The Blogging from A to Z April Challenge  is for bloggers who wish to participate by publishing a blog post every day in April except for Sundays. Each blog post will focus on a letter of the alphabet. For example April 1 will be A, April 2 will be B and on it goes. By the end of April, a blog post for every letter of the alphabet will have been posted.

The Wife Between Us by Christian White

Summary

Set against gainst the backdrop of an eerie island town in the dead of winter, The Wife and the Widow is a mystery/thriller told from two perspectives: Kate, a widow whose grief is compounded by what she learns about her dead husband’s secret life; and Abby, an island local whose world is turned upside down when she’s forced to confront the evidence that her husband is a murderer. But nothing on this island is quite as it seems, and only when these women come together can they discover the whole story about the men in their lives.

Brilliant and beguiling, The Wife and the Widow takes you to a cliff edge and asks the question: how well do we really know the people we love? – Goodreads

My Thoughts

I felt The Wife and the Widow started slowly. At first I was hesitant to keep going with it. I really enjoyed Christian White’s first book, Nowhere Child which is the reason I stuck with this book. And I’m really pleased I did. When my eyes were finally opened to what was really going on in the story, I was hooked and couldn’t put it down. No spoilers here at all. You have to read this book for the twist.

Published September 2019 by Affirm Press
Softcover, 384 pages

Star Rating ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

About the Author

Christian White is an Australian author and screenwriter. The Nowhere Child is his first book. An early draft of this novel won the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, and rights were quickly sold into fifteen countries. He lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and their adopted greyhound, Issy. – Goodreads

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2020 Aussie Author Challenge

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Summary

The Eureka Stockade: It’s one of Australia’s foundation legends – yet the story has always been told as if half the participants weren’t there. But what if the hot tempered, free spirited gold miners we learned about at school were actually husbands and fathers, brothers and sons? What if there were women and children right there beside them, inside the Stockade, when the bullets started to fly? And how do the answers to these questions change what we thought we knew about the so-called ‘birth of Australian democracy’?

Ten years in the research and writing,m inimitably bold, entertaining and irreverent in style, Clare Wright’s The forgotten Rebels of Eureka is a fitting tribute to the unbiddable women of Ballarat – women who made Eureka a story for us all. – blurb

My Thoughts

This book was right up my alley. I heard the author speak about this book at the Bendigo Writers Festival in 2017, and purchased it immediately. Unfortunately, it has sat on my bookshelf unread until recently. As a lover of history, and in particular Australian and Goldfields history, I devoured every word. Clare Wright has written about the women of the goldfieds in such as a way, that allows their personalities and characters to shine through. I felt as though I had met and spent time with these women, as I read their story.

I found some of the descriptions of the Eureka uprising to be brutal in their honesty and at times difficult to read. This is a true and accurate account of the women and children of the goldfields, who rarely rate a mention. The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka addresses that imbalance and tells the real story without sugar coating.

Recommendations

2014 Winner of The Stella Prize

‘A rare and irresistible combination of impeccable scholarship with a lively, warm, engaging narrative voice’. – Stella Prize Committee

‘Beautifully written, her book takes readers on a vivid journey of what life was like for the families of the miners, merchants, prostitutes, and police. It’s a great story’ – Courier-Mail

‘Evokes the goldfield era vividly….brings to life the experiences of so many young immigrants to Australia in the 1850s….Women in particular will enjoy this refreshing new look at Eureka‘ – The Age

Star Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

About the Author

Clare Wright is an historian who has worked as a political speechwriter, university lecturer, historical consultant and radio and television broadcaster. Her first book, ‘Beyond the Ladies Lounge: Australia’s Female Publicans’, garnered both critical and popular acclaim and her second, ‘The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka’, won the 2014 Stella Prize.

She researched, wrote and presented the ABC TV documentary Utopia Girls and is the co-writer of the four-part series The War That Changed Us which screened on ABC1.

Published 2013, by Text Publishing Australia.
Softcover, 539 pages, including notes, bibliography and index.

