Author: Mallee Stanley

Have you noticed anything about many well-established authors?

I have. And I often find it frustrating, but it’s not the author’s fault. Let’s take Kate Moreton as an example. If you’ve read her first, The House at Riverton where Grace worked as a servant for the Hartford family back in the 1920s when a suicide occurred in their mansion, I’m sure you were as riveted as I was to this mystery. Then came The Forgotten Garden that is one of my favourites of Moreton’s where a child arrives on the Australian docks unclaimed and doesn’t even know her name. A childless couple adopt her. Only some sixty years later does she try to unravel her past and work out how she ended up in Australia from England. My other favourite was Secret Keeper where Dorothy’s daughter Laurel witnesses her mother kill a man she’s never seen before, and she has no idea why.

Continue reading →

C.J. Cooke’s—A Haunting in the Arctic*****

Alone, Dominique arrives at a deserted beach in a remote part of Iceland. She wants to document the Ormen that was shipwrecked in the 1970s before the coastguard arrives at the end of the month to haul the wreck into the sea. She sets up camp inside the ship, but soon disturbing dreams make her awake suddenly, singing drifts through the ship, and in the distance along the beach she is sure there is a woman scantily clad in a dress even though it is below zero. These are images from 1901 when the Ormen, then a whaling ship, left Dundee. Later her visions are from when the Ormen was used as an Arctic research vessel in the 1970s.

Continue reading →

Hope Adams’—Dangerous women*****

In a London prison, Sarah, committed to hang for the murder of a man, must escape her sentence and board the Rajah headed to Van Diemen’s Land. In the 1840s, 200 women guilty of petty crimes are to board the ship and start life afresh on the far away island. Sarah is determined to be one of them. The night before the prisoners in her cell are to board the ship, she drugs another inmate, ties her up, takes her name tag, and hides her under a blanket.

Continue reading →

R.F. Kuang’s—Babel*****

In Canton, a child’s family dies around him and Professor Lovell barges in and places a silver bar on the boy to revive him. Once the Chinese boy recovers, he travels by ship to the professor’s English estate where he is tutored for years in Greek and Latin. He substitutes his Chinese name for Robin and enters Oxford where he takes lectures in the Translation Department. There he meets three members of his cohort—Ramy (from Bengal), Victoria (originally from Haiti but brought up in France) and their only English student, Letty. They form a tight group in their first year, but changes occur when first Robin meets his half-brother in hiding, Griffin whose totally different perspective on the Translation Department’s objectives begin to set Robin on a different course.

This is a tale that on the surface appears to be part fantasy, but the underlying themes of racial prejudice, sexism, and British colonial greed ring true and lead these students on a dangerous journey.