I’m not an avid historical fiction reader but when a book cover has the line “Send a woman to do a man’s job”, I can’t help but be enticed to find out just what ‘man’s job’ benefits from a woman’s touch! This book explores the fascinating world of Victorian funeral customs and features Sydney's first female undertaker. Tatiana Caldwell's childhood in London is idyllic and filled with the love of doting parents. But when they die in quick succession, she's left heartbroken and destitute, and at seventeen emigrates to Sydney in 1864, determined to build a new, financially secure life...
On the recommendation of a Petronella Book Club member, I picked up this book for my first new year read. A fictional reimagining of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon in 1969, it is a mix of fact and fiction cleverly woven together to create a real page turner. What if the Apollo mission had failed to return from the moon? What if this epic moment in history had a completely different outcome? Using parallel versions of the true characters involved, this novel covers both the mechanical and humanistic workings of orchestrating such a momentous event and the strength...
When I had the opportunity to read the second Kawai book ‘Tree of Nourishment’, I decided it was time to get educated. This book for me is my book of the year and I have read some real goodies this year! A hauntingly beautiful and powerful follow up to ‘Kawai: For such a time as this’. It's 1818 on the East Coast of New Zealand. Hine-aute, granddaughter of the warrior Kaitanga, is fleeing through the bush, a precious yet gruesome memento contained in her fishing net. What follows is a gripping tale of a people on the cusp of unprecedented...
If you are looking for a new take on the suspense thriller genre, then you will be pleasantly surprised when reading The Ledge, by Christian White. It’s a shift from the current all too popular detective storylines that seem to be filling the books shelves at the moment. Set in small town Australia, the book follows two different timelines. Now and back in the past 1999 when three teenage boys were forced to make a pact to never tell anyone..... no one can ever find out what happened. Now, human remains are found in the forest of the small...
If you are looking for a lovely, light and scintillating book, I can highly recommend You Are Here by David Nicholls. His name may sound familiar because he is the author of One Day, which is made into a very popular Netflix series. But don’t be fooled, You Are Here is nothing like the tragic One Day or any other love story because it is excitingly witty AND the two main characters are not young (relatively speaking). Michael is 42, bearded and a geography teacher from York. He plans to walk the 200 miles across Britain in order to distract...
Over 250 plants and fungi to forage in Aotearoa By Peter Langlands Penguin, $50 Earlier this year I wrote about Fungi of Aotearoa by Liv Sisson and mentioned the imminent publication of a ‘companion’ book: Foraging New Zealand by Peter Langlands. Peter has long been a leading expert in foraging. He has created a large, personal database of 7500 edible flora and fauna species in New Zealand. For this book he limited himself to plant-based foraging and to only 250 of our tastiest wild plants. The book starts with chapters on edible plant families listed in alphabetical order...
