Explosive Eighteen by Janet Evanovich

”I don’t feel so good,” Lula said. “It was that last doughnut. There was something wrong with it. It was one of them cream-filled, and I think they used old cream.”

”You ate ten!”

”Yeah, and none of the others bothered me. I’m telling you, it was that last doughnut. I’d feel better if I could burp.”

A typical exchange in Explosive Eighteen between Janet Evanovich’s stalwart bounty hunter Stephanie Plum and her loyal offsider, zaftig ex-prostitute Lula involves junk food. Lula nabs her prey with an aplomb that matches her appetite, and breaks for reviving fried-chicken lunches several times a day. (Shortly after the above conversation, the two women use the scent of a fresh pizza to apprehend an FTA (failure to appear) – but not before Lula packs away several slices: “I thought it might settle my stomach, but I was wrong.”)

The funny thing about the Plum series, now 18 books deep, is that while there’s nothing new under the Jersey sun, the set-pieces are so sharply written, the dialogue so snappy and the supporting cast so deliciously batty that the lure is as irresistible as that pizza.

Stephanie is a Jersey-fied, loosely mob-linked, grown-up Trixie Belden. She works at Vincent Plum Bail Bonds, the business owned by her erstwhile cousin, who has so much trouble staying on the right side of the law long enough to get any straight work done that Stephanie basically runs the show.

The plots of the Plum books are beside the point, and in Explosive Eighteen Evanovich has barely bothered. Between skits involving the captures of FTAs and bone-crunching takedowns of anonymous bad guys, she makes a stab at a putative storyline: on a flight from Miami to New Jersey, Stephanie is seated next to a man who, by mistake, puts an unmarked surveillance photograph of an unidentified man in her carry-on bag. On discovering it at home, she traces it back to her aircraft companion . . . who has since been found murdered and stuffed in an airport rubbish bin. The photograph is of value and is sought by many, but Stephanie has already disposed of it.

You’ll forget how the matter is resolved even as you’re reading. What constant readers will relish are Stephanie’s encounters with longtime paramours Ranger and Morelli (both of whom feature in the sojourn to Miami), and the family-dinner interludes, which are hilariously discomforting to all but her elderly grandmother:

”You need Annie to help you,” Grandma said. “She’s real smart. She’s fixing everyone up at bowling. She even had a man in mind for me, but I told her he was too old. I don’t want some flabby, wrinkled codger to take care of. I want a young stud with a nice firm behind.”

My mother refilled her wineglass and my father put his fork down and hit his head on the table. BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG.

“Go for it,” I said to Grandma.

“I’m not so old,” Grandma said. “There’s parts of me don’t sit as high as they used to, but I’ve got some miles left.”

My father pantomimed stabbing himself in the eye with his fork.

There’s no shortage of pace left in her granddaughter either. Evanovich is on a good wicket, and with the first movie adaptation of a Plum novel, One for the Money, coming soon with Katherine Heigl in the lead role, the series is likely to remain high-octane for a while yet.

2.5 / 5 stars: Frivolity that stays on just the right side of profane.

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The Real Katie Lavender by Erica James

If Erica James has carved out a niche for herself in the cluttered world of light romance fiction, it is one in which vile weather never descends, there is no such thing as a traffic jam, and the laundry is done by little elves who come in the night. Reading one of her books is like escaping into such a world – the intellectual equivalent of sinking into a warm bath clutching a glass of wine after a very long day.

In this sense, there is little to distinguish her latest, The Real Katie Lavender, from 2010’s The Queen of New Beginnings or the 13 novels that preceded them. Where James flexes her imagination most is in the set-up: Katie Lavender is a 30-year-old woman who in the opening pages is sacked unceremoniously from her job in media production. She takes this on the chin, largely because she knows real loss. Three years ago, her father died abruptly from septicaemia caused by food poisoning (who knew to be afraid of that?), and it is one year since the death of her mother.

Katie, an only child, was close to her parents and is bereft – but this being the type of story it is, James steers delicately away from an analysis of grief and towards Katie’s irreverent best friends Tess and Zac and, most usefully, towards a letter from a lawyer’s office summoning her for a meeting.

