A journalist’s inside look at the war in Syria, an unforgettable trilogy and the 1920s outback diaries of the founder of Penguin Books

TOP books this week include a journalist’s inside look at the war in Syria, an unforgettable trilogy in translation and the 1920s outback diaries of the founder of Penguin Books.

Current Affairs

THE MORNING THEY CAME FOR US

Janine di Giovanni

Bloomsbury $27.99

Journalist Janine di Giovanni has covered wars from Rwanda to Bosnia to Iran. She entered Syria in 2012 to report on a political uprising which turned into urban guerilla conflict when government forces attacked protesters. People she met lamented that before the civil war, Christians, Alawadis, Sunni Muslims and Jews co-operated for their beautiful country, with its staggering history. Di Giovanni met victims from both sides: torture survivors, government officials, desperate parents and their suffering children. If the story was grim then, it has worsened with the entry of ISIS.

Di Giovanni writes with passion, but without embroidering the facts. She speaks for those of us from the First World, when she says you realise, “that you can walk away and go back to your home with electricity and sliced bread; then you begin to feel ashamed to be human.”

ROBYN DOUGLASSêêêêê

The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria Janine di Giovanni

The Notebook Trilogy Agota Kristof

Fiction

THE NOTEBOOK TRILOGY

Agota Kristof, Text Publishing, $34.99

Hungarian Swiss exile, Agota Kristof, wrote the last of the trilogy in 1991 and the series has been translated from her second language, French.

Wildly original in content and tone, it tells the story of twins, Claus and Lucas, in shifting variations of a truth that speaks to the trauma of wartime Europe and how identities were lost. The first, The Notebook, is a sparse, fierce account of the inseparable twins who are left with their grandmother, The Witch, in an unnamed, occupied country. They develop a shocking determination to inure themselves to pain and hurt by practising it. Pursuing a code of ethical necessity, they administer cold punishments, revenges and tricks. One day, one crosses the border, promising to come back.

The style is simple, almost a series of pronouncements, and the content is uncomfortable and unforgettable.

PENNY DEBELLEêêêêk

The Secret Recipe for Second Chances J.D. Barrett Fiction THE SECRET RECIPE FOR SECOND CHANCES
J.D. Barrett, Hachette Australia, $29.99
You can almost smell the aroma of dated ’80s dishes drift from the once-famed Sydney restaurant JD Barrett has created in her first novel. There’s a whiff of lobster gazpacho, a trace of French onion soup and the scent of duck a l’orange as Barrett’s chef, Lucy Muir, adds a modern twist to the classics created during the kitchen’s heyday.
The plot centres on a little red book of recipes that Muir uncovers among the dust of the old Fortune, using it to reopen the restaurant with the ghost of its talented former owner looking over her shoulder. Barrett delivers a mix of romance and culinary triumphs as she works through a messy marriage breakdown and Lucy Muir’s career redirection. Her time as a television writer is evident in this fanciful, dialogue-driven tale that ticks along with a few of the recipes interspersed for a try later. BELINDA WILLIS êêêê

THE ROAD TO RATENBURG by Jay Cowley Junior Fiction THE ROAD TO RATENBURG Joy Cowley and Gavin Bishop Gecko Press, $16.99 It is better, they say, to travel hopefully than to arrive. When Spinnaker Rat’s high-rise home is suddenly and violently demolished he and his wife Retsina decide to make the arduous journey to the fabled city of Ratenburg, supposedly founded by the Pied Piper, in which rats can lead an idyllic life unmolested by the usual cats, dogs, eagles and “humming beans” that infest the rest of the world. Along with their four bright ratlings and a boastful, piratical neighbour they brave a multitude of dangers with ingenuity and pluck to arrive at a destination that is not quite what they
had expected. Noted NZ writer Joy Cowley has Spinnaker tell their story in
a pompous style that lends itself to a humour that is also picked up in the often unusual perspectives of Gavin Bishop’s illustrations. KATHARINE ENGLAND êêêê

Outback Penguin Richard Lane Nonfiction OUTBACK PENGUIN Richard Lane The Lane Press $49.99 Stranger than fiction: Dick Lane, one of the founders of Penguin Books in 1935, spent years as a rising teenager in South Australia in the early 1920s. He was a Barwell boy, a scheme that brought adventurous British lads out to SA. He kept a diary of neatly observed adventures working on a Renmark irrigation block. His dry humour, boyish enthusiasm and literary aplomb combine for some sweet passages among the general routine of hard, hot labour in a struggling community. Dick finds his escape as a “track” driver taking passengers between Renmark and Adelaide in highly unreliable cars.There are rare, detailed descriptions of the tortuous 10-20 hour drives through dust storms, mud, and heat, occasionally made hilarious by his passengers. These tales are worthy of a place in the National Motor Museum. TIM LLOYD êêêê

Originally published as A journalist’s inside look at the war in Syria, an unforgettable trilogy and the 1920s outback diaries of the founder of Penguin Books