crept in and the admittedly superior (but don’t tell him) computing talents of Roddy Ho are put into service in an attempt to find out just what is going on.

River Cartwright, still recovering from the loss of his grandfather, makes a shock discovery which puts him in grave danger; Catherine, Louisa, Shirley and Lech are all as interesting as ever and the toad-ish Jackson Lamb is his usual repulsive, politically incorrect self. Peter Judd, the fictional Boris Johnson wannabe, is once again reading Lady Di like a book and vice versa.

The baddies are bad, the goodies are complicated and the repartee is wonderfully witty. The story ends with a cliff hanger which will have Mick Herron’s devotees wondering what on earth they are going to do with themselves until book number eight comes along.

A superb, utterly satisfying spy novel from The Master. 5 out of 5.

Published by John Murray