Perplexed, she arrives to be informed of the truth about her parentage. She is not her father’s biological daughter but the product of a brief affair during her parents’ marriage. Her father forgave her mother and raised Katie as his own. Her natural father is apparently a man both of conscience and some standing, for he has endowed her, she now learns, with a trust fund worth more than £750,000.

Her curiosity piqued, she goes in search of Stirling Nightingale, and in the most ludicrous of a series of implausible positionings – this is where the wine comes in handy – stages her first meeting with him by posing as a waitress at the 90th birthday celebration for his mother, Cecily. There she also encounters his two grown children with Gina, his wife of 34 years, and meets her obnoxious, egotistical half-brother (Rosco, 32), and her pregnant, self-absorbed, 29-year-old half-sister Scarlet.

On the same occasion, Stirling receives a visit from the police with the news that his brother and business partner Neil has been found dead. The suicide was prompted, it transpires, by events including the embezzlement of money from the firm’s clients and an extramarital affair. Neil’s wife Pen, a gifted gardener with a sweet exterior and a core of steel, is blindsided.

The stage is set for romantic trials and family travails . . . but wait, where’s the love interest? That would be Lloyd, Neil and Pen’s son. (If you’ve deduced that this makes him Katie’s first cousin, you’d be right – but you can be sure Ms James has a solution.)

The Real Katie Lavender is the brightest and most undemanding of chick lit. There are idyllic settings – Pen’s glorious gardens, the majestic Nightingale family home, Lloyd’s cosy love nest – and a clutch of themes that are sufficiently stimulating in the moment to hold attention but not so unsavoury as to be unpleasant reading (infidelity and other garden-variety secrets and lies, troublesome relationships with in-laws). There is nothing to offend a sensitive reader or to please those with exacting literary standards – but the rest of us are comfortably served.

2 / 5 stars: Safe, supremely unchallenging chick-lit.

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The Quest for Anna Klein by Thomas H Cook

I knew of Chekhov, but was unfamiliar with his hammer until I read a passage in Thomas H Cook’s spellbinding historical novel-cum-spy thriller, The Quest for Anna Klein. The implement is mentioned during a late-night conversation in the hushed gloom of the patrician Century Club in New York City shortly after the fall of the Twin Towers. There, a bright young graduate student sits metaphorically at the knee of a mysterious octogenarian, who has summoned him to hear his life story.

The ostensible purpose of the meeting is for Paul Crane to draw information from the former anti-Nazi agent that might help the US government with its inchoate war on terror, but as Thomas Jefferson Danforth’s story unfolds, Crane hears a tale not of expert warfare but of mid-century European horrors, triple-crosses, dummy cyanide caplets and deathless obsession.

And Chekhov’s hammer? It refers, Danforth tells Crane, to the Russian writer’s musing “that at the door of every happy person, there should be someone tapping with a little hammer, just as a reminder, soft but steady, that there are unhappy people in the world.” It’s an arresting notion, and the text is laced with such cultural gems: the aborted plan for a monstrous Palace of the Soviets; the story of would-be Hitler assassin Maurice Bavaud; the sentimental US secretary of war who spared Kyoto from nuclear attack.

The model seen in The Quest for Anna Klein – a simple storyline overlaid with intersecting subplots and rich with fascinating factoids – is the same as that perfected by Dan Brown, which is no backhand compliment. It’s a clever way to produce an historical thriller that leaps between the early 2000s and Europe during World War II, the latter among the most trampled ground in all of modern fiction. It adds scope and grandeur, makes the characters more worldly and the reader feel smarter, and permits no flag in pace, even as Danforth languishes in prison for nearly 20 years (though Cook spares us any Solzhenitsyn-esque rumination).

Danforth meets and falls in love with the object of his affection during World War II, when he joins a small team of conspirators who plot to kill Hitler and sabotage the German war effort. Their exploits are recounted through Danforth’s reminiscences with Crane, and the seamlessness with which Cook darts between the two creates a lively, kinetic energy that never succumbs to the mustiness of refracted memory.

