The Passage by Justin Cronin

The unusually breathless introduction by the Hachette publicist, combined with the trouble taken to set up a Facebook page (www.whoisamy.co.nz) made me rather suspect The Passage, the third book by American novelist Justin Cronin, might be not be just your everyday post-apocalyptic science-fiction fantasy doorstopper.

That hunch was borne out: the acknowledgements page of the 765-page tome features a nod to film director Ridley Scott (of Bladerunner, Gladiator and Robin Hood), who knows a good story when he sees one and has already snapped up the movie rights for a reported US$3.75 million.

Smart man. The Passage has ‘summer blockbuster’ written all over it, and what’s more, it is merely the first installment in a trilogy.

The opening sentences indicate the scale of Cronin’s ambition for his story: “Before she became the Girl from Nowhere, the One who Walked I, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years, she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.”

At the start of the book Amy, to all outward observations a normal, healthy six-year-old, is abandoned at a convent by her troubled mother. Taken first under the wing of a caring nun, then a grief-stricken FBI agent, she is present when a killer virus is inadvertently unleashed from a clandestine military facility in Colorado, turning 40 million people into vampirish ‘virals’ and leaving all but a handful of the remaining American populace dead.

The disease is part of a grand, top-secret experiment by the US government in which death-row inmates consent to be used as human guinea pigs in exchange for commutation of their sentence – not such a great deal, as it turns out.

Following the outbreak, after which Amy vanishes, Cronin introduces a group of survivors who wall themselves off in what is now the California Republic. A tight but necessarily merciless community of refugees from other parts of the country, they ward off the virals with high-octane lights and skilled combatants known as Watchers.

A breach of security, and the curious reappearance of Amy, only a handful of years older despite the passing of nine decades, drives them eastwards and into the sinister embrace of another group of survivors, who have developed quite a different way of defending themselves against gruesome annihilation.

The question of who else is out there, and whether it is worth taking the substantial risk associated with finding out, dominates the second half of the book. Can a post-apocalyptic world sustain any hope?

The Passage, an immensely brave and inventive novel that is justifiably earning Cronin comparison with the best work of Stephen King, spans a century after the release of the virus. This event occurs in a time not far from now; a world in which, perhaps fittingly, Jenna Bush is Governor of Texas.

The main story is interspersed with brief diary excerpts by some characters, which have been presented at the Third Global Conference on the North American Quarantine Period in the Indo-Australian Republic in April 1003 AV (after virus?).

The excerpts constitute the end of the story, but The Passage leaves us (and Amy) with 900 years to go – one can only hope that the rest of the tale proves as thrilling and transporting as the opening salvo.

4 / 5 stars: An irresistible genre mash-up that reinvents the vampire.  Click here for more Easy Mix Book reviews.

My Name is Memory by Ann Brashares

The rather lovely notion of enduring passion across many lifetimes is at the centre of My Name is Memory, the seventh novel by Ann Brashares, perhaps best-known as the author of the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants series for young adults. 

This new book is her second in the adult fiction genre, after 2007’s The Last Summer (of You and Me), and, clearly emboldened by her earlier successful renderings of the torment and complexity of teenagehood, she introduces her two main characters, Daniel and Lucy, as they experience a profound connection that comes to a climax at a high school ball.

The encounter, as fleeting as it is dramatic, leaves both Lucy and the reader baffled: who is Daniel and where did he come from? Why does he insist on calling Lucy ‘Sophia’? How can she be so drawn to someone she doesn’t even know?

Answers start to emerge in the following chapter, when the action jumps from present-day United States to North Africa in 541, and the tense from the third person to the first, with the narrator musing: “I was first born to the north of the city that was then called Antioch . . . I consider it my first life . . . I guess it’s possible that I’ve lived lives before that.”

This faltering voice belongs to Daniel, who has lived dozens of lives in succession and can remember them all. (The possibility that reincarnation is very common and that only the individual’s awareness of it is unusual is alluded to by Brashares but regrettably not fully explored.)

It is in this first life that he meets Lucy, then a nameless young girl who disappears inside a burning house that Daniel has torched in battle. Tormented, he searches for her down the centuries, finding her, in different women, in 700s Asia Minor and in England in the shadow of World War I. But how to engage Lucy’s memory of Daniel’s role in her previous lives, and what – or who – will intervene to thwart their love?

