Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad, by Bee Rowlatt and May Witwit, Penguin, $22.95.
There’s not a lot of Jane Austen in this true story of an unlikely friendship between a tough-minded Iraqi lecturer on literature and a BBC journalist, but if the title reels in readers, all to the good, because this is a book to remind you of one of the best things about being a woman. Which is our connection with other women.
These two are like chalk and cheese – Bee is in London juggling job, housework and three daughters while May is trapped in the bombed-out, blockaded city of Baghdad, facing bullets and food shortages and religious persecution. At first, Bee is just after some colour about life in a war zone to go with the dismal news reports. Three years and hundreds of emails later, these strangers are calling each other sister and Bee is moving heaven and earth – and draining her own bank account – to get her friend to safety outside Iraq. Meanwhile, they share confidences about everything from loved but lazy husbands to crippling depression, from the importance of a good hairdresser to the character of Saddam Hussein. It has flat spots – doesn’t life? – but you can’t help but get caught up in their fear and their joy.
I’m an McEwan tragic, I admit. So, I thought, if anyone was going to pull off the coup of turning the subject of climate change into a compelling novel, it was surely the master.
Rather than lecture, he’s given us a black comedy –a farce, almost – centred around the monstrous character of Michael Beard: a fat, greedy, amoral, self-centred, philandering scientist who won a Nobel Prize during his brilliant youth and has been trading on it ever since. Repellent but cunning, he sniffs the zeitgeist and pinches a colleague’s work to become the front man for renewable energy, specifically converting the sun’s rays into hydrogen and so, potentially, saving our carbon-choked world – and salvaging his collapsing fifth marriage while he’s at it. But nothing goes quite right for Michael Beard, whose appetites and ambitions come to represent all of us who want to do the right thing for the planet, yet avoid a single personal sacrifice. It’s a virtuoso performance by McEwan, combining some brilliant set-pieces with a deep knowledge of the field, but a book in his Saturday rather than Atonement mode. Feeding the brain and funny-bone rather than the heart.
This Body of Death, by Elizabeth George, Hodder & Stoughton, $32.99.
With any long-running series, loss of potency can be a huge issue as characters cease to develop and plots stagnate. But the 16th novel in Elizabeth George’s bestselling series featuring Scotland Yard’s sharp killer catcher DI Lynley is a thrilling exception.
The multi-layered stories between Lynley in London and his former colleagues in the backwaters of England, offer such dynamic contrasts – and take twisted turns so subtle you really can’t see them coming – that I was left blissfully guessing right to the final full-stop. This is so much more satisfying than figuring it all out before we’re supposed to! The newest department chief, Isabelle Ardery, is out to prove her mettle in all the wrong ways, and brings a fresh complexity to the Scotland Yard team. The result is a richly deceptive and sinister murder mystery with inspired and intricate plot twists.
Gran’s Kitchen, by Natalie Oldfield & Dulcie May Booker, Hardie Grant Books, $45.
Ninety-five-year-old Dulcie May Booker’s recipes and cooking tips have the wonderful whiff of a bygone era.
Dulcie grew up in a rural farming community in Weymouth, Auckland, and started cooking as a child on her family’s coal range, winning prizes for her scones at just 18. What’s great about her recipes are their practical simplicity. It’s easy to see how Dulcie’s passion has been passed down through the generations – she’s a born teacher.
Life can change at any given minute, so watch out. And you may think you know those you love, but you don’t. Not really. Susanna, the central character in this gripping emotional drama, learns this as her life goes into a tailspin.
Not even her 20 plus years rock-solid marriage is safe, for behind the slick mask of a handsome, talented, loving husband, lurks a cheating narcissist. Fault lines begin opening up everywhere and then there’s a terrible accident. Terrific dialogue, the overarching theme of a woman trying to reclaim her life and her creativity after a lifetime as a doormat and the suspense of a small child in danger, makes this a raw, real and hugely entertaining read by one of this country’s rising star novelists.
The Winter of Our Disconnect, by Susan Maushart, Bantam $34.95.