If the point is the titular activity, in the end Danforth’s quest is more metaphorical than literal. Anna is elusive, almost non-corporeal, and impossible for Danforth to grasp or possess. Even the most fundamental aspects of her identity remain in question years after her wartime activity. She is likened specifically to Joan of Arc, while Danforth perceives in her “a fatalism she had long ago accepted, making her seem like a woman walking toward her future just as religious martyrs walked towards their execution sites”.

As they plot the murder of Hitler, an undertaking which includes an astonishing scene of Fuhrer attending a viewing of his paintings with Danforth and Anna, it emerges that none of the many who in real life attempted the same lived to tell about it. Those who weren’t slain in their tracks inevitably perished in prison.

Cook captures the audacity and danger of this enterprise, and of the ensuing banality of being sentenced to life without such exotic invigoration, with precision. The Quest for Anna Klein justifies the effort of pursuit.

2.5 / 5 stars: An historical novel with an edge.

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The Best of Me by Nicholas Sparks

Many famed genre novelists start getting itchy in mid-career, wanting to break new ground and exercise different creative muscles. John Grisham took a right turn into non-fiction, Patricia Cornwell developed a project on Jack the Ripper, and Nicholas Sparks, now comfortable with the royalties from his books and their multiplying film adaptations, could likewise do whatever took his fancy.

In The Best of Me, his 16th novel, he has chosen instead to return to familiar ground. Present and correct are the attractive people in mid-life discontented in their present circumstances (see: Nights in Rodanthe), who were passionately in love a lifetime ago but separated by the devilish machinations of older, cooler heads (shades of The Notebook, where the reunion happened after a few years, rather than more than two decades later as in The Best of Me).

Other plot points have similarly been Sparksified before, though won’t be revealed here: but if you’re familiar with any of his earlier storylines, you are unlikely to be surprised by anything that transpires in The Best of Me.

The male protagonist is Dawson Cole, a strong silent type made for the silver screen, who spent four years in prison for vehicular manslaughter in his North Carolina hometown. Now he lives an hermetic, ascetic life in Louisiana, working on offshore oil rigs and sending regular anonymous payments to the widow of his victim. Never married, he harbours an unquenchable love for . . .

. . . his feminine counterpart, Amanda Collier, who when the pair met and fell in love as teenagers had the misfortune of coming from the right side of the tracks, which meant she had parents both attentive and self-important enough to intervene. Her youthful obedience has resulted in stay-at-home motherhood, an unhappy marriage to an alcoholic dentist, and, following the death of her young daughter, volunteer work at a child cancer hospital.

Amanda and Dawson are at last reunited in their early 40s in their hometown by the death of a local personality, Tuck Hostetler, who fostered their early love. Sparks’ descriptions of Tuck’s various noble machinations to bring the two back together are at once mawkish, endearing and implausible. Shallow stylings are characteristic of Sparks’ writing: when Dawson first encounters Amanda in a high school class, he observes that “her eyes [are] the colour of warm summer skies” and that the “mischievous hint” about her smile suggests “she knew something that no one else did.”

The more I read, one word repeatedly sprang to mind: lazy. When Sparks isn’t resurrecting plot points and themes already canvassed extensively in his other work rather than taking the more demanding, time-consuming route of allowing characters’ actions to reveal their motives, he’s falling back on Dan Brown-esque interior exclamations (‘Do you know what you’ve done?’ asks a voice in Amanda’s head. “’Yes, but I love him’, another voice answered.”).

As always, there is plenty of sweetness in his storyline, so it’s hard to feel too curmudgeonly about the repetitiveness, but the Manichaean approach he takes to the writing of his characters, who are permitted only to be saints or sinners, grows tiresome. The ending is nothing short of preposterous – but it will make for a hell of a tearjerker on screen.

0.5 / 5 stars: Dire. Approach with extreme caution.

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The Impossible Dead by Ian Rankin

Two years after ushering in a new hero, in his first post-Rebus novel The Complaints, the incomparable Ian Rankin returns with the sophomore tale of Scottish DI Malcolm Fox, top man in the Internal Affairs division.

It’s an inspired premise – cops investigating and interrogating other cops can be nothing but rich dramatic ground – and in The Impossible Dead, Rankin marries relentless internecine warfare and a terrorism theme with a practiced hand.