Aspects of My Name is Memory are reminiscent of Geraldine Brooks’ remarkable 2008 novel People of the Book, which tracked not a love affair but the journey of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book, through centuries of European unrest.

Brashares’ tale, hinging as it does on character rather than setting, is neither as well-researched nor as meticulously detailed as Brooks’, but both writers have a knack for moving swiftly through time and from place to place without discombobulating the reader. Considering Brashares’ action can leap from 2006 Virginia to the coast of Crete in 899 in the course of two chapters, it’s an admirable feat.

That said, if you’ve had any more than a glancing encounter with Audrey Niffenegger’s megaselling The Time Traveller’s Wife, it will occur to you, within a handful of pages, that Brashares is either unabashedly ripping Niffenegger off or out to prove she can do it better.

For this and other reasons – the pure romanticism, the dastardly villain standing in the way of true love – Brashares’ storyline will be familiar in a favourite-blanket sort of way. It’s nothing out of the comfort zone, but good to spend some time with – and proves a surprisingly tender read that is best undertaken in a minimum of sittings. 

3 / 5 stars: The seven ages of man’s yearning.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Our Family Table by Julie Goodwin

Seven-and-a-half-thousand people vied last year for a shot at $100,000 and a cookbook deal, with the ultimate victor emerging in the form of a 40-year-old New South Wales mother of three, amateur cook Julie Goodwin. The contest was the first Australian edition of the TV cooking show Masterchef, which proved as much of a hit Downunder as in Britain, where it originated.

The publishing prize has resulted in Our Family Table, a handsome, weighty compendium filled with family recipes, passed down through generations, and newer dishes given to Goodwin by friends and neighbours.

The tastes are doled out in an orderly, 10-chapter fashion, starting with breakfast and covering the usual suspects: side dishes, desserts, sweets, special-occasion dinners and Christmas feasts.

More inventively, a chapter titled ‘Feeding the multitudes’ contains the dishes Goodwin loves to serve to her family (there’s a spaghetti bolognese, heavy on the mince, a ‘ridiculously cheesy lasagne’, chicken parmigiana . . . do you detect a theme?), while, in a rather sweet gesture, the final chapter (‘Our family table) consists of blank pages for the recording of the reader’s own culinary treasures.

‘Wide open spaces’ was my favourite, with its recipes for the camping trips Goodwin writes about relishing as a child and now with her husband and three sons. An easy recipe for damper on a stick is accompanied by a delectable ‘Camp fire train smash’ of vegetables and a simple lemon risotto cooked in a pot over the fire.

Our Family Table could not be classified as avant-garde: it features trusty crowd-pleasers and the odd harkening-back to a 1970s dinner party (veal with mushroom sauce, cauliflower cheese). There are instructions for ‘Mum Coughlan’s passionfruit shortbread’ and ‘Grandma’s hazelnut chocolate biscuits’: comfort food rather than culinary feats.

A personal attempt at Goodwin’s great-grandmother’s six-ingredient treacle scones resulted in small, light and irresistibly tasty morsels. They were moreish without being overly indulgent, the recipe calling for just three teaspoons of butter and two tablespoons of golden syrup.

The book leaves you with a strong sense of who Goodwin is, with its quotes and cooking tips from her loved ones (‘Use the good china. Every day is a special occasion’) and personal anecdotes (she shares the trial-by-fire experience of learning to make the perfect poached egg during a stint at a Sydney café).

It is not for the would-be chef or advanced home cook; for someone comfortable with the most complex tasks of Elizabeth David or Julia Child, this compendium of family favourites would be unchallenging and I daresay uninspiring.

Rather, it can be categorized alongside the likes of the Edmonds Cookery Book as a useful and dependable resource for simple, crowd-pleasing fare. The dishes are straightforward, requiring no sophisticated equipment or cooking techniques. Such risky dishes as souffle are modified by being twice-baked, and Goodwin manages to make even the potentially intimidating crème brulee, with its call for a blowtorch, look manageable.

Our Family Table is the work of a woman who loves food and who is accustomed to finding nutritious ways to fill the bellies of growing children. For those with similar requirements it would be a smart investment, and as one of the loveliest-looking cookbooks I have seen, a harmonious addition to the shelves.

