The Independent’s NOEL MURPHY takes a look at some of the offerings you’ll find on the bookshelf …
THE COLLECTOR OF LOST THINGS: By Jeremy Page, Little Brown $29.99
JUST love these cryptozoology yarns. Eliot Saxby is off to the Artic in 1845, chasing remains of the extinct great auk but his shipmates aren’t exactly what they appear.
Cabin fever sets in fast as Saxby tries to figure out his a loopy, sociopathic captain – with a penchant for embroidery – a silent first mate and the laudanum-addicted Betchley.
Matters are complicated by his fascination with Betchley’s beautiful but strange ‘cousin’ Clara and Saxby’s guilt over a failed romance years before.
Moving ever northwards into the Arctic Sea, the tale becomes one of brutality and deception, the sailors skills offset by dark motivations and ghostly apparitions.
Spine-tingler on the high seas.
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THE RESCUE MAN: By Anthony Quinn, Random House $32.95
SCOUSE architecture rarely gets a look-in anywhere but Liverpool’s built fabric gets microscopic scrutiny in this unusual trip through war and devastation.
Tom Baines is studying an 1860s Scouse architect, Peter Eames, and his handiwork, when World War 2 starts blowing his oeuvre to smithereens. As part of a heavy rescue team, he finds himself hauling the wounded from bomb-shattered buildings he’d been documenting.
Jumping to and fro between 1860 and 1940, author Quinn pits the vibrancy and life of a booming Victorian city against the dread and destruction of The Blitz. Baines is a complex man but emotionally adrift while Eames sees his fortunes dramatically rise and fall.
Think dark Liverpudlian humour, war in the suburbs, flashes of genius, love lost and found … great read.
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KRAKEN: By China Mieville, Macmillan $34.99
GIANT squids, the kind capable of crushing ships, have occupied a special place in legend and superstition for centuries.
When a perfectly preserved specimen, slightly smaller of course, goes missing from the research wing of London’s Natural History Museum it’s a fair mystery as to who might want such a creature.
But curator Billy Harrow soon learns of warring cults, surreal magic, assassins and apostates, and the possibility his magnificent rare specimen might be something else _ like a god.
The fact it’s considered a god that someone hopes will end the world makes for the kind of dark urban thriller that’s earned author Mieville a fistful of Arthur C. Clarke and British Fantasy awards.
This effort will shiver your timbers.
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THE GENESIS FLAW: By L.A. Larkin, Murdoch Books, $32.99
FAST-moving white-knuckler with a nasty environmental take that sees bad guys out to shut down a nuisance woman trying to expose their dodgy genetic experiments.
With GM produce in the sights of the green brigade, Larkin has no problem working up the fear factor early in the piece with human experiments in Africa, an Aussie business executive’s suicide and a farmer’s death.
The action is ratchetted up and up as our disguised protagonist Serena Swift homes in on the genetically-modified food production company Gene-Asis but then finds herself the hunted as her deep throats disappear and a hit man tracks her from Sydney to New York.
Eventually, she has to come face to face with her nemesis while all the while trying to avert a world disaster.
Great ride predicated on contemporary fear factor.
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THE FABULIST: By Rod Howard
AUSTRALIA hosts its fair share of folk happy to stretch the truth but few, if any, including Chopper Read, can or could bullshit like Louis de Rougemont.
The self-titled greatest liar on Earth, Rougemont – born Henri Grin – made a meal of the British press with his extraordinary tales of 30 years with Aborigines in the far outback and his elevation to god-like status, of flying wombats, gold reefs, pearling, exploits in New Guinea.
Papers in the 1890s fell over one another to publish either his outrageous but compelling tales or their exposure of his falsehoods and true identity. Rougemont’s fantastic yarns were garnered from libraries and his travels, and he had a wife and four kids in Sydney who he abandoned for the spotlight of London.
He fronted the Royal Geographical Society to defend his claims and was unabashed when eventually outed, taking his “greatest liar” on the road. It too was short-lived.
Wonderful account of great stories of dubious provenance.
