The Usual Desire to Kill, by Camilla Barnes

Two daughters must deal with their eccentric, aging parents.

Dutiful daughter Miranda has her patience stretched trying to keep an eye on her aging, rather eccentric parents. They moved to rural France years ago and now live on a run down mini farm. The house is in a terrible state and they live on dodgy food from the freezer. Her sister Charlotte, with whom Miranda has a rocky relationship, endeavours to help out. Even so, Miranda confesses to the “usual desire to kill” both her mother and father. 

The Usual Desire to Kill is Camilla Barnes’s debut novel (she is the niece of famed British writer Julian Barnes.) What she presents here is a totally original take on dealing with elderly parents (the novel mostly circles around the mother’s pending hip replacement operation.) Barnes opts for an innovative structure, with the novel written in the first person, interspersed with email correspondence and an earlier exchange of letters between the mother and her mystery friend, Kitty. The great joy of the book is Barnes’s pitch perfect dialogue between the idiosyncratic parents, which many a reader will recognise. A life affirming novel written with warmth and love, despite the protagonist’s parricidal fantasies.

The Usual Desire to Kill, by Camilla Barnes. Published by Scribner. $35

July 2025

Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work, by Sarah Wynn-Williams

The inside story of Facebook from a former employee.

​A former New Zealand diplomat with extensive experience in international affairs, Sarah Wynn-Williams early on saw that as Facebook expanded globally, it would find itself in moral and political trouble. She envisaged a role for herself in helping Facebook navigate these perilous waters and made a pitch to its leadership team. Her ideas and vision didn’t impress at first, but the times would soon suit her, and a position was eventually offered. 

Wynn-Williams started work at Facebook in 2011 and would eventually become the company’s global public policy director. The position would take her around the world to many important summits, hobnobbing with business leaders and prime ministers. Careless People, a memoir of her six years at Facebook, is notable for its coruscating portraits of former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. She also claims that her supervisor, Joel Kaplan, sexually harassed her over many years. 

In the author’s telling, Facebook had an expand-at-all-costs culture that had little to no regard for the harm it caused, turning a blind eye to the help it indirectly gave authoritarian regimes. A gripping if stomach-turning read on corporate greed and how power deranges.

Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work, by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Published by MacMillan. $36.99

July 2025

The Image of Her, by Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir published her final novel Les Belle Images (“Beautiful Images”) in 1966, and it was translated into English in 1968 by Patrick O’Brian. It is here given a new translation by Lauren Elkin and a reworked title, The Image of Her.

Laurence works as a copywriter, promoting products that make middle class life comfortable. She has a near perfect husband and two young daughters. While there is some friction caused in her personal life by having a lover on the side, this is resolved without too much drama by calling the whole relationship off. All should be well, but something keeps niggling at Laurence, a dreadful feeling of impending doom. At one point she wonders if she will always have this feeling of “stones in her chest and sulfurous clouds in her head.” She watches wars on the television and reads about disasters in newspapers while safely cocooned at home. It doesn’t seem right, but such is the communications technology of modern life. While Laurence tries to keep her emotional boat from capsizing, she finds trouble brewing in her family. Her mother, Dominique, is having trouble with her second husband. He has decided to leave her for a younger woman, causing Dominique to go into a full meltdown. And closer to home, her ten-year-old daughter, Catherine, has confessed to feeling despair at the state of the world. Her husband insists on therapy for their daughter as a stock standard response, but Laurence feels differently, in the end quite vehemently, that despair is the only rational response to the world.

Written in crystal clear prose and superbly organised, Simone de Beauvoir triumphs in creating the literary version of a panic attack. We watch as the protagonist, Laurence, feels herself slowly swallowed up and suffocated by life’s cruelty and carelessness. Friends and family tax her emotionally with their suffering, while she  hopelessly tries to forge her own path ahead, to escape their folly. At one stage she thinks her easy-going, philosophical father is the model to emulate, but she ultimately finds his peace of mind is built on illusions and self-deceptions.   

Wonderfully absorbing, and written with a genius’s uncanny gift, The Image of Her is a rare literary experience.

The Image of Her, by Simone de Beauvoir. Published by Vintage. $34.99

June 2025

The Passengers on the Hankyu Line, by Hiro Arikawa

 

A steady stream of strangers straighten out their lives while travelling the Hankyu Train Line.   

In the author’s preface to Hiro Arikawa’s The Passengers of the Hankyu Line, we learn that Hankyu is a private railway that services the area around Kyoto in Japan. Arikawa concentrates her story on the Imazu Line, a lesser known line within Hankyu. A loose collection of characters bump into and interact with each other as they commute on the line, sometimes their fates coming to intertwine. 

Shoko is dealing with the grief of being a jilted bride. Misa, a student, is having trouble with her violent boyfriend. Tokie and her granddaughter discuss the merits of getting a dog. Kei’ichi in an accidental encounter meets Miho and the two tentatively move towards a relationship. Yasue, a housewife unhappy with her friendship circle, decides to step back from their expensive outings and lunches to concentrate on her family. 

