The Ridge by Michael Koryta, Arena, $24.99.

Just like Deputy Sheriff Kevin Kimble and local journalist Roy Damus, you’ll ever so slowly be convinced that there’s something not quite human about the dramas unfolding at Blade Ridge.

There are the unexplained car wrecks, drownings and suicides. And they’re made even stranger by the number of survivors who walk away without a scratch.

Beautiful killer Jacqueline Mathis knows what’s there, so do the big cats at the local wildlife preserve, and crazy drunk Wyatt French didn’t build a lighthouse many miles from the sea for no good reason.

This forgotten part of Kentucky has a brutal history, one that’s never quite disappeared. But how can two ordinary men fight an evil they cannot see?

The Ridge starts as a mystery, quickly becomes a thriller, and then descends relentlessly into the realms of horror.

Koryta’s great achievement is in making this supernatural story frighteningly real.

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Portrait of A Spy by Daniel Silva, Harper Collins, $32.99.

Gabriel Allon could have been acknowledged as the world’s greatest art restorer if that occupation hadn’t merely been a cover for his true talent.

This sensitive and loyal man, a lover of Renaissance art, is Israel’s top assassin. The only thing he can’t seem to do is retire.

This is the 11th Gabriel Allon book from author Daniel Silva. No matter how hard Allon tries to lead a quiet life among unsuspecting Cornish villagers, Silva drags him back into the dangerous, high-speed world of international espionage.

In Portrait of a Spy, terrorists are targeting European capitals, and it’s Allon’s bad luck to be the only person to spot the sweaty suicide bomber lumbering in a heavy overcoat through London’s Covent Garden.

Forget James Bond and Jason Bourne! Gabriel Allon is the trained killer you’d want on your side, he’s a cultured killer with a heart of gold.

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Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff, Virgin, $45.

The richest woman in the world, queen of an enlightened empire, and the lover of two great Roman leaders, Cleopatra made such an impact in her lifetime that she has never been forgotten.

From Plutarch to Shakespeare, through to Elizabeth Taylor, there’s always room for another Cleopatra, and it seems Angelina Jolie could be the next. But who was she?

Stacy Schiff’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography finds a charming but not beautiful woman, a canny politician, a flatterer in dozens of languages, and above all a survivor.

When she was just 21, Julius Caesar helped her win back her empire, and together they had a child. They were so close, Cleopatra was staying with Caesar in Rome when his political enemies stabbed him to death.

Her second great conquest, Marc Antony, loved parties and pranks, and the two scandalised Rome with their shenanigans before famously dying together, defeated and humiliated.

Schiff’s life of Cleopatra is detailed, scholarly and vibrant, and it resists the assumptions, melodrama and sensationalism that haunted Cleopatra in life and in death.

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Empire Day by Diane Armstrong, HarperCollins, $32.99.

“It’s strange,” muses one of Armstrong’s struggling-to-settle Eastern European immigrees to Sydney in Australia’s post-war melting pot.

“A huge country with hardly any people, an empty centre and no history.”

“That’s exactly why I love it,” responds her husband. “A country without a past, but with a big future…” Of course, therein lies the travesty of the wiping out of indigenous history from the mouths of those who should have known better, as this fictional swag of “reffos” — string holding their paltry suitcases of belongings together — escape religious persecution in their homelands in the late 1940s, only to suffer the indignities of humiliation as “New Australians”, condemned for their smelly foods and accused of “buying up of all the flats” from true Australians.

Polish-born journalist Armstrong writes about what she knows, and cleverly weaves an evocative, multi-layered serial of migrants and white Australians battling wartime loss side by side, goulash versus grilled lamb.

Together these spirited, recognisable families will discover common differences, shared secrets and the spirit of community.

Nothing escapes Armstrong’s strong social eye, from the six o’clock pub swill to the smoking GP, to the PM [Ben] Chifley, “an engine driver who becomes a prime minister… this is the real socialist Utopia!” and the sterling efforts of a certain Australian Women’s Weekly magazine medico to address the rising divorce rate in encouraging women to be conciliatory and more feminine!

Just as much will change for the characters from one Empire Day to the next. Happily, much more ignorance has bitten the dust since too.

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Surviving Maggie by John Fingleton, HarperCollins, $29.99.

Surviving his drunken mother, Maggie, ultimately meant that Harold Fingleton was destroyed, in this despairingly bleak tale of history repeating.

What Harold, the author’s father, achieved was to halt the descent into a third generation, protecting his five children to a greater degree from his own alcoholism, although “Dealing with the dreadful expectation of these on-again, off-again phases [of binge drinking] became a dominant feature of our lives, especially during our teenage years”.

This desperately sad account by John Fingleton, the brother of Swimming Upstream author and film producer Tony, makes for painful reading.

It finishes where Tony’s book began and John’s intention was to write his “side” of the well documented family history.