The author’s three children didn’t remember a time before email or instant messaging or Google. They didn’t just use the media, they “inhabited” it.
And so Maushart embarks upon The Experiment, to live without any of it; pull the plug on the family’s entire armoury of electric weaponry and live in self-imposed exile for six months. The short answer is that yes, life was “infinitely” better – eventually. But it’s what happens along the way that makes this witty, very well written, sharply observed account of that experience a compelling and highly entertaining story of our times.
Secret Daughter, by Shilpi Somaya Gowda, Morrow , $23.99.
A fabulously turbulent family drama set in two great cities, Los Angeles and Mumbai. The two settings are almost characters themselves, the smog, the traffic jams and the teeming, chaotic nature of the East alongside the clipped lawns and somewhat antiseptic, sliced-white-bread nature of the West – so bland you want to spice it up with chilli.
Wherever it is, east or west, slums or air-conditioned palaces, the one universal element is the incredible ease with which families misunderstand one another. This is the unforgettable story of two families in particular who live worlds apart yet are linked by an adopted child called Usha whose confusion and self-doubt as a child raised in America but born in India is relayed with great poignancy, honesty and humour. The role of women and their strength in anchoring their families through all sorts of maelstroms, the raw emotions involved in having to give up a child – and the inability to have one – are movingly conveyed without a shred of sentimentality. A rattling good yarn taken to another notch entirely by writing that has intensity and depth and a great cast of characters. Provocative and wonderfully real, the perfect book for reading clubs.
Beautiful Malice, by Rebecca James, Allen & Unwin, $24.99.
Rebecca James has been hailed as the “next J.K. Rowling”, not because her book has anything to do with wizards, but because it was the subject of a frenzied, worldwide bidding war that pushed advances past $1million.
Often, things don’t live up to the hype, but this novel delivers in spades. Not only has the mother of four, from rural NSW, written a terrific thriller with some great twists, it is outstanding for its masterful plot and atmosphere, with every page saturated in pure malevolence. The story revolves around a friendship between two 18-year-olds, Alice and Katherine. Alice is the popular one, Katherine the outsider. The suspense sets in when Alice, who is all love and light at first, shows her true colours and begins to weave her sinister web around innocent Katherine. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
With million-dollar baby Shiloh Jolie-Pitt making headlines for her tomboy chic, we ask the experts whether her choice of dress-ups is a normal passing phase or cause for concern.
Months before she was even born, photographs of Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt were making headlines. US gossip magazine The National Enquirer claimed a grainy image on its front page was an ultrasound image of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s five-month-old foetus, while New York magazine mocked up a shot of the Hollywood couple with a computer-generated baby to illustrate a story on how much the print rights to such pictures might raise. As it happened, when the world’s most photogenically evolved child finally arrived in May 2006, her first pictures fetched a reported $8.1million.
Fast forward four years and photos of Shiloh are again making headlines – for a different reason. The youngster’s long blonde locks have been cropped boy-short and she is rarely pictured in anything other than boys’ clothes. One day she may be dressed in a tie and pork pie hat, the next in a pirate’s costume, the next as Robin Hood.
“Does Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s daughter secretly want to be a boy?” shrieked one US commentator, while another theorised that the politically conscious couple was using their daughter to make a point on gender. “That could lead to self-esteem issues and role and gender confusion later on,” she warned.
Yet is Shiloh’s sartorial style – already dubbed “tomboy chic” by the tabloids – really cause for concern?
According to child psychologists, it is common for young children to experiment with cross-gender behaviour as a way of understanding their own gender identity. Little girls may like to play with guns, while young boys may pretend to be pregnant or enjoy dressing up in their mother’s clothes.
“That doesn’t mean they will grow up to become cross-dressers,” says Professor Louise Newman, of Monash University’s Centre for Developmental Psychiatry and Psychology. “As a child, you should be able to play around. It’s usually perfectly normal.”