3 / 5 stars: Comfort, not cordon bleu.   Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews

After the Party by Lisa Jewell

What a relationship looks like after 11 years and two small children is the subject of British writer Lisa Jewell’s unexpectedly moving new novel, After the Party.

Ralph and Jem meet as flatmates in a romantic London hovel; they fall in love at an art gallery in Ladbroke Grove when Ralph, an artist, unveils an exhibition of which the subject is Jem. As Jewell writes, Jem takes one look at the paintings, another look at Smith, Ralph’s friend and her erstwhile boyfriend (who is at that moment drunkenly proclaiming his love to a different, entirely uninterested woman), and promptly and passionately collapses into Ralph’s arms.

What follows is seven years of unrelenting bliss. They move from the flat to a house, have thriving careers and luxuriate in lie-ins and champagne-fuelled picnics in Battersea Park. Then Jem, approaching 32, decides she wants a baby. She has always desired a family; Ralph doesn’t see the need to add another person to their harmonious existence and proceeds with reluctance. The five childbearing years which ensue strain the relationship, with Jem suffering miscarriages before and between the births of Scarlett and Blake, and Ralph failing to bond with his infant son.

The book is cleverly structured, not following a linear form but opening with a prologue detailing Ralph and Jem’s separation and shared custody of the children – they spend the first half of the week with their mother and the second with their father. When Ralph fails to pick them up for his allotted three days, Jem knows something is wrong, and his vague explanation and subsequent disappearance heightens her concerns.

Part one (of four) begins one year earlier, as the relationship is disintegrating.  Panicked by Jem’s apparent disinterest in him, Ralph decides to go to California for a week to visit Smith. There, he meets a captivating Australian named Rosey, while back in London, Jem finds herself drawn to Joel, the solo dad of Scarlett’s friend. The week apart initially tightens the family unit, but the emotional distance remains, and when a plausibly unexpected and problematic event occurs, the couple’s foundations are shaken perhaps beyond recovery.

Clearly it’s ‘chick-lit’ (an annoyingly reductive categorization), but whether you consider that a selling point or an alarm bell, Jewell’s writing is artful and confident, elevating her story far above the mundane.

The tale’s focus is Ralph and Jem’s relationship, so the character development of the peripheral figures is less than robust; Smith, Rosey, Joel, Jem’s sister Lulu and others are ciphers designed to move the plot at breakneck pace towards a satisfying and thoughtful conclusion. (Though any one of these characters would make an engaging protagonist; Jewell has a knack for exposing the more intriguing elements of the human personality in a few paragraphs.)

After the Party is a sequel to the first of Jewell’s seven novels, Ralph’s Party, which covers the eventful period preceding Ralph and Jem’s coupling. It’s an intimate, cogent depiction of how a stable, loving relationship can start to fragment – and how people might behave in the face of this and amid the vicissitudes of life.

Jewell writes in the preface to After the Party that faithful readers’ excitement at the prospect of a sequel both spurred her on and terrified her, and she hopes she hasn’t let them down. On the contrary: this will win her many new fans.

3 / 5 Stars: The perfect mix of levity and sobriety. Click here to view other Easy Mix book reviews.

Hearts and Minds by Amanda Craig

A novel which examines contemporary life in a churning, teeming city with a complete absence of judgement is a rare thing. Even rarer is one which tells us something new about how we live now.

Hearts and Minds is ambitious, not least because Amanda Craig devotes equal space to five main characters in today’s London: Polly, a divorced human-rights lawyer and mother of two; Job, an illegal Zimbabwean immigrant working as a cab driver and car detailer; Anna, a 15-year-old Ukrainian prostitute; Katie, a young American working at a prominent magazine; and Ian, a South African teaching at a dysfunctional inner-city school.

The novel opens with the dumping of the body of an unknown woman in a pond on Hampstead Heath. Who the woman is, how she is connected to the other characters and how the five eventually meet each is the novel’s ostensible plot, and it is sharply rendered.

However, what makes Hearts and Minds one of the most exceptional contemporary novels of the past year is the clear-eyed, quiet pathos with which Craig tells her tale. At moments it feels like five books in one, with each the record of a person being drawn, steadily and almost magnetically, to those who will change their existence.

