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Good Reading : June 2016
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GOOD READING JUNE 2016 41 GENERAL FICTION WOM word of mouth RATINGS ★ ★ ★★ ★★ ★★★ ★★★ ★★★★ ★★★★ ★★★★★ RG Fellside M R Carey Fellside is a strange, haunting and completely engrossing novel. Its protagonist, Jess, is a former junkie who wakes up with no memories after a catastrophic fire that she apparently lit in a misguided attempt to kill her boyfriend. She has been severely disfigured, and one of her few friends, a young boy who lived on the next floor, is dead. Convinced that she is a killer and deserves whatever she gets, Jess doesn’t contest her trial. After being found guilty she goes on a hunger strike, determined to die. She is transferred to the infirmary of Fellside, a bizarre, privately run, maximum-security prison where the authorities have decided to support her decision to die. But the voice of a shadowy figure, a young boy, calls Jess back from the edge. She claws her way back to life but has to learn to adapt to the power structures inside Fellside while she begins to delve back into the past to discover the truth about what happened. Fellside is one of those rare and wonderful books that creates its own unique internal realities; the prison and the netherworld where Jess communicates with the boy are both strikingly imaginative and compelling. The characters, while far from endearing, are vividly realised, and the story weaves around them until it reaches a violent but satisfying conclusion. ★★★★ Orbit $29.99 Reviewed by Tessa Chudy One Patrick Holland At the mention of bushrangers, my mind immediately conjures up the iconic armour and outlaw antics of Ned Kelly. But after reading One, m y imagination has been usurped by Jim and Patrick Kenniff, Australia’s last bushrangers. This novel describes the raw, brutal outback of Western Queensland that the Kenniff brothers made their kingdom, and the desperate attempts of the law to rein them in. Author Patrick Holland focuses on Jim, the more reckless of the two. If you’re expecting a hard-jawed, whisky-slugging, violent horseman with murder in his eyes, you won’t be disappointed. But Holland endows Jim with a sensitivity and complexity that makes the unfurling of the horse thief ’s traumatic past compulsive and heartbreaking. Nixon, the other main character, is a policeman who sets out to hunt the Kenniffs with the help of a farm boy and a young Indigenous tracker he dubs King Edward. The patrol that attempted to find the Kenniffs before him ended up butchered and burned in the bush. Nixon is driven to find and charge the bushrangers by a quiet fury and his staunch devotion to the law. He seems to especially crave Jim’s demise. But the outlaws are experts at escape who can blend into the bush without so much as a cloud of dust kicked up by their horses’ hooves. Jim Kenniff is treated almost as a mythological figure by the fearful locals; they say bullets pass straight through him as if he were a ghost. The most distinctive feature of One is Holland’s addictive, sparse style. He can evoke the roaring openness of the outback in a sentence, and his tight dialogue is revealing and real. The minimalist prose ushers you urgently through a thrillingly unique and morally tense Australian historical novel. ★★★★ Transit Lounge $29.95 Reviewed by Angus Dalton that the Kenniff brothers made their kingdom, with the help of a farm boy and a young Indigenous tracker he dubs King Edward.The patrol that attempted to find the Kenniffs before him ended up butchered and burned in the bush. Nixon is driven to find and charge the bushrangers by a quiet fury and his staunch devotion to the law. He seems to especially crave Jim’s demise. But the outlaws are experts at escape who can blend into the bush without so much as a cloud of dust kicked up by their horses’ hooves. Jim Fellside M R Carey Fengrossing novel. Its protagonist, Jess, is a former junkie who wakes up with no memories after a catastrophic fire that she apparently lit in a misguided attempt to kill AUSTRALIAN AUTHOR
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