Their father’s silent acceptance of savage beatings, near starvation, years in a state orphanage and teenage spells in prison took its toll, and the feisty boy scrapper turned mentor role model to teen tearaways lost in the battle of survival versus destruction in his final years.

John puts his finger on the unenviable truth: “His resolve weakened after 19 years of defying his urge to drink.

The cause of his breakdown remains a mystery; it could have been one of so many things.”

Told so starkly, this is an agonising read, but endurance, loyalty and love shine through.

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Smut by Alan Bennett, Faber & Faber, $24.95.

British master Alan Bennett subtitles his latest Two Unseemly Stories, perfectly summing up these short peeks behind the suburban blind at the unconventional sexual lives of two apparently conventional, middle-aged women.

For the widowed Mrs Donaldson, taking in lodgers to help make ends meet, it’s the offer by a nice pair of students to augment their rent by staging a sex show which she finds rather more titillating — and liberating — than expected.

While Mrs Forbes is a bossy wife and over-loving mother who believes in “keeping up appearances” at all costs, leaving her in comical ignorance as to the sexual peccadilloes of every family member — including her married, secretly gay and, sadly, quite stupid son.

Although maybe Mrs Forbes knows a lot more than it seems… It’s low-level smutty, high-grade subversive and huge fun for all concerned — especially the reader.

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The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, Vintage $24.95.

The book that sold itself is how I think of Hare. A word-of-mouth sensation, published last year but still selling strongly and dazzling readers wherever it goes.

It’s a true but scarcely grabby plot: the author, a noted ceramicist, inherits his great uncle Iggy’s collection of wood and ivory animal carvings, known as netsuke. Who knew, who cared, about netsuke?

But these 264 traditional Japanese miniatures are just the thread on which to hang a brilliant family memoir, starting in Odessa in the mid-1800s and winding through Vienna, Paris and Tokyo as generations of the Ephrussi go from grain merchants to prominent Jewish bankers, rivals to the Rothschilds, only to lose everything when the Nazis march into Austria in a shocking prelude to the outbreak of second World War.

These are extraordinary people going through extraordinary times, rubbing shoulders with Proust and Degas, witness to the Dreyfus trial, creating palaces and art galleries and assimilating perfectly everywhere — which, the author implies, is the very thing the anti-Semites couldn’t tolerate.

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All that I Am by Anna Funder, Hamish Hamilton, $32.95.

Anna Funder’s long-awaited first novel has one of the great opening lines: When Hitler came to power I was in the bath.

The place, Berlin; the year, 1933, and this homely image is a reminder of how mighty historical events can twist and destroy individual lives.

The bather is one of a small core of committed activists — based on real people – who see what is coming and determine to resist, first in Germany itself and later, as impoverished exiles agitating against Nazism (illegally) in London.

They marry and love each other, share passions and jealousy, but the personal is, in such extreme circumstances, always political and there is no escaping the consequences of their courage, and in some cases betrayals.

They are old when we meet them, or exist only in journals and letters, but Funder calls us back to when they were young and fierce and charts their getting of wisdom, at great cost, over 80 years of the last turbulent century.

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Animal People by Charlotte Wood, Allen & Unwin, $29.99.

Stephen is having a bad day. Another argument with his mum, a run-in with the neighbour’s dog, he skittles a pedestrian, then his bus seems to have a bomb on board.

All this while tossing up which of the 50 ways he’ll choose to leave his lover. Australian author Charlotte Wood takes a character from her last novel, The Children (which you don’t need to have read) and follows one day in his messed-up life, which sounds dismal but is actually hilarious because Stephen is such a forlorn yet likeable loser, and Wood such a wonderfully sharp observer.

Typical is when Stephen spots what he thinks is a newspaper ad, I work in people’s gardens to earn money for food.

Sometimes I collect firewood and sell it, which sounds a lot more appealing than his dead-end job flipping burgers at the zoo — only to discover it’s a quote from a starving woman in Darfur.

This is not a man aiming high. But Wood has her own plans for Stephen, and there is redemption at day’s end.

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Far To Go By Alison Pick, Headline Fiction, $29.99

Even in retrospect, it’s almost impossible to comprehend evil on such a massive scale as Hitler’s Nazi Party.

That inability explains a lot about why Jewish families such as Alison Pick’s fictional Bauers didn’t try to flee until it was much too late.

Secular and wealthy, Pavel and Anneliese Bauer discuss the approaching German threat from their comfortable home in Czechoslovakia with an infuriating complacency.

Pick slowly engulfs her ordinary family in the tsunami of Nazism that spreads across Europe.

As they become increasingly threatened they put their trust in the wrong people, and fail to trust the most loyal when they should.

Of vital importance is getting their little boy, Pepik, to safety, and it’s his journey and his total incomprehension and boyish hope that packs a powerful emotional punch.

The story is told by a mystery narrator and archival letters. It spans decades and comes full circle to a bittersweet but strangely satisfying end.

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