In writing what purports to be the ‘true’ autobiographical account of Elizabeth Macarthur -wife of Australia’s first wool baron- Grenville has actually created a gripping meditation on power in the late 18th century. Women’s power (or lack of it) features strongly, especially with regards to dominion over her own body. The one time a young Elizabeth feels and exercises her own sexual power she becomes pregnant, and marriage to the boorish, insensitive John MacArthur becomes an inevitability. Power over her own body is further diminished: “As a wife, with nowhere to go beyond wifedom, I was no more than a tenant in my body. If the landlord came to the door, I was obliged to let him in.”

During the course of her marriage Elizabeth does however learn subtle ways to manipulate the actions of her unbalanced bully of a husband. And within the confines of the life made by her husband, she creates her own life and finds, as a wise woman once said to her, “A woman can do many things, but she has to bide her time.”

The Elizabeth Macarthur of Grenville’s imagination is such good company; wry, funny, unflinchingly honest yet compassionate. Her voice stays with you well beyond the final pages of the book. But what really resonates is the injustice of the most unrelenting loss of power in the early days of colonial Australia; that of its original inhabitants.

A Room Made of Leaves is a beautiful and haunting piece of historical fiction. 4.5 stars.

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Two essentially decent siblings make one horrendous decision – to leave a dead, pregnant woman at the scene of a car accident caused by their negligence – and the consequences of that decision reverberate through every aspect of their lives.

It is 1974. Queensland is teetering on the precipice of massive social change but under the premiership of Joh Bjelke-Peterson, it’s still a comfortable place for corrupt cops to thrive. Siblings Abby and Charlie are attempting to find a way to live with what they’ve done while at the same time dealing with the complexities of family life, everyday life and their own uncertain futures, plus corrupt cops who suspect their involvement in the car accident and aren’t above using it as leverage. As it turns out – SPOILER ALERT – the pregnant woman killed in the car accident was the fiancé of Charlie and Abby’s dad’s and her ex-partner is a drug dealer aligned with corrupt cops being investigated by Abby’s husband, an investigative journalist. Sound complicated? Well, life is complicated. And this novel reflects that. It’s so intelligently multi-layered; it’s a deep dive while most thrillers are just a splash about on the surface.

I don’t know how Kirsten Alexander keeps producing such high quality literature but I sure hope she keeps it up. Riptides is well worth devoting a day to. 4 stars.

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Jump to the present and one of the family members is presented with disturbing news, forcing her to confront the fact that ‘before’ can never really be untangled from the present.

Life Before is an affecting, slow burning Australian thriller that takes its sweet time delivering a narrative of the shocking events of the past. You know some peculiar and nasty form of tragedy is on its way but that doesn’t make it less terrible when it finally arrives.

The past in this novel seems so much more vivid than the present; the book would have been sufficiently satisfying as a story about the car accident and its immeadiate consequences. The story set in the present seems a little forced, and the protagonist, Lori, is quite a colourless character. Is it really credible she would never have told her husband the truth of what happened to her family, or about the existence of a brother she knew was still alive? Debatable. But anyway, it’s a beautifully written, vivid portrait of a family before and after tragedy, and well worth a read. 4 stars.

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Of course this is about a missing child; the most nail biting thrillers usually are. Lexie Parker and her three year old daughter Bella attend a regular playgroup in a small village outside Canberra (fun fact; the village, named Merrigang in the book, is based on Uriarra). The playgroup needs Tim Tams (which playgroup doesn’t?) so, although Lexie is desperately anxious about leaving her daughter, she asks the other mums in playgroup to keep an eye on Bella and forces herself to walk to the shop for the required Tim Tams. She counts the seconds she is gone; a total of six minutes. By the time she returns, Bella has vanished. But how could she have disappeared so completely in such a small time? Did she wander off? Was she abducted?

