Membaca

Zoe and Ollie Morley tried for years to have a baby and couldn't. They turned to adoption and their dreams came true when they were approved to adopt a little girl from birth. They named her Evie.  Seven years later, the family has moved to Yorkshire and grown in number: a wonderful surprise in the form of baby Ben. As a working mum it's not easy for Zoe, but life is good.  But then Evie begins to receive letters and gifts.  The sender claims to be her birth father. He has been looking for his daughter.  And now he is coming to take her back... After reading Sanjida Kay's debut Bone by Bone last year I have been waiting patiently for the release of her second book and having now finished reading The Stolen Child it is safe to say that the curse of book two didn't hit this author as this book was even better than her debut. After failing to conceive Zoe and Ollie take the next step and decide to adopt a beautiful baby girl who was born with the effects of having a dr...

Fiction Skirting the law, searching for truth TWIST OF THE KNIFE By Becky Masterman 320 pp. Minotaur Reviewed by Sarah Corbett Morgan Protagonist Brigid Quinn is a retired FBI officer, having left the force early for reasons hinted at but not detailed in this third Brigid Quinn mystery. These details are in the author’s previous Quinn books, which I have not read, but might after reading this one. Quinn has flown to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where her elderly father is in the hospital with pneumonia and not doing well.  During her stay, she reconnects with an old co-worker, Laura Coleman, now a temporary investigator for the Innocence Project. She has dredged up new details on the closed case, the murder of a woman and subsequent disappearance of her three children. The husband, Marcus Creighton, was convicted and has been sitting on death row for the past 15 years.  The case is old, and many have told her to leave it alone, but Coleman believes he is innocent, framed for the ...

Relics of the Franklin Expedition: Discovering Artifacts from the Doomed Arctic Voyage of 1845 By Garth Walpole Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017, $39.95 Reviewed by Jonathan Dore Garth Walpole was an Australian archaeologist who early on became fascinated with Franklin’s final expedition, and who wrote his undergraduate thesis on the relics recovered from it by various searchers and held in the National Maritime Museum, London.  In later life he decided to expand this research and publish the results as a book, and had completed most of this work before he sadly succumbed to cancer in 2015. Before his death he had asked Russell Potter to edit the work for publication, and it has now been published by McFarland (who also brought out Glenn Stein’s Discovering the North West Passage ). With the first major exhibition of the relics in more than a century due to open this summer, publication could not have been better timed, despite the poignant reminder that the author did not live to se...

Fiction Off the grid THE TERRANAUTS T. C. Boyle 508 pp. Harper Collins Reviewed by Marty Carlock Can a self-sustaining biosphere be created on, say, Mars to enable human beings to live on an alien planet? Theorists think so. A couple of decades ago an attempt to perform this experiment actually took place in the Arizona desert; it was called Biosphere2. Although a crew stayed inside for two years, they cheated on several crucial levels, such as importing outside oxygen. T. Coraghessan Boyle, one of our more prolific and entertaining contemporary novelists, satirizes the experiment in The Terranauts . In his fecund imagination, another mission is undertaken (with snide references to the actual, failed one). Boyle has no problem visualizing the probabilities as eight “Terranauts” attempt to survive for two years in an artificial environment. E2 (E1 is the actual Earth, outside) is carefully planned: Its three acres comprise five biomes – rain forest, ocean, desert, savanna and marsh. The...

When a stranger asks Jo Blackmore for a lift she says yes, then swiftly wishes she hadn't. The stranger knows Jo's name, she knows her husband Max and she's got a glove belonging to Jo's two year old daughter Elise. What begins with a subtle threat swiftly turns into a nightmare as the police, social services and even Jo's own husband turn against her. No one believes that Elise is in danger. But Jo knows there's only one way to keep her child safe – RUN. I have been a huge fan of C.L Taylor her books have always kept me on edge and in complete suspense all the way through so I have been eagerly awaiting the release of The Escape to see what the author has lined up for us next. When Jo Blackmore finishes work to go and collect her daughter Elise from nursery she is approached by a woman asking for a lift and as she gets into Jo’s car it soon becomes clear that this woman is about to shatter Jo’s world when she makes a threat to Elise’s safety unless Jo gets her ...

Fiction Born in Vietnam, made in America THE REFUGEES By Viet Thanh Nguyen 224 pp. Grove Press Reviewed by Sarah Corbett Morgan The Refugees is an excellent collection of short stories Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote before his 2015 Pulitzer-prize winning novel, The Sympathizer . All eight stories were previously published in lit magazines between 2007 and 2011.  Nguyen writes with compassion about people caught in the middle.  We may encounter them when we get our nails done or shop in small Asian specialty markets. They are the people who live their lives half in one culture and half in another.  He knows what it is to be an outsider and yet a part of a new country. In 1975 he and his family were part of the mass exodus of some two million refugees fleeing Vietnam when communists took control of the country. He describes himself as “born in Vietnam and made in America.”  An epigraph in the front of the book quotes Roberto Bolaño’s Antwerp : “I wrote this book for the ghos...

No one ever disappears completely... You leave for work one morning. Another day in your normal life. Until you come home to discover that your boyfriend has gone. His belongings have disappeared. He hasn't been at work for weeks. It's as if he never existed. But that's not possible, is it? And there is worse still to come. Because just as you are searching for  him someone is also watching  you . When Gone Without a Trace by Mary Torjussen was recommended to me I was so intrigued by the premise of this book that I abandoned my current read and started this book immediately and I wasn’t disappointed. When Hannah arrives home from work with exciting news she cannot wait to share with her partner Matt but as soon as she enters their home she knows something is amiss. Matt has gone….. Not only has Matt left but there is no trace that he was ever there, all his belongings have gone even the new TV and in its place sits her old tv from before they were together. It is clear he h...