Igniting the past
In a tough Aussie novel, the case of a missing teen returns to haunt the living.
When fire sweeps through the small Australian town of Kinsale, it leaves behind rage, grief and smouldering resentment. It also uncovers long-buried events from New Year’s Eve 1996 in which Grace, a teenager, left town and was never heard of again. Eliza Carmody was Grace’s friend. Now a corporate lawyer, she has been sent to find evidence to help fight a class action that the town is taking against the power company that they believe caused the fire as a result of negligence.
Eliza sees a collision between two drivers, which results in a fight between her old mate Luke and a visiting Irishman.
She will become the star witness in what ends up as a murder trial. But what did she really see? And what did she really see on that night in 1996? When you rake over old embers, you risk rekindling fires, and that is what happens in Aoife Clifford’s accomplished SECOND SIGHT
(Simon & Schuster, $35), a terrific addition to the tradition of tough Australian crime writing, à la Garry Disher and Peter Corris. Clifford has a gentler touch, but her observations of the small-town psyche are every bit as insightful.
If anyone thinks Auckland homeowners are smug about their good fortune, the fictional residents of South London’s Trinity Ave make them look like amateurs. In Louise Candlish’s OUR HOUSE (Simon &
Schuster, $35), the houses – now worth two million quid, and climbing – are all the same: “red-brick, double-fronted Edwardians … their owners united in a preference for front doors painted black”.
Fi and Bram’s home is distinguished by a magnolia in the front garden, which is the envy of all passersby, and a designer playhouse in the back, a “sun-dappled oasis filled with hydrangeas and fuchsias and roses”. The playhouse is where Fi finds her feckless, adulterous, boozing husband having it off with another woman.
They separate, but take turns swapping between the house and a rented flat so as not to disturb the children – or their still rapidly rising real-estate investment.
One day, Fi comes home early from a work trip to find another family moving in. Her family’s belongings are gone, as is Bram. The money from the sale has also vanished. As has the middle-class dream.
The mechanics of this cautionary tale posing as a mystery are fairly barking, but the domestic detail and the living of lives that aim to create aspirational envy are perfectly and pointedly achieved.
This is the ultimate revenge-of-the-renting-millennials novel in which, if you build a designer playhouse, you may deserve to arrive home one day to find nasty things happening under your climbing roses. Nothing truly terrible seems to have happened to 15-year-old Lana during the four days she was missing. She was found in a field, a bit scraped, bruised and sullen. But she was like that before she went missing while on a painting holiday with her mother, Jen, who was desperately trying to bring her depressed, self-harming daughter back to life.
In Emma Healey’s WHISTLE IN THE DARK
(Penguin, $37), Lana has been found. That is as much as we and her parents know. But she’s not talking. She seldom talks, except to say sarcastic things to her parents. She keeps, perhaps, an imaginary cat that Jen starts to hear in the night. This book could be relentlessly harrowing, but as in normal family life, even in times of crisis, there are bleak, but laugh-out-loud moments, tenderness and imperfect resolutions. This is a lovely book.