Fox and his team are summoned to Fife to look into a complaint against one Paul Carter, a DC whom a young woman, Teresa Collins, has accused of sexual harassment. After her accusations were made public, two other women emerged with similar stories. Though Carter has three colleagues backing up his version (inoffensive) of events, Fox’s questioning of Alan Carter, Paul’s uncle and a retired cop, gives credence to the allegations.

Fox’s visit to Alan Carter’s home also ushers in the plot proper – in true Rankin style, the opening subplot is merely an amuse-bouche. As Fox and Alan chat, the investigator not only learns everything he needs to about the impeached Paul Carter, he also discovers what is occupying the older man’s time these days: an examination of the apparent suicide 15 years ago of a local lawyer, Francis Vernal, who had ties to Scottish paramilitary groups. Agitating for a separate Parliament, the groups used means both fair and foul to achieve their goal of a legitimate, representative Scottish National Party.

Alan Carter was commissioned to do the work by Charles Mangold, a fellow lawyer who, upon being bailed up by Fox, is cagey as to whether he is motivated by loyalty to an old friend or a greater fealty to Imogen, Vernal’s icy, inscrutable widow.

Shortly thereafter, two key players perish, and The Impossible Dead – the title perhaps a reference both to the monotonous difficulties of homicide investigation and the ability of some deceased to remain a pain-in-the-jacksy for those still living – kicks into high gear. Wiretaps, historical bombings and compromised cop work ensue.

Like The Complaints and Rankin’s earlier, legendary Rebus books, The Impossible Dead is structurally flawless. Even the most experienced crime writers can succumb to the temptation of leaving a truck-sized hole here or there in the interests of narrative momentum, and papering over it with diverting character-work and inventive twists.

Rankin respects his readership, among them many who have followed him since long before he first topped the book lists, and applies an unusual degree of discipline to his writing. Acknowledging the plague that threatens many a writer in the high-octane crime genre, he sticks to an ascetic schedule that allows him to elude the embarrassing trap of confusing characters’ names and deeds or running the narrative off-course. To wit, he started writing The Impossible Dead this past January and finished the first draft in 10 weeks, then spent the next six months editing before hopping on the pre-publication promotional treadmill in September.

Such prolific output could be interpreted as a gimlet-eyed mercenary enterprise, but as Rankin told The Independent in October, writers who have already made a handsome fortune, such as himself, Grisham and Patterson, keep writing because their work is “how [we] make sense of the world, it’s what [we’ve] always done.”

In that, the creator has everything in common with his Mr Fox.

3 / 5 stars: Rankin reigns.

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I Don’t Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson

The redoubtable Kate Reddy, Allison Pearson’s imagined exemplar of the plight of the high-achieving working mother, began her life in a series of columns in The Guardian before appearing in the multimillion-seller I Don’t Know How She Does It in 2002. The novel is hitting shop shelves once again ahead of the New Zealand release (3 November) of the film adaptation, in which Sarah Jessica Parker will portray the frenzied fund manager.

The narrative arc is not hard to follow: most of the story consists of Kate, mother of a five-year-old and a toddler, attempting to juggle her responsibilities at work and home while skirting around the edges of an emotional affair. Kate’s husband Richard is something of a cipher, a ghostly character both in the novel and his wife’s life. His spectre comes into sharper focus in the final quarter, when he becomes the catalyst for Kate’s inevitable confrontation with herself.

Kate can be flaky; she spends time she doesn’t have fretting about what her in-laws will think of her son’s lingering attachment to his dummy, she is intimidated by her nanny, and her inability to say no has her condemned to a nauseous whirligig of business trips. But not far below the surface dwells a feistiness that emerges when she needs it most. She deals with pitiless alacrity to a colleague who bullies Kate’s talented protégé, and sets about repairing her marriage with the same single-mindedness that equips her to buy a season’s worth of high-end shoes in five minutes.

These may be traits shared by the author. In the wake of her debut novel’s success, Pearson was commissioned by Miramax in 2003 to write a second novel, to be delivered in 2005 and for which she was paid a hefty advance of US$700,000. When the copy failed to materialize, Miramax filed a lawsuit. The book, I Think I Love You, was finally published in 2010, not long after Pearson was involved in a public spat with Sarah Ferguson, who objected to disparaging remarks Pearson made about her daughter Princess Beatrice’s physique.

