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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If ever there were anyone who had an excuse to grind axes, it would be Eva Gabrielsson, who lived with author Stieg Larsson for thirty-two years but who, through a loophole in Swedish law, inherited nothing upon his death at age fifty in November, 2004, his entire estate going, by law, to his estranged brother and father. Gabrielsson has said many times, and repeats often throughout this book, that she is not personally interested in the enormous sums which the posthumous sales of his Millenium Trilogy have generated—forty million books sold, plus rights to audiobooks and films, including three Swedish films and one American film not yet released. As dedicated to social causes as Larsson was, she is fighting, instead, for control of his literary legacy, especially alarmed because “a myth has sprung up: the ‘Millennium Stieg’…[which] casts him as the hero of the trilogy…[though] Stieg didn’t wait for the Millennium books to be what he was.”
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Posted in 9a-2011 Reviews, England, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, Mystery, Thriller, Noir, Psychological study, Social and Political Issues on Jun 11th, 2011
Described on Amazon and elsewhere as “the first credit crunch novel,” something that, frankly, would never have lured me into reading it, Get Me Out of Here is much more like an adult version of Patrick McCabe’s novel of psychological horror, The Butcher Boy, than it is a broad satire of the London business community at large. The book focuses almost exclusively on Matt Freeman, a thirty-three year-old Londoner who is trying to run his financial business, an overly-driven young urban professional, with all the stereotypical hang-ups about appearances, brand names, personal connections, and the toys of success. Matt, as narrator, conveys every thought that enters his mind, every twisted bit of false logic, every sensation, every hope for the future, and every self-deluded justification for the crimes he commits—and he commits a lot of them. We know his personal friends, all his lovers, and his neighborhood–he is individualized, not the generic stick figure we usually see in satires. The focus here is on the small, not the broad and universal–the life of one young man whose problems are so extreme that he cannot be considered “typical,” even among psychopaths. Full of wonderful, grim humor and irony.
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Having lived in Iceland for over ten years, Quentin Bates got to know the country and its politics well, before moving back to the UK during Iceland’s continuing economic crisis. He had observed political corruption there with fresh eyes, and he now uses his outrage as the basis of this complex and unusual murder mystery in which he illustrates how some elected officials are able to parlay their connections into illegal gains and large personal bank accounts. Officer Gunnhildur, a widow described as a “big fat lass with a face that frightens the horses,’ has been with the police department for sixteen years and now runs the police station in the small village of Hvalvik. When the body of an unidentified young man is found in the water beside the docks, Gunna investigates, and when she discovers that one of the victim’s close friends was killed in a road accident the previous spring, she becomes sure that it is murder. Both had been interested in Clean Iceland, an organization which promotes clean energy and keeps an eye on dams, the environment, and power sources. At issue is a contract that has been awarded recently for the building of a privately run smelting company across the bay, and that company and its public relations offshoot, Spearpoint, are directly connected to the Ministry of Environmental Affairs and run by the wife of one of the ministers.
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