It is the connections formed between the characters that tells us who each one is. Polly, who has just ridden in Job’s cab, is caught out by the sudden departure of her nanny, Iryna, and needs someone to ferry herself and her young son around. She calls him back and, over hours together in a car, the two forge an unexpected bond.

Katie, bereft after breaking up with her fiance, is afforded by her solitude the chance to become the saviour of another character. Other encounters are fleeting and unrealized: Polly nearly runs down Ian, cycling in Hampstead; Job and Polly never know how closely they are tied to Anna.

Hearts and Minds is the sixth novel by Craig, a long-time reviewer and broadcaster and the children’s book critic for The Times. She says on her website that the seed of the novel was planted in 2001, when she began to notice just how many people in her daily London life were immigrants, from the cab drivers to the local café waitresses and the drycleaner – and started to consider whether they were legal or illegal, happy or unhappy, what had brought them to where they were.

The novel, intended for publication in 2004, was delayed by Craig’s serious health problems, and all the operations she required were performed by first or second generation immigrants, in hospitals in which she was nursed by women from all over the world. For a time after her hospital stay she was cared for by a series of au pairs from eastern Europe.

Craig’s experience is reflected in her work: there are conversations, recollections and musings that are so authentically depicted they could only have come from real life. As she says, the au pairs had fascinating stories to tell of war, ambition, misery and triumph over adversity. Craig has paid close attention to what she has been told, and has rewarded their faith with a novel filled with compassion and devoid of sentimentality.

It is not an easy read: there are scenes, particularly some involving Anna, that will make you wince. But, though the story begins with five people in varying states of fear and misery, it ends rather differently. What is in between is remarkable.

4 / 5 stars: One for the 2010 top 10 list.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

This Body of Death by Elizabeth George

“What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

So goes the biblical line (Romans 7:24) that prefaces Elizabeth George’s door-stopping new crime thriller. One surmises that the ‘wretched man’ is her long-time protagonist, DI Thomas Lynley, who, as the novel begins, is absent from Scotland Yard on compassionate grounds after the murder of his wife.

The primary plot of this well-upholstered tome involves a young woman, Jemma Hastings. Wanting to make amends for past wrongs, her estranged best friend, Meredith Powell, visits Jemma’s last known address, a property in Hampshire. There, she finds Jemma’s boyfriend, Gordon Jossie, shacked up with a new woman, Gina Dickens. Gordon tells Meredith that Jemma decamped to London some months earlier without explanation, leaving behind her car and other possessions.

Thus Meredith begins an investigation, at the same time as Scotland Yard, upon the discovery of Jemma’s body in a Stoke Newington cemetery. Heading the police taskforce is Isabelle Ardery, who has been seconded as an acting replacement for Lynley within the Met. Encountering a mistrustful team, she sees that the best way to get the outcome she needs in the Hastings case is to persuade Lynley to return. (George writes conflict well, and later scenes of mutiny against Isabelle are some of the finest in the book.)

Isabelle has demons she is struggling to quell, and the perceptive Lynley notices their manifestations almost at once. Queering his pitch is the fact that the result of this investigation will determine whether Isabelle is permanently appointed or cast out, and their mutual superior, who favours Isabelle, has asked Lynley to keep an eye out for any hint that he may be mistaken.

The investigation is multifaceted and at least half a dozen viable suspects emerge. The team must interrogate the owner and lodgers of the boarding house Jemma was living in before her death, a psychic (one of the book’s less worthwhile characters) enters the picture, and when a Roman artefact of indeterminate value is found, the trail appears to lead back to Hampshire.

Cleverly, George interposes the main narrative with brief chapters elucidating a sub-plot reminiscent of the tragic case of James Bulger, the Liverpool toddler who was killed by two 10-year-olds in 1993. The eventual linking of the two storylines is unexpected and enhances the richness and pathos of the conclusion.

This Body of Death was my introduction to both George (writer of 11 novels featuring Lynley) and her DI, and I was struck by what an appealing and intriguing character she has created. Though there are several notable serial protagonists in crime fiction, I have not encountered one as well-drawn as Lynley: he is compassionate without being treacly, and inspires trust and loyalty among the jaded and battered members of his unit. He seems like someone you might know, and wish to emulate.