There is also a snappishness to Kate, a sharp edge that dulls as, one by one, the balls she is juggling fall to the ground. This prickliness and Pearson’s eye for wry detail enrich the novel: Kate has learned not to return from business trips without gifts for her daughter, who has amassed a global Barbie collection “now so sensationally slutty, it can only be a matter of time before it becomes a Tracey Emin exhibit.”

As she welcomes a group of new trainees to her firm, she recalls her own sweaty-palmed induction, when she couldn’t decide if she should cross her legs (“whether it was worse to look like the Duchess of Kent or Sharon Stone”), and had spent the last of her money to buy a suit that made her resemble “a Wolverhampton schools inspector.”

Later, as Kate’s marriage fractures, the recollections become more poignant. She reflects on the agony of returning to work nine weeks after giving birth, still breastfeeding and taking a cab home every day to feed her daughter – then attempting a panicked weaning when she is dispatched suddenly on a five-day business trip.

Kate’s story will likely strike a chord with as many women today as it did in its first go-round, and there is more in it should Pearson be so inspired – I Don’t Know How She Does It’s resolution is, like its heroine’s life, far from tidy.

3 / 5 stars: A story to strike fear into the heart of any would-be working mother. 

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Matilda is Missing by Caroline Overington

Despite being the purported subject of the novel, Matilda was absent for roughly the first half of Australian writer Caroline Overington’s thoughtful new work Matilda is Missing. The early chapters are concerned with the family drama of 60-something Barry and Pat, the parents of four adult sons adjusting with ease to late middle age until one son, Brian, brings home his blowsy new girlfriend. That Nerida, at 20, is already mother to a four-year-old is one reason Pat takes an instant dislike to her – but her antipathy is moderated by the arrival of two more boys, and the happy grandparents become frequent caregivers.

Combustion comes when Nerida is unfaithful to Brian and throws him out of the marital home (it struck me that Overington’s mothers are shown in a slightly more imperfect light than the hapless but generally well-intentioned fathers – other readers may beg to differ).

In the midst of the meltdown, Barry has his biannual chat with his old school friend Frank, now a Family Court judge, whom Barry is shocked to find frail and weak from terminal cancer. Frank alludes to a mistake that must be righted, a need to “get the truth out there” – but dies just three weeks later, before he can tell Barry what he needs his friend to do. It is left to Barry, with the assistance of Frank’s former secretary, to sift through mounds of legal documents relating to a court case involving a well-known local man, Rick Hartshorn – which is where Matilda, somewhat belatedly, enters the picture.

Matilda is the daughter of Rick’s stepson, Garry, the primary cause of the novel’s suspense. As Barry learns from the files – chiefly, in a clever narrative device, by listening to taped conversations between a court-appointed psychologist, Dr Bell, and the two estranged spouses, Garry and Softie – Garry and his sister were abandoned when very young. The sister shuffled through state guardianship before dying in her teens, while Garry was adopted by a caring couple, Joan and John Cooper, whose biological son, Beam, was born severely handicapped. After John Cooper’s sudden and premature death, Joan married Hartshorn, whose prominence and wealth afforded security.

In their late 30s, following a rapid courtship and too-hasty wedding, Garry and Softie produce Matilda, but the marriage is over before it has begun, and the custody decision, with both parents requesting full-time responsibility, falls to Frank Brooks, and here occurs the mistake.

All of the above barely touches on what Matilda is Missing is truly about – Overington packs a lot of plot into 350 pages – and it would do a subtle story a disservice to attempt to boil it down or latch it to a genre.

Part of the subject matter – what becomes of the children of warring parents – piqued my curiosity as to the writer’s own background. I found her website, where she declared the book (her fifth) “fully informed by the many custody battles I’ve had to cover, in my role as a reporter for The Australian.”

Makes sense. There is a human messiness to Matilda is Missing, and an astuteness to Barry’s non-judgemental eye, that is unlikely to emerge from even the most fertile imagination. What Overington shares of what she has seen will resonate with many.