There are rare instances, however, when parents may need to seek advice on whether their children’s behaviour falls outside the boundaries of normal play-acting. “Problems can arise if the child expresses distress or is not happy with their body or the things that they are expected to do as a boy or a girl,” Professor Newman says. “Or if the child runs into difficulty socially because he or she is not accepted by peers, or if the family is struggling to deal with what the child is expressing.”
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Some parents believe that young children should be able to express themselves freely – an approach that seems to have been adopted by Brad and Angelina. He laughingly told an interviewer recently that Shiloh would only answer to the name of John because of her love for Wendy’s older brother John in the story of Peter Pan. “We’ve got to call her John,” he said, noting that when he tried to call Shiloh by her real name, she would interrupt him with, “John, I’m John”. “So I’ll say, ‘John would you like some orange juice?’ and she goes, ‘No!’ ”
“There are some adults for whom this is very confronting,” says psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg. “Men, particularly, think, ‘God, I have a gay son’. Most mums are relatively chilled about it.”
Your say: What do you think about this? Do you think there is anything wrong with a child dressing up as the opposite sex? Share with us below.
Read more of this story in the May issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Out now with Susan Boyle on the cover.
After a decade living in Paris, The Weekly’s newest writer, Bryce Corbett, has seen it all. So, when glamorous First Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy became embroiled in an affair scandal, he knew exactly how the French would react.
Eyebrows all over the world were raised in March when scuttlebutt started leaking out of Paris that French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his elegant première dame wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, were cheating on each other. People everywhere reacted with shock at the rumours. Everywhere, that is, except France.
While the rest of the world whipped itself into a frenzy of righteous indignation, the French responded with an almighty Gallic shrug. As moral arbiters, political commentators and gossip mongers from other God-fearing nations weighed in on the unseemliness of a head of state and his wife sleeping around, the French were left wondering what all the fuss was about.
If the gossip is to be believed, France’s president has been “’aving it off” with his Secretary of State for Ecology, Chantal Jouanno, while his pop-princess wife has supposedly been getting cosy with her songwriting collaborator, Benjamin Biolay.
The tattle was initially sparked by a few wayward “tweets” by an online journalist, then spread like wildfire throughout Paris, finally catching up with the president during a press conference at 10 Downing Street, in London, where he was forced to take a break from expounding on matters of state to dismiss it as a baseless rumour.
Although a carefully staged bout of public canoodling during a subsequent trip to New York poured cold water on the claims, the collective indifference of the French people to the rumoured affair only served to highlight the difference in attitude between us and our Gallic cousins. While we tend to tremble in its presence, terrified at the threat infidelity poses to the social fabric, the French seem to accept it as an inevitable part of the messy business of living. And when it is perpetrated by their politicians, well, that’s just part of the job description.
This is a country, after all, in which Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand’s admission of sex holidays in Thailand ruffled barely a feather, where the late President François Mitterrand had a secret second family and his successor, Jacques Chirac, was so renowned for his extra-marital liaisons, he earned the nickname The Three-Minute Man for the efficiency with which he conducted them.
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As a former resident of Paris, recently returned home, I know from 10 years living among them that the French are relatively relaxed when it comes to the prickly issue of sleeping around. The 19th-century French author Alexandre Dumas pretty much set the tone when he observed, “The bonds of wedlock are so heavy that it takes two to carry them, sometimes three”.
Certainly, rumours of the Sarkozys’ straying have come as no great surprise to the average French citizen. First Lady Carla is as well-known in France for her contempt for monogamy as she is for her preference for kitten heels. “Monogamy bores me terribly,” she famously told Madame Figaro magazine before her marriage to the president. “I am monogamous from time to time, but I prefer polygamy.”
And you only have to glance at her dance card to see that she means it. Her string of famous former lovers includes Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and Donald Trump. While living with the French publishing magnate, Jean-Paul Enthoven, Carla ran off with his son, the philosopher Raphaël Enthoven, and bore him a child.
Your say: What do you think about this? Do you think the French opinion on fidelity is far removed from our own? What is your take on fidelity? Share with us below.
Read more of this story in the May issue ofThe Australian Women’s Weekly. Out now with Susan Boyle on the cover.