Additionally, there is a complex and opaque dynamic between Lynley and his former partner at the Met, Barbara Havers, a recurring character whose personal proclivities George is at pains to veil. I couldn’t decipher exactly what was at issue; other readers will likely show more intuition than I did. Doubtless, how the Lynley-Havers partnership plays out during the DI’s slow recovery will be one of the treats of George’s next work.

3 / 5 stars: Weighty but worth it.  Click here to view other Easy Mix Book Reviews.

The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag by Alan Bradley

Rarely does a writer pull off the trick of producing a winning book for adults which stars a child protagonist. Mark Haddon did so successfully in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and Jonathan Safran Foer in the brilliant Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but more common are books written for children that are sufficiently clever and well-drawn to have cross-generational appeal, such as Tolkien and Rowling’s work, and much of Roald Dahl’s oeuvre.

All of which is just to say that when Alan Bradley made his writerly debut last year with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, featuring one Flavia de Luce as heroine, he was doing something quite audacious – producing a new kind of crime fiction for adults, replacing the customary grimness and gore with wit and the particular worldview of an extremely unusual 11-year-old.

‘Precocious’ does not begin to describe Flavia, who lives in the sleepy English hamlet of Bishop’s Lacey with her father and sisters and assorted housekeepers, gardeners and eccentric villagers. The year is 1950.

Flavia explores her passion for chemistry and the natural sciences in an abandoned Victorian laboratory on the de Luce property, Buckshaw. (Some experiments help her solve crimes; others are simply a means to torment her sisters, Ophelia and Daphne (‘Feely’ and ‘Daffy’), with whom she is permanently at war – the spiking of their food with unpleasant agents is a favourite pastime.)

The Sweetness opened with Flavia discovering a corpse in the cucumber patch at Buckshaw, the catalyst for an engaging yarn in which the youngest de Luce’s fearless detective work cleared her father’s name and pinpointed the real killer.

The Weed that String’s the Hangman’s Bag has the same formula that made the first book a bestseller. A travelling puppet show arrives in Bishop’s Lacey, and Flavia is quick to sense that not all is what it seems between the puppeteer, Rupert Porson, and his assistant, Nialla. She performs a lysozome test on Nialla’s handkerchief and detects a straightforward case of pregnancy. Shortly afterwards, an equipment failure during Rupert and Nialla’s performance of Jack and the Beanstalk in the village hall results in death, and Flavia, not taken in by suggestions of an accident, sets out to unmask the killer.

Perhaps it isn’t fair to compare the first Flavia de Luce book to the second, but The Weed is a weaker tale for not obeying, as The Sweetness did, some of the immutable rules of good crime fiction – chief among them being don’t faff around with the plotline. If the story hinges on a murder investigation, the unfortunate person needs to meet their Maker early on, not halfway through.

The unique wit and personality of Flavia shines as bright as ever – and she really is a stellar and singular creation, what with the misanthropic and mischievous goings-on in her brain. There were many moments that made me smile. An example? Confronted with a corpse, Flavia reflects: “Was I frightened out of my wits? I’m afraid not . . . I had developed a fascination with death, with a particular emphasis on the chemistry of putrefaction. In fact, I had already begun making notes for a definitive work, which I would call De Luce on Decomposition . . . “

I enjoyed The Weed immensely for what it is, a diverting and rather original read, but to elevate Flavia to the heights she deserves and cement her place in the canon of detective fiction, Bradley needs to give her material that is as strong as her personality next time round. Which won’t be long in coming – flaviadeluce.com reveals that the next four books in the Flavia series are already lined up, titles and all.

 2.5 / 5 stars: A mild case of ‘sophomore syndrome’ is counterbalanced by an addictively amusing main character. Click here to view more Easy Mix Book reviews

Head over Heels By Felicity Price

Kiwi women novelists have been immensely productive of late – writers from Jenny Pattrick to Paddy Richardson, Nicky Pellegrino, Laurence Fearnley, Sarah-Kate Lynch and Emily Perkins have all published some of their best work yet in the past couple of years, and have been deservedly lauded for it.

Christchurch’s Felicity Price has been beavering away with a somewhat lower profile than most of the aforementioned, but possibly that’s because she’s had a lot on: in addition to publishing novels, of which Head over Heels is her sixth (and the third to star Penny Rushmore), she wrote the bestselling John Britten biography Dare to Dream and runs a successful public relations agency with her husband.

