 |
| BiP staff review by Leonie |
Everyone Brave is Forgiven
by Chris Cleave
May 2016 | Sceptre | $29.99pb *BiP price $26.95
In September 1939 Mary North, the daughter of an English parliamentarian, was in her last year of finishing school in Switzerland when she heard that war had been declared. Forty-five minutes later she had signed up, expecting the adventure of a lifetime. Mary was rather deflated when she realized that she had been assigned to a school to teach a class of young Londoners. Her parents and best friend Hilda were astonished. Within a week her charges had been evacuated to the country and her services were no longer required. Desperate to find another position as a teacher she tracked down Tom Shaw, the 23-year-old man who had been appointed head of the school district. Tom eventually agreed to engage her to teach a group of children who were unable to be evacuated. Mary began to love teaching and her little class of misfits. Tom and his friend and flatmate Alistair were both attracted by Mary’s zest for life. When Alistair’s job at the Tate Gallery was wound up he enlisted, barely surviving the brutal training regime. As Mary and Tom become closer Alistair is sent to the Mediterranean with his unit, without telling Mary how he felt about her. Chris Cleave has written a powerful novel of the Second World War, which brings to life the hell that was daily life for the people of London during the Blitz. In the second part of the story, which takes place during the siege of Malta, the author describes quite graphically how the Maltese population and the British military were almost starved into submission. This is a marvellous book by one of our favourite authors. By the time I had reached the last page I wanted to start all over again.
Good People
by Nir Baram
May 2016 | Text | $32.99pb
By late 1938 Thomas Heiselberg has built a career in Berlin as a market researcher for an American advertising company. In Leningrad, twenty-two-year-old Sasha Weissberg has grown up eavesdropping on the intellectual conversations in her parents' literary salon. They each have grand plans for their lives. Neither of them thinks about politics too much, but after catastrophe strikes they will have no choice. Thomas puts his research skills to work elaborating Nazi propaganda. Sasha persuades herself that working as a literary editor of confessions for Stalin's secret police is the only way to save her family. When destiny brings them together, they will have to face the consequences of the decisions they have made. Nir Baram's Good People has been showered with praise in many countries. With its acute awareness of the individual amid towering historical landscapes, it is a tour de force: sparkling, erudite, a glimpse into the abyss.
Nir Baram was born into a political family in Jerusalem in 1976. His grandfather and father were both ministers in Israeli Labor Party governments. He has worked as a journalist and an editor, and as an advocate for equal rights for Palestinians. He began publishing fiction when he was twenty-two, and is the author of five novels, including The Remaker of Dreams, Good People and World Shadow. His novels have been translated into more than ten languages and received critical acclaim around the world. He has been shortlisted several times for the Sapir Prize and in 2010 received the Prime Minister's Award for Hebrew Literature.
The Other Side of Silence (Bernie Gunther 11)
by Philip Kerr
April 2016 | Quercus | $29.99pb
The French Riviera, 1956. A world-weary Bernie Gunther is working under a false name as a hotel concierge. His attempts to keep his nose clean go horribly awry when a wartime acquaintance sucks him into a blackmail plot involving one of the most famous British writers of the 20th century and the Cambridge Spies. Bernie is missing his old detective life when his past walks through the door in the shape of Harold Hennig, a former captain in the Nazi security service - the man who, in 1945, was responsible for the deaths of thousands, among them a woman Bernie loved. Hennig now enjoys a lucrative career as a blackmailer. Hennig's target on the Cote d'Azur is a famous resident with a dark past and plenty to hide - the writer, Somerset Maugham. A shared love of bridge draws Bernie to Maugham's magnificent villa, where Maugham tells him of the existence of a very compromising photograph. Taken in 1937, it shows Maugham among a group of naked men beside a swimming pool - one of whom is the infamous spy and homosexual, Guy Burgess, who, with Donald Maclean, has recently defected to Moscow. Hennig has the photograph and is demanding $50,000 for its release. Bernie is reluctant to become Maugham's agent but his former life has made him as vulnerable to blackmail as Maugham himself. Not only that - he has a massive score to settle with Hennig.
All These Perfect Strangers
by Aoife Clifford
March 2016 | Simon & Schuster | $29.99pb
You don’t have to believe in ghosts for the dead to haunt you. You don’t have to be a murderer to be guilty. Within six months of Pen Sheppard starting university, three of her new friends are dead. Only Pen knows the reason why. College life had seemed like a wonderland of sex, drugs and maybe even love. Full of perfect strangers, it felt like the ideal place for Pen to shed the confines of her small home town and reinvent herself. But the darkness of her past clings tight, and when the killings begin and friendships are betrayed, Pen’s secrets are revealed. The consequences are deadly.
‘This is about three deaths. Actually more, if you go back far enough. I say deaths but perhaps all of them were murders. It’s a grey area. Murder, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. So let’s just call them deaths and say I was involved. This story could be told a hundred different ways.’
Your secrets define you, don’t let them kill you.
