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could claim compensation for needless to say compensation was not paid to the slaves and there was no provision made for their transition to the new economy do you need to know all this of course not the historical note tells you everything you need to know historynerd i was just curious about the gap between the dates and the reasons why the british occupied the cape at that time so the story opens a week before that significant date as a nameless slave flees from her master at an inn she has no money nothing but the clothes she stands up in and some food scraps she had had a love affair with september who escaped some time beforehand because he was beaten for some unavoidable lateness when beating was no longer allowed his master set him free to avoid hassles in court and september took off without a backward glance this girl mourns for him and for the baby she lost as well as she scrambles across the inhospitable landscape desperately avoiding anything that might lead to recapture also struggling to survive but in a different way are james and his wife caroline she was warned not to marry him because he s a dreamer and a schemer but he set her hormones fluttering and here they are in the hot and dusty cape where he continues to lose their money in his investments he s an odd character a frenzied kind of a man perhaps these days we might say he is hyperactive and might be okay if he had a bit of ritalin he s in constant motion like a whirlwind striding through the streets as if he owns them and accepting the respect of others because he s spent money that he doesn t have impressing them with expensive accoutrements his mind is always active always impulsive always sensing every opportunity and planning his fortune so as to prove his father wrong but he cannot take a trick when the story opens the ship he chartered has foundered in a storm and the cargo that the newly freed slaves were going to buy to make him rich is nothing but salvage and even that is being pilfered by the locals in the dark caroline hates him she is sometimes nostalgic for the romance that has withered and died but she blames him for their awful life in this miserable colony she almost died from typhus and has lost her looks because of it she can t cope with crowds and social life and she has nothing to do and since james does not even visit her at night she has no children to assuage her loneliness the turmoil in the streets and the fear of an uprising keeps her imprisoned at home where she has no one but loyal faithful leah she thinks that leah loves her so you d think she might be kinder to leah but that s not how it is between mistress and slave leah knows that caroline doesn t though there are brief moments of hope things go badly for the nameless escapee hurt hungry and afraid she has a week to survive on her own and the concluding lines don t augur well for a vulnerable woman as the church bells ring to signal the moment of emancipation she is elated she has waited so long and suffered so much on her headlong flight and now she is with others newly free she doesn t want to wait with them to start out for cape town in the morning she wanted to start at once knowing only that she had to go she had to get outside and start coming out into the rain the fresh night everything washed clean walking down the stone steps of the church out into her freedom and having nowhere to go p 183 as must have been the case on that fateful day an uncertain future waits for all of them author karen jennings title first of december publisher text publishing 2026 cover design by imogen stubbs isbn 9781923058910 pbk 183 pages source kingston library share this share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky share on facebook opens in new window facebook email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin share on tumblr opens in new window tumblr share on pinterest opens in new window pinterest share on mastodon opens in new window mastodon share on threads opens in new window threads share on whatsapp opens in new window whatsapp like loading a short history of longans 2026 by mirandi riwoe july 22 2026 lisa hill 20 comments mirandi riwoe s third novel a short history of longans begins in 2049 with the poignant story of daniel grappling with old age with troubling memories and with the effects of climate change on his beloved longan tree there has been a ferocious storm and it seems as if this irreplaceable tree is doomed daniel has learned the hard way that solitude is the best way to ward off intrusive strangers who want to rake up a painful past so he s wary of an inquisitive neighbour called olivia in a novel composed of linked short stories and vignettes this beginning and the possibility of friendship blooming in the aftermath of the storm captured my interest more than any other so i was sorry to come to the end of winter and find that daniel s future like that of the planet remains unresolved autumn is set in the year 2000 and this section also shows riwoe s skill in depicting elderly characters with respect written from the perspective of wendy who has early onset dementia it shows her confusion and her distress about her daughter s realisation of what her forgetfulness signifies but it also shows wendy s irrepressible spirit not for the first time in reading this book the family tree at the front clarified who wendy is and her relationship to daniel in summer the novel then travels back a further half century to los angeles and the ambitions of ruby hoping to land a role in a film and finding that her opportunities such as they are in the era of the casting couch clash with her responsibilities to her son back in australia brought up by ruby s aunt pearl james doesn t know who his real mother is once again this is a story that invites the reader to become invested in the fate of the characters but after these first three characters there is a marked reduction in the number of pages about the remaining characters daniel wendy and ruby get round about 50 pages or so the reader gets to know them and is engaged with their prospects but maria michael and honora only get between 8 and 12 pages barely enough to get a sense of who they are and how they relate to their descendants eliza only merits two and a half pages and ada only five the penny dropped when i realised that the family tree plays another role in this novel its structure mirrors the family tree like many this family tree reflects the fact that families had many more children in the past before there was effective birth control but frustratingly for genealogists amateur or otherwise there s usually more information to be found in more recent generations while ancestors further back in time are harder to flesh out this may change in our digital era but records from the 20th century onward became more comprehensive assuming the ancestors lived in a well ordered stable society and that s a big assumption to make at any time and assuming that informants were honest and reliable another big assumption when breaches of custom mores and law had to be covered up in conservative eras there may be government church military and newspaper records letters and journals if an ancestor was literate and perhaps photos if the ancestor could afford them there may also be more recent oral history reliable or otherwise 18th and 19th century records are less helpful there may be shipping records convict