"The Paperbark Shoe" by Goldie Goldbloom

Virginia Toad, née Boyle, has married Toad, a man whose name describes him, and lives a hardscrabble life on a farm in the Australian Outback. During the years of World War II, the drought is worse than usual, and the normal struggle to eke out a living becomes even more difficult. Then the British high command directs that Italian prisoners of war be sent to Australian farms as slave labor, and the conflicts of “The Paperbark Shoe” begin as the authorities assign two prisoners, John and Antonio, to the Toad farm.

Virginia – “Gin” – is angry at and repels the world, including her husband, her two children, and the child yet to come. She has survived a cold kind of abuse from her stepfather and has been denied a piano scholarship and tour rightfully hers. She deserved it because Gin can play – in fact, her virtuoso abilities combine with her albinism to make her a complete freak in her isolated community. She has a caustic word or response to every situation until the arrival of Antonio, an attentive, cultured man who takes time with her, can appreciate her musical skill, and eventually finds her beautiful. This is a revelation to Gin but she struggles with it because of her loyalty to her husband. She struggles until she finds that Toad has not been loyal to her.

Ms. Goldbloom compels us to see Gin’s harsh life in the harsh landscape and conditions. She makes everyone’s motivation plentifully clear; the main characters are gratifyingly nuanced and deep. The somber, almost foreboding tone throughout makes this book something of a drag, at least it did for me. There are things about this book that recommend it: the correspondence of the harsh and empty landscape to the heroine’s parched heart; the effective glimpses into Australian thought and psychology during the war; the weaving of Aussie words and phrases into Ms. Goldbloom’s staccato, hard-edged prose. This book does have an edge, and is very well written, but it is limited by its pedestrian ambition.

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"The Secret River" by Kate Grenville

Will Thornhill, a down-on-his-luck London waterman (boat taxi pilot) in the last years of the 18th century, struggles to feed his very young family. Kate Grenville shows graphically that the odds are too long, just as they are for countless other lower-class Londoners at the time. Will turns inevitably to petty thievery, is caught, tried, and sentenced to be executed. Instead, his ever-loyal wife succeeds in getting the sentence reduced to transportation - the authorities banish Thornhill and his family to Australia in 1806.

After Will's arrival in Australia, the story takes flight. His wife Sal opens a grog shop and the family begins to scrape together a few shillings. Will returns to the boat trade, and they begin to build some wealth. He finally buys out a former employer, and becomes a man of property. Along the way, he convinces Sal that they can and should be landowners along the river, and the stage is set for the drama that plays out. The other settlers along the river wish to drive the aboriginals out and expand their inchoate empires. Thornhill and his brood have the opposite view, down deep. They have no reason to want the Aboriginies out - they have no grievances on either side. However, hatred and events gain momentum, and Thornhill takes part in a skirmish at a friend's settlement in which several are killed on both sides. The native people clear out of the area after that, leaving the white settlers alone. Thornhill becomes wealthy from the river trade, dealing in farm goods and shipping.

But Thornhill has a secret river, living alongside the actual Hawkesbury where he has made his fortune. He has kept his complicity in the deadly fight with the aboriginals a secret from Sal, and it has allowed his family to flourish. He recoginzed the natives as a creative, family-oriented, affable lot, and the battle that made his fortune possible haunts him. He watches the landscape and the river from his villa, looking, and waiting, for something he knows will never come. There will never be a return of the Aboriginies he knew in his early days on the river, just as there will never be redemption for his acts of violence.

Ms. Grenville tells this saga in unblinking language. Her facility with Thornhill's inward journey is sure and true, and lends weight to this weighty narrative. This piece won the Orange Prize in the UK, and it's easy to see why. It encapsulates in one piece of fiction the internal and external conflict surrounding the inescapable poverty of 18th-century London, and the displacement and annihilation of Australia's native people. The book offers a highlight in the loving Thornhill couple, a full and nuanced relationship with an inward odyssey of its own. Ms. Grenville delivers all this in vivid terms, in knowing language, framed in emotional and economic reality. A terrific, memorable, and highly-recommended book.

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"Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish" by Richard Flanagan

Sometimes the buzz surrounding a book crashes through my everyday. Such is the case with "Gould's Book of Fish," a story ultimately about the brutal strength of empire and the truly callous way science applied itself in the service of accepted wisdom in the 19th century.

The prison surgeon, an obese, self-absorbed, and manically ambitious individual, assigns Billy Gould, a small-time forger and crook, the job of painting the various species of fish caught by the surgeon and others. Additionally, the camp's commandant, himself an impostor wearing a gold mask, is skimming funds from the government to build a new city-state in this island off the coast of Tasmania. Well, the surgeon, who wanted to advance the art of Enlightenment classification, is killed and eaten by his pet pig and becomes "the largest pig turd on the planet." The commandant, too, comes to an appropriately ghastly end. But these plot particulars do not begin to inform you about this remarkable, outrageous outlier of a book. Flanagan blesses his reader with a very healthy dose of the outlandish, the impossible. There is an ultimate metamorphosis in the book which I will not spoil. The triumph of the book for the author is in its unbelievably inventive plot devices and prose. The triumph for the reader and the main character is the final transcendence over the Enlightenment's compunction to classify everything (including aboriginals as sub-human), and the madness of Britain's imperial and penal systems.

Oh my gosh! If you've missed this one so far, you should definitely open it up. Its plot elements may not be for everyone, but the theme of man's inhumanity etc. etc. is universal.

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