2.5 / 5 stars: Overington knows of what she writes.

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On Canaan’s Side by Sebastian Barry

Almost as soon as I put down my completed copy of Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side, my hunch that it would be judged widely pleasing was borne out when it was listed alongside 12 others on the annual Man Booker Prize longlist. It is not the first time Barry has been in the running for the Commonwealth’s most prestigious prize for fiction: he was shortlisted in 2005 for A Long Long Way and again three years later for The Secret Scripture.

The multitalented (plays, novels and poetry) Irishman is due, and On Canaan’s Side would be a worthy laureate not least because it handles the complex subject of grief with rare economy, while showing the seismic power of sudden and premature loss.

The protagonist is the elderly Lilly Bere, a Chicagoan who was forced to flee Dublin with her doomed fiancé at the end of the First World War. On Canaan’s Side opens in the immediate aftermath of the suicide of her 20-something grandson, Bill, and proceeds through her experience of grief until its arresting halt 17 days later.

Which is not to say it is all about Bill – in fact the narrative, stark in content yet laden with Barry’s usual lovely wordcraft, evokes a sombre, reflective mood largely through a series of flashbacks that constitute a biography of Lilly’s 89 years. The loss of Bill – her only surviving relative – is one more in a series, and the story of her endurance of it is powerful in its simplicity. There are few who can craft something so remarkable out of the most ordinary, and Barry lets none of the effort that must have been required be perceived.

Lilly’s life has been no pretty picture. She has lost a homeland, a brother and son to war, and a not-quite-husband to civilian bullets. Her son Ed, though alive, is buried in the post-traumatic stress of Vietnam, and his toddler proves Lilly’s saviour as she devotes her later years to raising him. But Bill’s life unfolds as if in mirthless mimicry of his grandmother’s, and by his early 20s he has emerged from his own divorce and a stint in the second Gulf War. It is as if Lilly’s steeliness loses its potency down the generations, with Ed retaining his life if not his sanity, and Bill proving unable to cling to either.

Throughout, Barry’s prose is jaw-dropping, and the beauty of his writing – “those long-limbed creaturely fogs that walk in against the Hamptons like armies, whether attacking or defeated, whether going out or returning home is hard to say” – will surely contribute to his elevation once more to the Booker shortlist. Indeed, war is a prominent theme, both as a literal reference and perhaps a metaphorical allusion to the daily, subconscious practice of guarding against death.

The ending cannot be objectively defined as either happy or sad, but it is entirely natural. The final lesson of On Canaan’s Side may be that one is never too old or world-weary to elude devastation, and that an aged heart, its defenses weakened by life, is perhaps the kind most afflicted by sorrow.

4 / 5 stars: There might well be a Booker in it.

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The German Boy by Patricia Wastvedt

It is in 1947 London that Patricia Wastvedt opens her latest novel, The German Boy, with Stefan Landau, “this white-skinned, bruise-eyed German”, landing in Dover and journeying to London to be met by his aunt, Elisabeth, the sister of Stefan’s English mother, Karen.

Elisabeth is apprehensive at the arrival of this near-stranger, and for good reason – 16-year-old Stefan, enigmatic, taciturn and only recently freed from the Hitler Youth’s death grip, can barely hide his disdain for his English relatives, the only family he still has. In this, he is very much his father’s son, and the story of what became of his Fuhrer-loving parents in Nazi Germany is just one of the narrative pearls Wastvedt plants for her reader to prise out as they make their way through this rich, absorbing novel.

Stefan remains oblivious to the (perhaps typical) messiness of his family’s evolution since the end of the First World War, but the more fortunate reader has the pleasure of returning, from this opening, to 1927. Here is introduced the novel’s pivotal character, a young artist named Michael Ross, who will become both subject and cause of sisterly obsession and the estrangement of Karen and Elisabeth.

Michael’s family is damaged in a way not unusual for the time: his father Albert was severely disabled in a 1917 mustard attack in France and is cared for by Michael’s mother Vera. Michael’s Jewish ancestry, though it’s of no consequence to the Rosses or their acquaintances, will become a matter of great import later in the story, when Karen (whom, he met, along with Elisabeth, through his sister Rachel in their school years) introduces him to her thoroughly propagandized German husband.

