The Age (Australia)
Reviewed June 14, 2008

ONE KIND WORD CAN WARM THREE winter months, according to a Japanese proverb. Well-chosen words in large doses will similarly help keep out the cold and dispel the seasonal gloom. This winter there is no shortage of books with which readers can pleasurably wile away the many extra indoor hours the season brings.

According to one of Shakespeare's characters, "A sad tale's best for winter". A poignant family story with a European flavour comes from Doris Lessing, last year's Nobel laureate for literature. She is about to release Alfred & Emily (HarperCollins), a partly speculative biography of her parents, whose lives were blighted by the First World War. In a fictional section of the book, Lessing imagines how much happier their lives might have been if the war had never happened.

A more modern, though no less tragic conflict is the location for I Lost My Love in Baghdad (MUP), Michael Hastings' memoir of his time as a correspondent and his ill-fated romance with Andi Parhamovich, an aid worker he met in New York. She moves with him to Iraq only to die in an ambush.

During winter, libraries seem all the more inviting. Scott Douglas' Quiet, Please (Pan Macmillan) is a lively account of the author's career at a southern Californian public library.

Douglas' realisation of the true nature of his profession will resonate with anyone who has worked in a library. "My world had for so long been about books and writing and anything remotely literary. The library - the place in my life that was full of books - began to teach me that books weren't everything."

Some of the authors whose books moulder on library shelves are not as dead as they seem. Robert Ludlum and V. C. Andrews continue to "write" books even though they passed away years ago, so it is no surprise to find Ian Fleming being impersonated attentively by Sebastian Faulks in Devil May Care (Penguin) with the approval of the Fleming estate.

There are more authorised James Bond books written by other writers than by Fleming himself, including arguably the best-written James Bond novel, Colonel Sun, which Kingsley Amis wrote under a pseudonym.

A local publisher dabbling in literary resurrection is Scribe, which is reissuing Charles McCarry's 1978 Cold War espionage thriller, The Secret Lovers. McCarry's admirers are wont to place him in the same bracket as John le Carre, and this book certainly comes from a vintage period for spy fiction.

In August, Scribe will bring us Dissection, the debut novel by Jacinta Halloran, a Melbourne GP, who tells the story of Anna MacBride, a medico haunted by a malpractice suit after she mistakenly amputates a patient's leg. She dreads the thought of finding herself before a judge "who does not understand the intrinsic truth of being a doctor; that, while the mind may deceive, the body does not".

Fans of Vikas Swarup's Q&A, a clever satire on Indian TV quiz shows, will be pleased to learn that his second novel, Six Suspects (Random House), is on the way. Arun Advani, India's best-known investigative reporter, sets out to solve the murder of the wayward playboy son of a provincial government minister who was himself a killer. In a classic Agatha Christie scenario, each of the six people at the party where the victim died has an apparent motive.

Younger readers of fiction can look forward to Cloudland (Pan Macmillan), the first novel by poet Lisa Gorton, and due in July. An ordinary airline flight to England propels child heroine Lucy into "the secret machinery of clouds" and a world where she finds herself at war with the ice queen Kazia.

Already in bookstores is Pip: The Story of Olive (Allen & Unwin) by Melbourne author Kim Kane. Olive Garnaut, "the most peculiar looking girl in year 7" at the Joanne d'Arc School for Girls, finds solace in her ostracism with the arrival of a vivacious imaginary friend.

The cover of Pip is illustrated by Elise Hurst, whose own rather magical book, The Night Garden (Allen & Unwin) - the 50th Hurst has illustrated and/or written - was shortlisted for this year's Children's Book Council best picture-book award.

China will loom ever larger in the world's consciousness when the Beijing Olympics begin in August. China: A History (HarperCollins) is John Keay's grand though concise narrative spanning thousands of years. Gavin Menzies, meanwhile, focuses on a single year in 1434 (HarperCollins) when he says a Chinese fleet sailed to Italy and while it was there somehow inspired the Italian Renaissance.

Those readers unconvinced by 1421 - the controversial mega-seller in which Menzies claimed, over the fierce objections of leading historians, that the Chinese discovered America and Australia and much else besides - might want to consider having a little salt nearby as they read.

Closer to home, though still very much in the region, Alice Pung has edited Growing up Asian in Australia (Black Inc), an impressive collection of memoirs by Cindy Pan, Jenny Kee, John So, Jason Yat-Sen Li and many more prominent Asian-Australians.

In a similar vein, Ouyang Yu's On the Smell of an Oily Rag (Wakefield Press) explores the Chinese-born Australian author's dual cultural identity, and finds some striking and unexpected parallels between Chinese and Australian high and low culture. The tall poppy syndrome was prefigured in a line of ancient Chinese poetry: "If a tree stands pretty in a forest, the wind will destroy it."