First published in 2008 and now translated into English by Allison Markin Powell, The Passengers on the Hankyu Line is a gently written novel about everyday lives and where they intersect in public places. If there’s a theme, you could say it’s the kindness of strangers. Sometimes people behave badly in public - there are scenes of loud school girls and boisterous women grabbing seats - but in the long run humanity tends towards kindness and loving relationships. 

A pleasurable, companionable read that will make you feel that despite life’s troubles, all is good with the world.

The Passengers on the Hankyu Line, by Hiro Arikawa. Published by Doubleday. $34.99

June 2025

Pernickety Boo, by Sally Gardner

A talking umbrella with magic powers finds his forever home.

When a muddle-headed wizard unwittingly bungles a spell, he brings to life an umbrella. Pernickety Boo - a talking dog’s head attached to an umbrella canopy - finds himself abandoned by the forgetful wizard to a lost property depot. He languishes there for several years until he meets Sally Moonshine, a young girl who takes an immediate liking to Pernickety Boo. He moves in with Sally and her two Mums, meeting several interesting characters along the way, notably the cat Jimjam and a horse named Crackers. Pernickety and Sally experience many adventures, especially once Pernickety figures out how to use his time travelling skills. But danger looms when brattish Billy Turpin decides he wants Pernickety Boo for himself.

Best selling children’s author Sally Gardner has written a winning story full of whimsy and clever nonsense. Think Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. All of the novel’s interlocking parts shouldn’t really work - a talking umbrella that even the adults see as perfectly normal, talking cats that performed as circus acts in previous lives, plus a host of other absurdities - yet Sally Gardner has the magic touch and creates a bubbly, effervescent tonic out of this seeming chaos. 

A book sure to delight young and old readers alike. 

Pernickety Boo, by Sally Gardner. Published by HarperCollins. $19.99

June 2025

Murder on the Marlow Belle, by Robert Thorogood

Septuagenarian sleuth Judith Potts and her two middle-aged sidekicks Suzie Harris and Becks Starling find themselves drawn into another Marlow murder mystery in the fourth installment of this much loved cozy crime series.

There is trouble brewing at the Marlow Amateur Dramatic Society (MADS). Oliver Berestford, a divisive figure among the players, has organised a boat trip on the Marlow Belle, a snazzy vintage cruiser with cabins below. Only a select few have been chosen to attend the trip: Verity, Oliver’s wife, Lizzie, a former MADS member but now famous actress, Toby, a protege and Duncan, an old friend. When half way through the trip Oliver goes missing, it’s a complete mystery as to what has happened. His body is later found washed up with two bullet holes. What on earth could have happened to him? More to the point, who was out to get him?

The fourth book in The Marlow Murder Club series is great page-turning fun. Robert Thorogood’s ability to write a compelling whodunnit, shot through with wit, humour and heart, shows no sign of flagging. The twists and turns in the story, coupled with the wonderful characters - the pushy Judith, the blunt and outspoken dog walker Suzie and the prim and proper vicar’s wife Becks - make for a brilliant entertainment. The final set piece - with the ultimate crime reveal happening in the middle of a production of The Importance of Being Earnest - is clever and just a bit mad. Admittedly some aspects of the story stretch credulity, yet the overall journey is so enjoyable that these minor quibbles can be overlooked.

An irresistible romp with an endearing cast of characters.

Murder on the Marlow Belle, by Robert Thorogood. Published by HQ Fiction. $32.99

June 2025

A Curtain Twitcher's Book of Murder, by Gay Marris

Gay Marris gives murder the comedy-horror treatment in this entertaining debut.

​It’s 1960s, Swinging London. Atbara Avenue is a cosy yet nosy street, one where everyone knows everyone else’s business, built towards the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. At one end there is a corner shop and at the other a church, St Francis in the Fields. The street has become somewhat gaudy in its aspect, as contemporary decorative fashions, with all their ephemeral novelties, have taken prominence. Despite its surface calm, Atbara Avenue is soon shocked by the apparent suicide death of Pauline Dollimore, unhappy daughter of faded  songbird Muriel Dollimore, with whom she lived. As the story progresses, we are introduced to more unusual characters - a set of rival twins, a local beauty who goes missing, a weird girl who collects animals - many of whom meet untimely deaths. Weaving in and out of this bizarre cast is the stiff-upper-lip vicar’s wife Deidre O’Reilly, and her eternally bemused husband, Desmond. They remain cheerful and untouched by the subterranean oozings and slitherings of Atbara Avenue, carrying on their trivial, self-satisfied life while the worst of human depravity unfolds around them.

A Curtain Twitcher’s Book of Murder is English author Gay Marris’s debut novel. (Interestingly Marris is a retired scientist with an interest in insect ecology and parasites.) The book doesn’t work so much as a novel, rather it’s more a collection of bizarre tales, with well drawn characters and compelling plot lines. The only continuing thread is  the indomitable vicar and his wife, steady in their unflappable foolishness.

Gay Marris’s crime debut is a total original, almost a Gothic comedy-horror. The best analogy is perhaps the novels of American Shirley Jackson, noted for their macabre yet comic tone. A delicious treat for those with a wicked sense of humour.

A Curtain Twitcher's Book of Murder, by Gay Marris. Published by Bedford Square Fiction. $32.99

April 25