Nigeria in the 1990s, the setting for this novel, was a police state of such sadistic violence, with human rights abuses so staggering, that the country was expelled from the Commonwealth of Nations, and virtually every other country had sanctions against it. Focusing primarily on Lomba, a journalist and frustrated novelist, who, in the opening chapter is a starving political prisoner in a Lagos jail, author Helon Habila jumps back and forth in time, introducing us in succeeding chapters to the lives of ordinary citizens of Lagos, men and women, including Lomba himself, living on Poverty Street, trying to maintain some semblance of hope in an increasingly hopeless world. Lomba, jailed for two years without a trial as the novel opens, has gone beyond anger, which he describes as “the baffled prisoner’s attempt to re-crystallize his slowly dissolving self,” and entered “a state of tranquil acceptance” of his fate. When the jailer finds the poems and journal entries he has written and hidden, he persuades Lomba to write some love poems for the better-educated woman he is courting. A brief ray of hope flickers when the woman recognizes Lomba’s cryptic messages and comes to the prison to meet him.
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In this Ned Kelly Award winner from 2007, Adrian Hyland begins his series about Emily Tempest, who is part white, part aborigine. As a child living with the aborigines at Moonlight Downs while her white father worked at the Moonlight cattle station, Emily was a happy member of the community until she violated a taboo and was then sent to school in the white world for the next ten years. Much has changed upon her return to the community. Adrian Hyland creates an atmospheric and dramatic first novel which moves at warp speed, filled with action and excitement. At the same time, he also invites contemplation of the natural world and the lives of the aborigines who identify with nature on a visceral, even mystical, level.
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In his fourth novel featuring Dr. Quirke, a Dublin pathologist at the Hospital of the Holy Family with unusual insights into forensics, Booker Prize-winning author John Banville, writing as “Benjamin Black,” reveals yet another grim side of Dublin life in the early 1950s. When Dublin Detective Inspector Hackett investigates the gruesome death of “Diamond Dick” Jewell, a wealthy man whose head had been blown off in what was thought to be a suicide, he calls Quirke, who has helped him on several occasions in the past and who agrees that this death had to have been murder. “Few outside the family circle and few inside it, either, considered his demise a cause for sorrow.” As Hackett investigates, he finds himself relying on Quirke more and more, since Quirke has access to the elite of Dublin society, people who know all the powerbrokers in the business community, in politics and the church, and on both sides of the law. Whom you know is more important than legal fine points, and Hackett trusts Quirke to provide him with information he might not otherwise obtain.
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