registers and church records of births marriages and deaths occasionally there are newspaper records lower literacy levels means that there are fewer letters and journals to access a novelist who wants to create characters in these earlier periods of history has to rely more on imagination or as in riwoe s novel make a virtue of the reality that not much can be known of the stories of the generations born in 19th century australia by creating a tapestry of brief vignettes and weaving among them the tantalising legend of the chinese ancestor who might might not have been a bushranger although there are many grievances for these characters all of whom are othered in one way or another the reverse chronology shows that as you d expect racism and stereotyping were more overt in the earlier time frames when there was legal and social licence that allowed it spring set in the 19th century has rather a lot of characters all of whom suffer from prejudice against their irish or chinese heritage one shocking incident causes an unintended death but there is a form of redemption for the perpetrator while i think it s fair to say that some readers might find the structure confusing this is what mirandi riwoe has to say about it in the press release i love a clue puzzle novel i loved what swifties refer to as easter eggs i love finding links in stories that aha moment one of the reasons i wrote the novel going backwards was to explore how a character or a person might be perceived in the present perhaps negatively or with prejudice but how an incident of revelation revealed in the past might unpack those present behaviours or events i hope that my readers might enjoy some aha moments too i had no idea what riwoe meant by this something to do with taylor swift i looked it up yes apparently so enthusiasts find clues in her lyrics music videos social media and even her outfits who knew not me see also the review at the guardian and at readings author mirandi riwoe title a short history of longans publisher uqp university of queensland press 2026 cover design by sandy cull isbn 9780702269004 pbk 256 pages source review copy courtesy of uqp share this share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky share on facebook opens in new window facebook email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin share on tumblr opens in new window tumblr share on pinterest opens in new window pinterest share on mastodon opens in new window mastodon share on threads opens in new window threads share on whatsapp opens in new window whatsapp like loading before i go to sleep 2011 by s j watson july 20 2026 august 13 2026 lisa hill 19 comments reading this book reminded me of how much i used to enjoy browsing in secondhand bookshops sj watson s debut novel before i go to sleep was one of those much hyped books that passed me by when it was released in 2011 but by the time i stumbled on it for a paltry two dollars in a secondhand shop i was curious enough to buy it most of what i ve read in this genre which is not much has been annoyingly predictable with plodding characterisation and cliffhanger chapter endings designed for the movie tie in but this one was not like that for those who missed the hype and haven t seen the film beware lots of spoilers in the wikipedia description this is the book description every morning christine lucas wakes without memories her past her present the people she loved all are erased every night when she goes to sleep each day she must try to piece her life together each day the questions come who can she trust when she can t remember yesterday how can she love without memory and why is she so frightened so there are two men in her life one is her husband ben who has placed named photographs in the bathroom so that she can identify who he is and who patiently answers the same questions day after day about how she has lost her memory after a traumatic event the other is dr nash who unknown to ben is helping her to recover her memory and he does this by providing her with a journal to record her day before she goes to sleep and forgets everything all over again this is conducted in secrecy because ben is fed up with quacks trying to cure her it s not a spoiler to note that almost anyone will notice that there are no other people in christine s life no family no friends and no visitors to the house odd but the explanations are so plausible that the reader is torn between wondering which of these two men is not what he seems and whether one of them represents a threat to her or if the odd fragments of memory that surface are her imagination compensating for what has been lost so it s an interesting book even if it is a bit long for itself i can t say much more than that because the whole interest in reading it is the fun of weighing the evidence and vacillating between solutions to the mystery i got my two dollars worth i read this book at this time for 20booksof winter hosted by annabel to see my progress click here author s j watson title before i go to sleep publisher text publishing 2011 cover design by w h chong isbn 9781921758980 pbk 366 pages source personal library purchased secondhand 2 00 share this share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky share on facebook opens in new window facebook email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin share on tumblr opens in new window tumblr share on pinterest opens in new window pinterest share on mastodon opens in new window mastodon share on threads opens in new window threads share on whatsapp opens in new window whatsapp like loading playing in the light 2006 by zoë wicomb july 16 2026 lisa hill 5 comments it s so long since i bought this novel at what prompt i wonder that it came as a surprise it s the second novel of the late south african born uk resident zoë wicomb and it tells the story of marion the daughter of parents classified as coloured in apartheid south africa who had passed as white since before she was born people who did this in south africa were called play whites a deceptively light hearted term but the subterfuge was deadly earnest people chose to over ride the arbitrary classifications of the population registration act of 1950 so that they could access the benefits of a racist society but the personal cost was profound a traumatic loss of identity of family of culture and traditions and a sense of belonging and when apartheid south africa transitioned into the new multiracial south africa the personal cost also included guilt and shame when secrets kept for decades were revealed marion s has been an unhappy life because the strain of living a lie made her parents marriage bitter and marion wholly ignorant of her origins grows up estranged from all her family and anyone who might give the game away when she finds out she is blindsided by the impact on her identity and furious with her father wicomb treads a fine line between depicting marion s reality and avoiding opportunities to create her as a sympathetic character the reader is not meant to like her or feel sorry for her but she is meant to represent the consequences of opportunistic decisions made in the immediate aftermath of being suddenly classified into rigid racial categories the whole thing came about by accident not knowing that traffic police was a job reserved for whites because in apartheid s warped justifications how could you have a coloured man tellin...
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