An ordinary day quickly turns into a nightmare when ten children and their bus driver are abducted and confined in a shipping container buried underground. Jesse, the bus driver, struggles with her own demons and how best to protect the children, while the eldest child, Sage, is determined to find a way out. Their choices may save or doom them. And it’s not just the choices inside the container that are in question, decisions made by one distraught parent could prove disastrous. The kidnappers promise release after the ransom is paid, but survival until then is uncertain. The dark, cramped...
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...
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...
