The Woman in the Library, Sulari Gentil (292 pps)
Amazon blurb:
Ned Kelly award winning author Sulari Gentill sets this mystery-within-a-mystery in motion with a deceptively simple, Dear Hannah, What are you writing? pulling us into the ornate reading room at the Boston Public Library.
The tranquility is shattered by a woman's terrified scream. Security guards take charge immediately, instructing everyone inside to stay put until the threat is identified and contained. While they wait for the all-clear, four strangers, who'd happened to sit at the same table, pass the time in conversation and friendships are struck. Each has his or her own reasons for being in the reading room that morning—it just happens that one is a murderer.
Sulari Gentill delivers a sharply thrilling read with The Woman in the Library, an unexpectedly twisty literary adventure that examines the complicated nature of friendship and shows us that words can be the most treacherous weapons of all.
NOTE: This is an interesting book and author for a number of reasons. She's an Australian author, another in my cadre of favorite Aussie writers, but she was born in Sri Lanka, and raised in Zambia as well as Brisbane, Australia. Early in her education she studied astrophysics, but ended up graduating with a law degree.
And her novels are equally interesting. This one is officially a mystery novel, but it also has epistolary characteristics, and two time frames as well as geographical locations. Her novel, Crossing the Lines, won the Ned Kelly award in 2018. And her novel A Few Right Thinking Men was nominate for the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2011. Not only that, but she has 10 novels in her Rowland Sinclair detective series set in World War II.
Expect one of her novels to appear on the schedule in a future class.
Katherine Kovacic, The Shifting Landscape (an Alex Clayton art mystery)
Amazon blurb: Art dealer Alex Clayton travels to Victoria’s Western District to value the McMillan family’s collection. At their historic sheep station, she finds an important and previously unknown colonial painting - and a family fraught with tension. There are arguments about the future of the property and its place in an ancient and highly significant indigenous landscape.When the family patriarch dies under mysterious circumstances and the painting is stolen, Alex decides to leave; then a toddler disappears and Alex’s faithful dog, Hogarth, goes missing. With fears rising for the safety of both child and hound, Alex and her best friend, John, who has been drawn into the mystery, join searchers scouring the countryside. But her attempts to unravel the McMillan family secrets have put Alex in danger, and she’s not the only one. Will the killer claim another victim? Or will the landscape reveal its mysteries to Alex in time? See also Painting in the Shadows
Hayley Scrivenor, Dirt Creek
Yes, there's a theme here. I'm back checking out Aussie lit. This one has gotten good reviews, recommended by Jane Harper, may or may not live up to expectations.
Amazon blurb:
Who's lying about what happened at Dirt Creek? “Blends a taut psychological thriller with a suspenseful police procedural. Fans of Liane Moriarty and Jane Harper won’t want to miss this page-turner.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A novel of sharp-edged tempers, accidents waiting to happen and dark inheritances.” —New York Times Book Review
When twelve-year-old Esther disappears on the way home from school in a small town in rural Australia, the community is thrown into a maelstrom of suspicion and grief. As Detective Sergeant Sarah Michaels arrives in town during the hottest spring in decades and begins her investigation, Esther’s tenacious best friend, Ronnie, is determined to find Esther and bring her home. When school friend Lewis tells Ronnie that he saw Esther with a strange man at the creek the afternoon she went missing, Ronnie feels she is one step closer to finding her. But why is Lewis refusing to speak to the police? And who else is lying about how much they know about what has happened to Esther? Punctuated by a Greek chorus, which gives voice to the remaining children of the small, dying town, this novel explores the ties that bind, what we try and leave behind us, and what we can never outrun, while never losing sight of the question of what happened to Esther, and what her loss does to a whole town.In Hayley Scrivenor's Dirt Creek, a small-town debut mystery described as The Dry meets Everything I Never Told You, a girl goes missing and a community falls apart and comes together.
Lucy Treloar, Wolfe Island, author of Salt Creek
Completely different novel from Salt Creek, but beautifully written. Available from Amazon only, as far as I know.
Amazon blurb: 'Atmospheric...evocative...important. Kitty Hawke, the last inhabitant of a dying island sinking into the wind-lashed Chesapeake Bay, has resigned herself to annihilation... Until one night her granddaughter blows ashore in the midst of a storm, desperate, begging for sanctuary. For years, Kitty has kept herself to herself - with only the company of her wolfdog, Girl - unconcerned by the world outside, or perhaps avoiding its worst excesses. But blood cannot be turned away in times like these. And when trouble comes following her granddaughter, no one is more surprised than Kitty to find she will fight to save her as fiercely as her name suggests...A richly imagined and mythic parable of home and kin that cements Lucy Treloar's place as one of our most acclaimed novelists.
Winner of the Barbara Jefferis Award, 2020,
Shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction 2020
Shortlisted for NSW Premier's Literary Award for Fiction, 2020
Shortlisted fir ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year, 2020
Longlisted for the Voss Literary Award 2020
The Memory of an Elephant, Alex Lasker, got 4.7* on Amazon
Blurb: "The Memory of an Elephant" is an epic saga told by an aging African elephant as he makes a last, perilous journey to find the humans who rescued him as an orphan some fifty years ago. Interwoven with his narrative are the tumultuous lives of the family who raised and then lost him. This timeless story is alternately heartwarming and heartwrenching, spanning east Africa, Great Britain and New York from 1962 to 2015. Note: the elephant is one of the narrators!
The Great Circle, Maggie Shipstead, (608 pps) got 4.4* on AMZ
New York Times bestseller. The unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost: an “epic trip—through Prohibition and World War II, from Montana to London to present-day Hollywood—and you’ll relish every minute” (People).
After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There--after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes--Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles.
A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian's disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian's own story, as the two women's fates--and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times--collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.
NOTE: I'm reluctant about this novel mainly because of its length.