The Storm We Made
by Vanessa Chan (Hodder & Stoughton, $37.99)
Malaysian author Vanessa Chan draws on her family history for this gripping story about a family in Kuala Lumpur over two time periods – in 1935 in the run-up to World War II and in the final throes of it in 1945.
Cecily Alcantara, a clever young Eurasian, is a bored housewife and mother in Malaya who has always felt looked down upon by the British, who are occupying the country. She finds herself falling for the charms of Bingley Chan, who says he is a Hong Kong merchant but is really General Fujiwara of the Japanese Imperial Army, preparing the ground for an invasion of her country. Eating up Fujiwara’s “Asia for Asians” vision, Cecily begins feeding him information she picks up from her mid-level civil servant husband, Gordon, and finds she has a knack for it.
Cecily experiences life in its extremes. In the mid-1930s period, she a woman in love and feeling superior for the first time in her life. Then she’s living in fear in 1945, when the Japanese, like the Nazis, have started to see the writing on the wall – they have lost the war.
As Chan puts it, the Malayans were being brutalised by people who look like them this time. In 1945, each of Cecily’s by then three children is in grave danger. Her son, Abel, is snatched by the Japanese to work in a labour camp; her youngest daughter, 7-year-old Jasmin, is hidden for fear of being recruited as a “comfort woman” for the Japanese; and Cecily’s smart older daughter, Jujube, is desperately trying to keep her family safe. Each character is finely drawn. The author is extraordinarily good at evoking the scenes and smells of the time, even people’s sour sweat and breath.
The novel examines what it is to carry the legacy of colonialism in your body, the prejudice between nations, women’s friendships and how power corrupts. It’s a gruelling but absolutely fascinating read and Cecily is a riveting anti-heroine, someone who, for all her flaws, you can’t help rooting for.
The Porcelain Maker
by Sarah Freethy (Simon & Schuster, $37.99)
Living in the vibrant art scene of Germany of 1929 are Max, an architect, and Bettina, an avant-garde artist. Max is from a Jewish family in Vienna, Bettina from a traditional conservative farming family near Dachau, and both are in grave danger from the Nazi regime.
Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the main architect of the Holocaust, oversaw the mass production of the Allach porcelain figures of soldiers and animals, a cloyingly sentimental kind of art designed to bend the masses to the Nazis’ will and raise a spirit of nationalism. Seeing the way the wind is blowing, Bettina changes her art to work that is more Nazi-friendly. Max gets work at the Allach porcelain factory in Dachau under a false identity. When his true identity is discovered, his sculpting skills save him and he works this time in the SS’s other porcelain figure-making factory directly linked to the concentration camp.
Bettina becomes pregnant and marries a high-up Nazi with an interest in art, who she persuades to allow her to donate her artistic talents to design some of the porcelain figures at the Allach factory. Max and Bettina loathe these porcelain figures, decide they can’t be completely complicit and start making their own figures with a darker side to expose the reality of the world. When these are discovered, all hell breaks loose. We hear what happens next through the investigations of Clara and Lotte, Max and Bettina’s daughter and granddaughter, decades later.
It’s a heart-wrenching read but offers fascinating insights into the way art can be used to rouse or tame a disgruntled population. In the end, the novel suggests, art and love are all we leave behind.
Never Ever Forever
by Karina May (Macmillan, $37.99)
A perfect beach holiday book that has a few twists to keep things interesting. Our heroine, the charmingly named Rosie Royce, has left her friends and family in Sydney for the country town of Mudgee, where she is starting a new career with her own radio show. Suddenly, her boss tells her the well-known TV vet Dr Markus is going to join her show and he’s not quite the man she was expecting. Sometimes he’s smarmy and pleased with himself but at other times he seems lacking in confidence and sweet. Meanwhile, Rosie’s first love, Wes, who went off to London without her in their 20s, has come back for their high school reunion and wants to reconnect.
Rosie’s mother left her and her father when she was young. She suffers from anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder and is loath to leave her father and do the usual Aussie girl things, such as going on her OE. Meanwhile, her friend group is going through a few issues and Rosie has a way of erasing people from her life if they disappoint her.
As her new world and the old collide, Rosie’s life suddenly becomes full of adventure. She has two men interested in her, a radio story goes viral – which leads to a trip to India – and Rosie meets someone from the past.
There are elephants, cows in labour, the bright lights of Mumbai, designer clothes, interesting art projects, a wedding, a dash to hospital and lots of satisfying action, and you can feel smug about guessing some of the twists ahead. A right rollicking read.
