Latest reviews

British-Australian thriller writer Harper – she was born in Manchester but relocated to Victoria with her family as a child – occupies an enviable position. Not only is each new book greeted as an event by readers and critics alike, she’s also admired for the quality of her writing and the intricacy of her plots. Her award-winning first novel, The Dry, introduced us to Federal Investigator Aaron Falk, and since its publication in 2016 she has produced a string of bestsellers, both featuring Falk and standalone.

There are high hopes, therefore, around her latest and it does not disappoint. Exiles sees the return of the reticent and intriguing Falk, who returns to Marralee in South Australia for the christening of his godson. Once there, he finds a community still reeling from the disappearance of young mother Kim Gillespie from a fairground a year earlier. Suicide is presumed, though a body has not been discovered, and many refuse to believe Kim would have left her baby alone in the pram beneath the Ferris wheel in order to take her own life. Plus, as Falk will discover, there are enough contradictory sightings of Kim on the night she vanished to suggest things may not be as they appear.

Though the disappearance is the hook upon which this beautifully crafted novel is hung, it is only one element of its deeply satisfying narrative. As the book opens, Kim’s daughter Zara is about to launch an appeal to find her mother, and Harper also weaves in the story of teenager Joel, whose father was killed in a hit-and-run. This is a novel that expertly counterbalances mystery and thriller elements with an examination of grief, friendship and family, while shining a light on the sometimes tricky transition of teenagers as they turn into adults.

As with all Harper’s novels, the writing is exquisite. In her previous life she was a journalist, and here she once again manages to illuminate characters and evoke rich and atmospheric scenes with enviable economy of language and extraordinary lightness of touch. We see Falk getting to know his godson’s family, and find ourselves rooting for him as, through a series of expertly woven flashbacks, he begins to compare life on their idyllic vineyard with his frenzied Melbourne existence. The book drips with the atmosphere of its small-town Australia setting, and, in an extra bonus for fans of The Dry, Harper updates us on the lives of some of the characters in that book. The only disappointment in this outing for Aaron Falk is that Harper is adamant it is to be his last. A powerful and affecting novel.

S J Watson is the award-winning author of the bestselling psychological thrillers “Before I Go To Sleep”, “Second Life” and “Final Cut”. Follow him on Twitter at @sj_watson

One day last month, I posed this quiz question, on air: Which Ukrainian actor dubbed the voice of Paddington in Paddington? A fair chunk of our listeners knew – or worked out – it was Volodymyr Zelensky.

A year ago, few people round the world knew who now-President Zelensky was. And he would rather it had stayed that way. But “assuming you live on planet Earth,” he says levelly, “you already know the significance of 24 February, 2022.”

By March, his face was visible on every phone, blue-and-yellow flags fluttered from poles across the globe, and premiers far senior to Zelensky competed to be seen sporting a khaki T-shirt or a grizzled chin, or standing resolutely in a bombed-out factory.

Ukraine has been attacked approximately once a generation since the dawn of time, and this invasion came as no surprise whatever. Parts of it, after all, began almost a decade back. And from the moment of his 2019 inauguration, Volodymyr Zelensky – an Honest Joe, taking on a lethargic, kleptocratic system, swept in with 75 per cent of the vote, without a comprehensive political ideology or an experienced team – had been telling the outside world that Ukrainians have “chosen a path that leads to Europeanness,” and that they were therefore at grave risk from next-door Russia.

Message from Ukraine comprises sixteen speeches selected from the thousand or so given between then and 24 August 2022 (Ukraine’s Independence Day) – at major venues like the US Congress and the European Parliament, and often on uncoincidentally resonant dates, such as the anniversary of the start of WWII. (The first mention of Churchill comes early in the preface.)

His message is unwavering: where are you guys?! It’s delivered with a moral clarity and force that recent generations have not needed to get used to. Calling the Russians “animals”, “bastards,” and a “terrorist state”, he describes rape, looting, executions, and the desecration of bodies. “What did they do wrong?” he accuses Vladimir Putin, of the attempted genocide of Bucha.

In the face of “the biggest security crisis since the Cold War,” Zelensky speaks openly of appeasement and complicity. Mentions of the Nazis (founded on 24 February, by bleak coincidence) are rife – and not just to defang the obscene claim that Russia needs to defend itself against a Nazi neighbour (Zelensky himself is descended from Jews who fought for Soviet Ukraine against the Nazis). There is a particularly uncomfortable address to the Munich (yes!) Security Conference, less than a week before the Russians crossed the border. That speech was called “The Lessons of History”.

Most of all, he laments the West’s failure to welcome Ukraine into NATO and the EU (he calls out Sarkozy and Merkel), for refusing to arm Ukraine, or heed his warnings. This is, he says, “the beginning of a war against Europe… How are you going to protect yourselves, when you have been so slow to protect Ukraine?”

Sanctions now are not enough. Or even military defeat. Zelensky wants a reckoning with the entire architecture of international security, which has enabled a “grey zone in which Moscow thinks they are allowed to do anything.”

He doesn’t blame anyone but Russia for their crimes – but makes short work of the “Never again” slogans that underpin the United Nations. To the Bundestag he says, “You have already been blackmailed with natural gas.” Of Israel’s Knesset he asks, “What is it…? Indifference?” He cannot afford too many niceties. Anyway, he says, “words have long since lost their value.”

These punches land. But, of course, the West didn’t rush in to “last” war for entirely rational reasons. And when Zelensky argues that “in the 21st century, there is no such things as a foreign war”… alas, there is. As I write, the so-called human rights beacon that is the new, “rainbow” South Africa is entertaining Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov.