The beastly Artur Landau is a well-drawn, grim echo of the many willing servants of the Third Reich. Karen is in love with him and is thrilled to give birth to their son, but their marriage is one of convenience (not least because, by this reviewer’s reading, Awful Artur doesn’t bat for Karen’s team). As menacing as the Fuhrer himself, Artur’s actions catalyze much of the fast-moving second half of the story, which leaps from the early 1930s and the establishment of Nazi Germany to 1947, following the divergence of Karen and Elisabeth’s familial paths. These passages, crafted with imagination and empathy, make The German Boy an historical novel that is a cut above the rest.

Wastvedt demonstrates a remarkable knack for evoking the many small kindnesses and unexpected fellowships that bolstered the bruised survivors of two unholy wars. One character, striking up a conversation with a night porter at a train station one chilly evening, ends up giving the virtual stranger 20 acres of land he owns in the Romney Marsh.

Years later that kind man becomes Elisabeth’s husband, and we can see that event owes more to her recognition of her need for his goodness than to romantic love. But this is Wastvedt’s point – there is no horror in the mundanity of the everyday, when you have seen the alternatives.

3.5 / 5 stars: A family’s story, told with delicacy and daring.

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Last Summer by Kylie Ladd

A novel about the aftermath of a sudden death shouldn’t be warm and uplifting, but Australian neuropsychologist-turned-novelist Kylie Ladd’s Last Summer is above all a tale of lightness. It’s also absorbing, and harmonious in spite of the many schisms it describes.

The death is that of Rory, a 39-year-old family man who collapses from an aortic aneurysm at a practice for his social cricket team. Rory was beloved by his circle of close friends: his sister Kelly and her husband Joe, James and the aloof Anita, Nick and Laine, and Pete and Trinity. There are small children, jobs and businesses, unvoiced resentments and unfinished or yet-to-begin romantic business. The loss of Rory, whose mischievous, rebellious persona was the group’s fulcrum, creates an immediate and predictable fragmentation.

Ladd opts for probably the best, and certainly the most straightforward, way to tell such a character-driven story – she gives several characters two or three chapters each. It reads as a series, over the ensuing year, of chronological vignettes offering glimpses into lives unified by shared history.

The death occurs in the first chapter and is seen from the viewpoint of Nick, Rory’s oldest and closest friend. In his absorption, Nick fails to notice Laine’s subsequent reconnection with a past love, a subplot which exemplifies Ladd’s close-reading of the effects of grief. She doesn’t care to show us the wailing and gnashing, but rather the real ramifications of loss experienced by those too young to be especially accustomed to it. As one character turns away from their own spouse, they might turn towards another’s – everyone seeking comfort, but causing greater ruptures.

The novel is unmistakably Australian, with every page seeming sun-drenched, from the barbecues to the after-work cricket practices and the Antipodean lingo – one character’s incipient football career ended when he “did his ankle”, while an irate Joe accuses his distracted teammates of playing like a “pack of [expletive] sheilas!”

And in its study of the male-female dynamic – much of the action seems driven by grief-heightened hormones – Last Summer is, unexpectedly, a novel about gender politics. The women are headstrong and self-possessed, at least in domains familiar to them. Laine is an accomplished architect, Trinity a social worker, Kelly a business owner, and Colleen, Rory’s widow, a former head nurse in an A&E department.

Anita, a stay-at-home mother, feels young, inadequate and alien by comparison, but it is she who acts most assertively in relation to her marriage, and Laine who turns out to have the weakest hold on her sense of self.

Women control Last Summer’s middle-class suburbia, if not the world, and whether these marriages fracture or endure will depend on the choices made solely by the wives. Joe is portrayed as lost and yearning, for his wife, whose unusually close relationship with her brother only intensifies with his death. Another husband is spurned altogether.

Ladd’s characters are not especially introspective, and their responses to the tragedy are entirely consistent with the personalities she gives them. The story of grief and its corollaries is one that will never grow tired, and Ladd’s version, vivid and unsentimental, is oddly heartening, and well worth reading for it.

3 / 5 stars: Australian suburbanites get sad, go a little mad.

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