Emily Paull

The Desert Nurse Pamela Hart Hachette, Australia 2018 As you may know, I have been on the look out for novels set in Australia during and around the First World War.  So when a copy of Pamela Hart's newest novel arrived in my mailbox, I made time to read it right away. The Desert Nurse is the story of Evelyn Northey, the daughter of a doctor living in Taree in the early Twentieth Century.  She longs to become a doctor herself, but after her mother passed away, her father insisted on her leaving school to help run the household and take care of her younger brother.  Evelyn dreams of the day that her inheritance from her mother will become available to her so that she can use the money to go to University and become a doctor.  But she's in for the shock of her life on her twenty-first birthday when she discovers that the terms of her mother's will state that she will only get the money when she turns thirty or when she marries-- meaning that she is to be at the...

The Coves David Whish-Wilson Fremantle Press, 2018 David Whish-Wilson is a respected name in Australian Crime Fiction, and his trio of novels Line of Sight, Zero at the Bone   and Old Scores shine a light on the possibilities of a seedy Perth underbelly in times of recent memory.  In his fourth novel, The Coves , just recently published by Fremantle Press, he takes a slightly different angle with a foray into the genre of historical crime.  The Coves  is the story of twelve year old Samuel Bellamy, who makes his way to San Francisco aboard a ship full of convicts during 1849 with the intention of finding his mother, whom he believes to be among the Australians living there.  Drawing from the historical record, Whish Wilson vividly recreates the 'Australian quarter' of San Francisco, a town run by the Sydney Coves, or the Sydney Ducks as they were sometimes called.  The novel is peopled with murderers, drunks, prostitutes and scoundrels, and all...