One Good Thing by Alexandra Potter

 

Liv’s world has been turned upside down. This is the story of how she goes about turning it right side up. 

One Good Thing by Alexandra Potter is warm, witty and wise. When Liv’s husband walks out on what she thought was their perfectly happy marriage to take up with his much younger yoga teacher Liv suddenly has to rethink her whole life. She decides to leave London and go to Neswick, a village in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales where she and her sister enjoyed a lot of happy times when they were children. Very fortunately for Liv, her share from the sale of the house she and her husband owned in London has left her with the means to buy a house in the Dales and take a breather while she tries to establish her new existence.

Liv develops a theory that all it takes for anyone to get on the path that is right for them is one good thing. Liv’s one good thing happens when she comes across, falls for and adopts an old dog from a shelter and from then on she meets the people who are going to become important to her as she will be to them. She finds joy and purpose in all of her new relationships and Harry the dog is with her all the way.

It’s a story about dealing with loneliness and grief with love and trust and hope, and the setting of the Yorkshire Dales is perfect. It is a big book but I could have wrapped myself up in its warmth and comfort for as long as Alexandra Potter would have me.

I have only been to Yorkshire as a visitor but it is a magical, beautiful part of the world and I loved reading about it in this book. The Brontë parsonage and the village of Haworth are definitely as eerily atmospheric as Liv’s pupil, Maya, experiences them to be. Brrr!  

Before I float away on a cloud of memories I will record my rating of 5 out of 5. I only post reviews of books I have loved and recommend highly and this is one!

Published by Pan Macmillan

Wild Dogs by Michael Trant

 

Gabe Ahern is a dingo hunter, or ‘dogger’, living and working in the West Australian outback. It is an ugly, horrible way to make a living but as Gabe says, although he is referring mainly to his sideline in supplying grog to a dry community, somebody is going to do it so it might as well be him. Despite his hard, roughened exterior he is a fundamentally good man carrying within him the unbearable sadness of losing his beloved Valerie in terribly tragic circumstances.

Quite unwittingly, and most unwillingly, Gabe finds himself thrown into an extraordinary story involving an Afghan refugee, a highly professional gang of people smugglers, a roo shooter/hitman, bent coppers, good coppers, an unlikely hero and more.

I am not going to throw out any spoilers and take the edge off this incredibly edgy, heart stopping, twisting and turning but intricately character driven thriller. Michael Trant uses an interesting device of telling the story as it is happening to one character and then later showing what was happening at the same time to another character, which makes for a particularly satisfying way of following the story. This is done in a beautifully moving way towards the end of the book.

The opening chapters about Gabe’s methods of dingo hunting are pretty confronting, but so too are the chapters seen through the eyes of a female dingo. I love books that do this and I rate Wild Dogs as a 5 Star read.

It’s just a fabulous read from a brilliant Australian writer.

Published by Penguin Random House