This is a well crafted read, particularly for a first book. The characters are all believable and believably flawed. You do want to keep reading because it’s just as impossible to us as it is to her parents that Bella could have just vanished. Toward the end it gets a little far-fetched (three principal characters ending up locked in a chapel? And how many isolated rural properties have chapels, anyway?), but ultimately it’s a satisfying read.

And if, like me, you’re a parent who likes to pick at the scab of your darkest fears, do try these other missing child mysteries; Now You See Her by Heidi Perks and Have You Seen Her by Lisa Hall. No prizes for guessing the gender of the missing child in those two.

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David Tran came to Australia from Vietnam as a child refugee and has grown into a brilliant scientist. The immunology drug he invented could be enormously successful but first it needs to be tested on humans. What David does next leaves everyone reeling, battling with guilt and unanswered questions. Every character holds a piece of the puzzle; the reader gets to see them all put together into one surprisingly devastating picture.

It’s not often that science and thrills come together, but Susan Hurley blends them masterfully in Eight Lives. It’s Hurley’s first novel but her biography says she “has worked in medical research and the pharmaceutical industry for more than thirty years”, and it shows. There’s so many interesting issues here: the ethics of scientific experimentation on humans and animals, refugees, poisonous secrets, greed, murder, spin, domestic violence, racism and one deeply irritating vegan.

What more could you want? Get behind Hurley and hopefully she’ll write many more as good as this one.

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I’m not usually a fan of novels involving time travel but here it’s dealt with in such a matter-of-fact way, it becomes entirely credible. It helps that Stella doesn’t deliberately travel back in time; she just gets off a bus and wonders where the hell the jacaranda blossoms she saw this morning have gone. Then she meets her former self in the street and carries on from there.

Time travelling Stella has endured one major tragedy; the loss of her daughter, Claire, to a drug overdose when Claire was sixteen. Stella has always felt that Abby, one of Claire’s friends, was largely responsible for her daughter’s drug taking and death. When Stella finds herself back in 1997, four years before Claire dies, she sets about trying to eliminate the influence of Abby in Claire’s life. As time goes by she contemplates increasingly ruthless methods. But it seems every move Stella makes has an effect on the future, and her memories of the past sway and alter in response to her actions. It’s a fascinating process and makes for compulsive reading, seeing whether Stella can save her daughter and what else she’s going to mess up along the way.

Another of the lost girls in Stella’s life is her aunt, Linda. Linda disappeared from her small home town when she was a teenager, well before Stella was born. To infiltrate her way into Stella’s family, time travelling Stella pretends to be the missing Linda – a questionable ethical choice, but one that gets her inside her old family life where she needs to be to begin influencing the future.

Stella’s mother Anne, a sister to the missing Linda, isn’t fooled for a second. I particularly love the relationship and conversations Stella has with her mother. Anne eventually comes to know the truth about Stella’s time travel but wisely refrains from asking Stella too many questions about the future. After all, would you want to know when and how you end up dying? And if you did, could you do anything about it? Would you?

The Lost Girls is written with such intelligence and compassion; it reminds me very much of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. Both novels utilise time travel as a tool for the exploration of the human condition and both have a distinct understanding of what is, in the end, important in a life. Stella doesn’t spend her time in the past trying to influence world events or giving her younger self stock market tips. Instead she revels in seeing her children and husband again, as they were, and tries to use a light touch when steering them away from their worst choices. But so many of her acts have unintended consequences.

The Lost Girls ultimately leaves you with a sense of sadness at the inevitability of loss in every life, but it is such a beautiful read you can sit with the sadness for a while, and not mind it.

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When Diana is found dead it’s initially unclear whether it was murder or suicide. And when her family discover she lied to them about having breast cancer and has left all her money to charity, there’s a collective sense of WTF?! 

It’s such a relief to read a gripping thriller with complex, intelligently drawn characters. I feel like ripping the vast majority of books off the crime fiction shelves in bookshops and replacing them with multiple copies of this one. This is how you do it.