She shares this propensity for busy-ness with her heroine Penny, who lives in an unnamed New Zealand city and in the dead centre of the maelstrom of a frantic career (as the head of a PR agency), two teenagers, elderly parents, and a new boyfriend intent on whisking her off on his Turkish research expedition.

Meanwhile, Penny’s ex-husband Steve is living a life of serenity with Jacinta, the nubile young woman for whom he abandoned his marriage a couple of years earlier. Penny is emphatically not okay with this, and when the news comes, via daughter Charlotte, that Jacinta is pregnant, Penny turns to her girlfriends, collectively known as the Ladies’ Philosophical Society, for succour and a great deal of wine.

On the heels of this wounding information, Penny learns that Charlotte is dating her university lecturer, and that her ailing mother, suffering from dementia in a rest home, is engaged in what looks like a raging affair with a fellow patient. (Penny and her mortified father are summoned for a candid chat with staff after the geriatric twosome are discovered in a linen cupboard.)

Another sub-plot involves Penny’s irresponsible and self-obsessed sister Stephanie, a writer who engages in the latest of many extra-marital escapades while overseas to promote her latest book. This affair is different, though – her prey is an aging British rock star, which attracts the attention of paparazzi, and when Stephanie begs her sister for help in managing the media to save her reputation, Penny starts to ponder whether she’s prepared to keep turning herself inside out for other people.

Seeking respite, Penny departs on what she envisages will be a sun-soaked and relaxed escape to Turkey with newish boyfriend Simon. Everyone survives the ensuing terrorist attack unscathed except for Simon, who returns from the Med with rather more baggage than he intended . . .

Be assured that the above merely touches on the plots and sub-plots that crowd Head over Heels – in fact, the novel would have been well-served by a slightly heavier hand in the editorial department, for reasons of both pace and accuracy. A running joke involving the family dog goes on far too long, while a reference to ‘Jimmy’ Hendrix had me wincing.

Head over Heels is no less a funny and absorbing read for these flaws. I am certain that the somewhat bawdy conversations had between the members of the Ladies’ Philosophical are entirely autobiographical, and the climactic scene of a wake in Penny’s home, neatly ending the story arc of each character, is finely constructed and remarkably moving. Penny Rushmore is not done yet.

2.5 / 5 stars: A great winter read – serve with a hot bath and glass of wine.  Click here to review other Easy Mix book reviews.

Survival In Auschwitz by Primo Levi

Recognized as one of the seminal books written about life inside a concentration camp, and one of the finest writings of any kind about the monstrosity that was Auschwitz, Primo Levi published If This Is A Man: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (‘Survival in Auschwitz’ was a stupid, pointless alteration made by his US publishers; evidently they felt American readers would fail to appreciate the nuance of the original name, also shared by the poem that opens the book).

Perhaps what stunned me most were Levi’s revelations about the politics of life in the camp, and the clear-eyed, almost dispassionate way he writes about his German captors. This novel was published in 1947, an eye-blink from the time of the atrocities, yet not a note of anger or bitterness is detectable.

He writes of the “funereal science” of the numbers at Auschwitz, tattooed on the forearms of each new entrant, “which epitomize the stages of destruction of European Judaism . . . the numbers told everything: the period of entry into the camp, the convoy of which one formed a part, and consequently the nationality. Everyone will treat with respect the numbers from 30,000 to 80,000: there are only a few hundred left and they represented the few survivals from the Polish ghettos.”

Lest the reader become overwhelmed with pity, he reminds us that human nature persists in the Lager: “It is as well to watch out in commercial dealings with a 116,000 or 117,000: they now number only about forty, but they represent the Greeks of Salonica, so take care they do not pull the wool over your eyes.”

In the final chapter, ‘The Story of Ten Days’, Levi recounts the approach, in January 1945, of the Russian army and the flight of the Germans from Auschwitz. Entranced by the prospect of escape, the healthier inmates undertake an ill-advised mass march from the camp, leaving the sick and weak to scrounge for food and warmth. There are only potatoes left to eat, and no one with the strength to stoke the massive furnaces. The horror still is not over. Some SS men penetrate the nearly empty camp and find that 18 Frenchmen have settled in the old SS-Waffe hall. “They killed them all methodically, with a shot in the nape of the neck, lining up their twisted bodies in the snow on the road,” Levi writes, noting that the corpses remained exposed until the arrival of the Russians: no one had the strength to bury them.

