HISTORICAL
HISTORICAL
The Golden Gate
by Amy Chua
(Corvus £16.99, 384pp)
(Corvus £16.99, 384pp)
Brimful of plot, packed with intriguing characters and set against a backdrop of wide-sweeping political change, the debut novel by the author of the memoir Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother is a riveting homage to American crime noir.
It’s 1944, and presidential hopeful and millionaire magnate Walter Wilkinson has been shot. Suspects are Isabella Stafford and her cousins Nicola and Cassie Bainbridge — all heirs to the fortune of grandmother Genevieve, who knows all the family secrets, but refuses to say who pulled the trigger.
Hard-boiled homicide detective Al Sullivan is intent on identifying the killer, while taking care of his young niece, fending off the approaches of femme fatale Isabella and unravelling a back story that takes in race, class, corruption, political ambition and doomed family history.
The Vaster Wilds
by Lauren Groff
(Heinemann £20, 272pp)
(Heinemann £20, 272pp)
It’s the depth of winter in New England of 1610 and a woman is desperately fleeing the besieged Jamestown colony, where the inhabitants are slowly dying of smallpox and starvation.
There’s fresh blood underneath her fingernails, stolen boots on her feet, murder in her heart and a determination to survive. What follows is a test of endurance and resourcefulness. Foraging for food, building fires and making shelters, she crosses the treacherous landscape, leaving behind her servant past as she heads into an uncertain future.
It’s a novel of bleakness and beauty, as the relentless demands of eking out a life wreck her ‘good strong dancing body’, while the wonders of nature leave her spirit ‘ravished’.
Sisters Under The Rising Sun
by Heather Morris
(Zaffre £20, 400pp)
(Zaffre £20, 400pp)
More heartbreak and quiet heroism here from the best-selling author of The Tattooist Of Auschwitz, who tells the story of a group of more than 500 women held prisoner by the Japanese in brutal Indonesian jungle camps.
Among them are the brave Australian nursing sisters, including the redoubtable Nesta James (whose real life experiences inspired the novel) and Norah Chambers, an accomplished musician, who brings the solace of song to the ill and starving women and children.
Morris’ unadorned prose works best when describing the dehumanising conditions in the camps, and the women’s valiant efforts to fight despair, but there’s a stilted sameness to the dialogue that blurs the individuality of her characters, and adds an unneeded gloss of sentimentality to a harrowing story.
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