Diana is a brilliant and quite brittle character. Her tough past as a single mother estranged from her Catholic family in 1970’s Australia means she feels most at ease with the pregnant refugees her charity supports. She respects the fact they have struggled and is more comfortable helping them than her own priviledged children.

Diana’s relationship with her daughter-in-law Lucy is characterised by a mutual sense of incomprehension. Lucy longs for a mother figure and can’t fathom Diana’s apparent indifference to her. Diana thinks Lucy is a good mother, though she’s never told her so, but she cannot understand Lucy’s choice to remain out of the workforce after the birth of her children, because what if something happens to her husband?

Why, Lucy wonders, are mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationships often so deeply fraught? Why don’t sons-in-law and fathers-in-law have the same issues? The book suggests it’s because mothers-in-laws and daughters-in-law care too much. And that sounds about right to me.

So many of the relationships in this novel ring true; the way the family cope with the lazy, abrasive son/brother-in-law, the massive role money plays in the childrens’ interactions with their parents, the misunderstandings that stem from acts intended to be kind, the perceived transgressions in the way grandparents take care of their grandkids and the way advice offered up by the older generation in an attempt to be helpful is so often perceived as criticism. As a portrait of a family, The Mother-In-Law is utterly believable. At the same time it’s a compelling mystery as information from the police investigation into Diana’s death is slowly drip-fed to the family and they become increasingly isolated from one another. Lucy’s husband is identified as being present at Diana’s house the afternoon Diana died. Does that mean…..? And what does Lucy know about Diana’s intention to commit suicide?

Buy this book. Read it. Choose it for your book club if you have one. And then get onto all the other Sally Hepworth novels, like I’m about to.

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Sophie McCarthy, an obsessive high achiever, now lives in constant pain following a car accident caused by the negligence of Aidan Ryan. While Sophie was in hospital recovering from the accident, she and Aidan acted on their unexpected attraction to one another, and now they live together. Which is a bit controversial because Aidan was married when they met and has a young child, Jasmin. And Jasmin is going through some difficulties at home. And Sophie secretly loathes children in general and resents Jasmin in particular. And Sophie’s father is incandescent with rage towards Aidan because of the injuries he inflicted on Sophie, and he has a burning desire to see Aidan pay. And and and… underlying it is all is the fact that the human heart and mind are complicated places, and sometimes lives intertwine in ways that become toxic.

The central question is this; is Sophie McCarthy missing some pieces as a result of the accident, or was she missing some essential pieces of what it means to be a decent human being well before then? An incident from Sophie’s past can perhaps supply an answer….

I love that no one in this book is a complete villain (though Sophie arguably comes close); it’s just a collection of human beings dealing with life and one another. And it’s very, very good.

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”Violence is about exhibiting power and dominance, no doubt, but it is simultaneously about denying or disguising frailty. It is an assertion of boundaries, a shoring-up of status not only in the eyes of others but in one’s own estimation. It is a way of reclaiming honour and a form of ultimate conflict resolution.”

In other words, violence in this form is toxic masculinity at its most virulent.

Cuskelly is a fine writer, sensitive and restrained. She reminds me of Helen Garner and that is a huge compliment. She interviews family and friends of the victims with the guilty knowledge that they will most likely be unhappy with what she writes, and feel betrayed. But still, she tries. She also tries to get a sense of the character of the victims and perpetrator from the people of Wedderburn, while acknowledging the accounts she is given of their character and their actions are often contradictory. She tries hard to be fair, while acknowledging her own very human reaction to the brutality of the murders and the seemingly remorseless perpetrator.

What lingers at the end of the book is a sense of terrible waste; the wasted lives of the victims, the regrets of their splintered families and the almost endless waste of time during Jamieson’s torturously slow and self indulgent progression through the legal system.

The fact is that small men who feel slighted can do terrible things. Cuskelly’s examination in Wedderburn clarifies our understanding of why and demonstrates the damage this kind of poisonous, inarticulate masculinity leaves in its wake.

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