As Roth says, he fell ill only once and it was at the perfect time – those in the sick bay were forgotten and abandoned, and escaped being caught up in the forced evacuation that would surely have killed them. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his shipment to Auschwitz, Levi was one of only 20 who left the camp alive.

My edition, found at an Auckland second-hand bookshop, features an afterword, a conversation between Levi and the American novelist Philip Roth. From this I learned that apart from his year at Auschwitz and a brief period afterwards in which he circuitously journeyed home to Italy via Bielorussia, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria and Germany (he wrote about this experience in The Reawakening, the sequel to If This Is A Man), he spent the remainder of his life as a chemist and writer in his hometown of Turin, dying in a fall in his home in 1987, aged 67.

I considered excerpting a piece of the poem, to give the flavour, but to reduce it to two lines would be pointless. Like all great poems, it’s a work of art in itself. If it moves you at all, read the book.

If This Is A Man

You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street.
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.

5 / 5 stars: A masterpiece.

Caught by Harlan Coben

Until a few years ago I was relatively unversed in the crime/thriller/mystery genre, aside from the sedate likes of Agatha Christie and P D James: the modern megasellers (James Patterson, Jonathan Kellerman et al) hovered in my peripheral vision in other domains of the bookshop.

It was Harlan Coben’s compelling 2007 novel The Woods that at last introduced me to the sophisticated modern thriller, in which the reader finds a plot with multiple connected sub-plots, crime depicted in grisly detail, unforeseeable twists, and hard-bitten characters who, despite their seen-it-all-before miens, are invariably shocked by the new chaos they encounter as they lurch toward an unpredictable climax and denouement.

A common feature of the postmodern thriller is the clever use of science and technology – Kathy Reichs, Val McDermid and Karin Slaughter are handy at this – and these days the protagonist is as likely to be a forensic pathologist or crime-scene investigator as a detective inspector.

In Coben’s 17^th novel, Caught, he sticks to his knitting with a crackerjack story that makes a swift take-off. The scene is set with two parallel plotlines that initially don’t intersect – the disappearance of a 17-year-old high school student, and a sting operation by a tabloid reporter who tracks online sexual predators and exposes them in a national news programme.

In the opening chapter, the reporter, Wendy Tynes, follows social worker Dan Mercer to a house to which he has been summoned by a troubled teenage girl. She busts him, but the ‘exposure’ turns out to be less than definite – though there is little immediate evidence that Dan is in fact a child abuser, the repercussions for both Dan and Wendy are swift and calamitous.

Out of a job and still uncertain as to the truth about the social worker, Wendy finds her curiosity further piqued when Dan calls her, telling her he was set up and that they need to meet in person. He summons her to a trailer park in rural New Jersey where he has gone into hiding, and she finds him sporting mysterious bruises and a bad dye job. Before Wendy can learn more from Dan the plot thickens, as the father of another of Dan’s alleged victims storms the scene and takes what he believes to be revenge.

Coben uses this turn in the plot to pose the novel’s key questions: who are the real villains of the piece, what crimes have they committed, and has the missing girl, Haley McWaid, fallen victim to foul play or simply decided, on a teenage whim, to absent herself from ordinary life?

The latter query appears to be answered when the local sheriff’s scouring of Dan’s former motel room turns up Haley McWaid’s iPhone – with the plotted coordinates of a specific area of the local park. A connection between the two storylines has thus been established, and Coben ramps up the action with inspired digging by Wendy, who finds that Dan and his four college housemates have each experienced the destruction of their personal reputation in the past couple of years.

Dan’s avowal that he was a victim now seems justified – but who is targeting the men, and why?

To say more would be to spill the best beans of Caught, which doesn’t rewrite the rules of the crime thriller but more than meets the requirements of fans of the genre and this writer. Coben’s talent lies in pacing and structure – it is harder than it seems to dive between disparate narratives while engaging rather than confusing the reader – and in subtly guiding the reader’s interpretation of each character while withholding just enough crucial data to produce the requisite big bang. Very satisfying. 

3 / 5 Stars: No molds are being broken here, but it’s a pacy thriller from a highly competent practitioner.  Click here to view other Easy Mix book reviews