Courtesy of Forbes
Thursday, 23 November 2017
Wednesday, 22 November 2017
The Dry by Jane Harper
Paperback: I just can't understand how someone like him could do something like that.
Australia is in the grip of its worst drought in a century, and it has not rained in the small country town of Kiewarra for two years. Tensions in the community become unbearable when three members of the Hadler family are brutally murdered. Everyone thinks Luke Hadler, who committed suicide after slaughtering his wife and six-year-old son, is guilty.
Policeman Aaron Falk returns to his hometown for the funeral of his childhood best friend, and is unwillingly drawn into the investigation. As questions mount and suspicion spreads through the town, Falk is forced to confront the community that rejected him twenty years earlier.
Because Falk and Luke Hadler shared a secret, one which Luke's death threatens to unearth. And as Falk probes deeper into the killings, secrets from his past bubble to the surface as he questions the truth of his friend's crime.
The Dry (2016) is one of the most stunning debuts by a debut author and won both the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2015 and the Dagger Awards for Best Book in 2017.
About the author: Jane Harper was born in Manchester in the UK, and moved to Australia with her family at age eight. She spent six years in Boronia, Victoria, and during that time gained Australian citizenship. Returning to the UK with her family as a teenager, she lived in Hampshire before studying English and History at the University of Kent in Canterbury. On graduating, she completed a journalism entry qualification and got her first reporting job as a trainee on the Darlington & Stockton Times in County Durham. Jane worked for several years as a senior news journalist for the Hull Daily Mail, before moving back to Australia in 2008. She worked first on the Geelong Advertiser, and in 2011 took up a role with the Herald Sun in Melbourne.
In 2014, Jane submitted a short story which was one of 12 chosen for the Big Issue's annual Fiction Edition. That inspired her to pursue creative writing more seriously, and that year she applied for the Curtis Brown Creative online 12-week novel writing course. She was accepted with a submission for the book that would become The Dry.
Jane lives in St Kilda with her husband and daughter.
Rating: 5/5
Tuesday, 21 November 2017
Monday, 20 November 2017
Saturday, 18 November 2017
Friday, 17 November 2017
Fatherless (The American Tragedy Trilogy) by Brian J Gail
Paperback: Called "a book of the century", powerful, gripping, deeply moving, hauntingly beautiful, masterfully done, a must read and a freight train page turner, Fatherless (2013, Third Edition) is an intensely human tour of the great spiritual battles in the US Catholic church during the late 20th century.
Brian Gail takes us out into the "trenches" and shows what life was like for Catholics, good and bad, during this critical time. This book is a great opportunity for Catholics to take hold of who they really are.
Meticulously researched, brilliantly crafted, Fatherless takes the reader on an unforgettable journey inside Fortune 500 boardrooms and Madison Avenue screening rooms, behind one-way mirrors in America's heartland and two-way screens in church confessionals, to the very peak of Ireland's highest mountain and inside the papal dining room of John Paul II in Rome.
It is the searing journey to the centre of conscience, however, that marks Fatherless as the signature Catholic novel of its generation. In its pages we meet flesh and blood characters - noble and flawed, driven and seeking; each struggling to achieve the American Dream but discovering instead a uniquely American nightmare.
How each confronts the reality of ethical and moral dilemmas - while struggling to balance faith, family, and career - goes to the very heart of the Catholic experience in America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
This is a tale you will never forget.
About the author: Brian J. Gail was a schoolboy baseball phenomenon recruited by Division One universities and scouted by Major League baseball teams; he suffered a disabling shoulder injury early in his college career and was sent to the Philadelphia Phillies team doctor whose efforts to help him regain his exceptional pitching velocity were unsuccessful.
Fueled by a white hot competitive fire and magnetic rhetorical gifts, he rocketed to the top of the Madison Avenue advertising world in his mid-30s only to see his career derailed by a great moral business dilemma and a direct challenge to his Catholic faith. A gifted entrepreneur and CEO, he provided strategic marketing counsel to elite Fortune 500 corporations and directed a variety of non-profit boards focused on assisting the underprivileged in Philadelphia.
Today, Brian J Gail is a critically acclaimed author, a Knight of the Immaculate, a co-founder of three catholic classical academies, a patent holder, and a highly sought after speaker on matters of faith and family. Brian’s remarkable novel Fatherless is published by Emmaus Road Publishing and has become a powerful tool for catechesis.
Brian married his high school sweetheart, Joan Mary Kain, 40 years ago and they were blessed with seven children including two sets of identical twins and one set of “Irish twins.” Brian has touched many lives with his optimism, humour, and unwavering Faith in Our Lady and the truths of the Catholic Church. He and his lovely wife, Joan, divide their time between homes in Villanova, Pennsylvania and Jupiter Island, Florida.
Rating: 5/5
Thursday, 16 November 2017
Wednesday, 15 November 2017
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