The pundits called A Message from Ukraine “remarkable”, “inspiring”, “a masterpiece”; so it’s doubtless churlish to say that, compelling and urgent as Zelensky’s case is, the rhetoric here can be surprisingly heavy-handed. Putin lost the war the day he invaded, “the kind and peaceful people of Ukraine turned into lions”, “we have changed the world” – that sort of thing. Perhaps it’s better in Ukrainian.

But in what The Economist’s Russia and Eastern Europe editor Arkady Ostrovsky calls a “war of communication”, Zelensky is simply doing what he does best, “communicating with Ukrainians, [and] lobbying governments and businesses to supply arms.” And that war he is definitely winning.

I quite believe he doesn’t “care about gaining new followers on Instagram or Facebook.” But his messaging is nonetheless savvy; it appeals not just to international politicians (Zelensky’s only lapse is to have indulged that blow-up Churchill, Boris Johnson), but their electorates too. From “I need ammo, not a ride” to the heroic “fuck-you” from Snake Island, the Ukrainians have practically been minting memes.

“If Putin created this war,” Ostrovsky writes, “Zelensky narrated it.” But Zelensky knows full well the TikTok types are fickle: “Supporting Ukraine is not a trend, a meme, or a viral challenge.” Above all, he begs for Ukraine not to be forgotten.

This time last year, the Brandenburg gate was dressed in the Ukrainian colours. Now the Germans drag their heels over despatching tanks to help Ukraine defend itself. The Brits have scraped together barely a dozen Challengers. And Poland demands EU compensation before it sends its materiel.

“What will bring the end of the war?” Zelensky asks (rhetorically) “We used to say peace. Now we say victory.”

One year in, victory is still a long way off.

ASH Smyth is a writer, broadcaster and part-time soldier in the Falkland Islands

Blake Morrison is known for his calm, relentless, unputdownable analysis of human relationships and affections: no foible too delicate; no grief too profound, no tenderness too tender, no family member too close. Sometimes it seems this polymath Yorkshireman – poetry, novels, journalism, libretti, adaptations – is single-handedly making up for all the famously silent Northern men whose nearest and dearest have no clue what’s going on inside them.

In this new memoir, Two Sisters, Morrison approaches, well, his two sisters, Gill and Josie, one of whom he didn’t know for decades was his sister. So there’s a story. Both are now dead, releasing the agreement he’s made with himself not to write about anyone while they’re still on the planet.

Intermingled with the family memoir is Morrison’s trademark scholarly curiosity: his own sisters are buttressed by the sisters of other writers and creative men, sisters who perhaps contributed a bit more than history has chosen to relate. Fanny Mendelssohn and Mary Lamb we’ve heard about before; we also meet Anna Maria Levi and Primo; Eileen Joyce and James; Maria Chekhova and Anton Checkhov; Sarah Fielding, who Samuel Richardson thought was the talented one in the family – forget her brother Henry. Alice James had both Henry and William to squash her. “In our family group,” Henry James noted, “girls seemed scarcely to have a chance,” though he thought Alice “the most remarkable member of the family”. And she herself wrote, before her death at 43, “When I am gone, please don’t think of me simply as a creature who might have been something else, had neurotic science been born. Notwithstanding the poverty of my outside experience, I have always had a significance for myself.”

It’s a beautiful thing when brothers come through without judgment or side to support and amplify sisters. We need it as much now as Alice, Fanny and the rest needed it then, and in this excellent, considered book Morrison both raises and attends to the fact that we need it in retrospect too.

It’s rare to find a novel we can immerse ourselves in with the trusting abandon of childhood, identifying so deeply with the characters it’s a surprise to wake from this reverie into the chill reality of an English February.

Hungry Ghosts is one such, pervaded with the scents and sounds of rural 1940s Trinidad, the home country of author Kevin Jared Hosein, where, ominously, “the snakes’ calls blurred with the primeval hiss of wind through the plants.”

It’s a story of two households, divided socially and geographically in a place where humanity is just “ants on the savannah”. High on the hill in palatial splendour lives pert young mistress Marlee, “her skin light brown as the throat of a forest flood”, whose much older husband has gone missing. Down in the valley, Hans inhabits a single room in an impoverished barrack, with his wife Shweta and son Krishna. Through flimsy partition walls, their neighbours hear every creak and whisper of each other’s lovemaking, quarrels and sicknesses.

“These barracks were scattered like half-buried bones across the plain, strewn from their colonial corpse,” writes Hosein, alluding to the difficult transitional times before independence. “On one side, the belief of bush and burlap and sohari and jute and rattan and thatch and tapia. On the other was Bell Village, the dogma of a new world, howling and preaching steel and diesel and rayon and vinyl and gypsum and triple-glazed glass.”

Hans belongs to the old life of the bush, a good man, “loving, high-spirited, skittish to a fault”. He has resolved never to be a wife-beater like his father and brother, and is a kind, dependable neighbour, who sees the best in people. He’s also ruggedly handsome, not lost on Marlee, on whose property he works. Nor is Hans immune to her charms: “Her fingers on his skin like a spirit’s wings…. Her scent warm, balsamic, holy. Felt as if lights were rising within his body.”

Dark stories lurk: every character longing for a different life, whether it’s love, desire, a comfortable home, clean water. But it’s Krishna who ultimately breaks our hearts, the intelligent, once-carefree boy who’s now a truculent adolescent, furious at the way he’s treated at school and the store because of his background – “as if he were an escaped leper” – and resentful of his father’s submission to pervasive, violent prejudice.

Hosein is wise about the pain and guilt carried through generations, a burden of poverty impossible to escape. Yet his writing illumines the darkness like the flash of a kingfisher’s wing. When Shweta hangs Hans’s washing, still trusting him yet intuitively sensing danger ahead: “She stood in silent judgment between the clothes lines, his merino shirts beating against her petite body like a flurry of giant silk moths.”