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#2020 Aussie Author Challenge

© 2020 Copyright. All rights reserved: bestbookishblog.com

This post is not a review post but merely a list of the non-fiction that I’ve been reading lately, with a short description taken from the back covers. I did enjoy reading each of these books, but don’t feel ready to review them just yet. They may appear as a book review in 2020, or they may not.

Cardinal: The rise and Fall of George Pell by Louise Milligan

Cardinal George Pell, Australia’s most powerful Catholic, was found guilty of five sexual crimes against children and has been sentenced to six years jail. He is the most senior Catholic figure in the world to be charged by police and convicted of child sex offences. The abuse involved choirboys at Melbourne’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The royal commission into institutional Responses to Child Abuse brought to light horrific stories about abuse of the most vulnerable. Pell portrayed himself as the first man in the Catholic Church to tackle the problem. Louise Milligan pieces together decades of disturbing activities highlighting Pell’s actions and coverups. Cardinal has won many awards. (from the back cover)

Murder, Misadventure & Miserable Ends; Tales from a Colonial Coroner’s Court
by Catie Gilchrist

Single & Free: Female Migration to Australia 1833-1837 by Elizabeth Rushen

Henry Shiell was the Sydney city Coroner from 1866 to 1889. In the course of his unusually long career, he delved into the lives, loves, crimes, homes and workplaces of his fellow Sydneysiders. He learned of envies, infidelities, passions and loyalties, and just how short, sad and violent some lives were. but his court was also, at times, instrumental in calling for new laws and regulations to make life safer. With few safety regulations, the colourful city was also a place of frequent inquests, silent morgues and solemn graveyards. this is the story of life and death in colonial sydney (from the back cover)

Between 1833 and 1837, fourteen ships carried nearly 3000 single women from Britain and Ireland, to the colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. The women migrated in response to promotional material which emphasised the shortage of women in the Australian coonies. Life at home contrasted dramaticaly with the opportunities provided by the colonies and many enterprising women were encouraged to migrate.

The life experiences of these women demonstrate that they were drawn from a wide cross-section of nineteenth century society. They contributed to the develpment of the colonies through their employment as domestic and agricultural workers, their enterprises as dressmakers, midwives and teachers, as wives and as mothers of the rising generation. This book tells their stories.

Solomon’s Noose: The True Story of Her Majesty/s Hangman of Hobart
by Steve Harris

The story of a young convict, Solomon Blay, who became Her Majesty’s hangman in Van Diemen’s Land. the man who personally had to deliver an Empire’s judgment on 200 men and women, and endured his own noose of personal demons and demonisation in order to “survive”; all in the context of the great struggles of good-evil, life-death, hope-despair, which drew the attention of Darwin, Twain, Trollope and Dickens as Van Diemen’s Land evolved from a Hades of Evil to sow the seeds of nationhood.

The book paints a vivid picture of the society and poverty from which Blay’s character was forged in England and the desperate, brutal nature of being a convict in Van Diemen’s Land. Solomon’s Noose is an important book in exposing the dark ‘underbelly’ in the formation of modern Australia.

1788 The Brutyal Truth of the First Fleet by David Hill

In 1788, 11 small ships set sail from England on an eight-month-long voyage over the roughest of seas, carrying 1,500 people, food for two years, and all the equipment needed to build a colony of convicts in a land completely beyond their experience and imagination. In Portsmouth, the fleet’s preparation was characterized by disease, promiscuity, and death. The journey itself was one of unbearable hardship, but also of extraordinary resilience. Upon their arrival, however, the colonists faced their biggest challenges of all: conflict, starvation, and despair. Combining the skill of a vigilant journalist with the magic of a master novelist, this entrancing history brings the sights, sounds, sufferings, and joys of the “First Fleeters” back to life. Journals, letters, reports, and pleas to England are all interwoven here with the author’s own insight, and together they convey the innermost horrors and joys of the very first European Australians. The result is a narrative history that is surprising, compelling, and unforgettable.

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images: Goodreads