Bhowani Junction

Review by Andrew Murray Scott

Highly successful on publication in 1954 when events of a decade earlier in India were still fresh in the mind of John Masters, its author, and the public at large, Bhowani Junction is set at the time of Indian independence and therefore has superficial similarities to the slightly better known work of Paul Scott. But while the Raj Quartet has been popularised by a successful TV series, Masters’ work has rather receded from familiarity like the film made of this novel starring Stewart Granger and Ava Gardner.

The novel has three main protagonists and is a more focussed and narrower study of the personal and social problems of three of the main social groupings in India just before Partition, particularly of the Anglo-Indians, or ‘half-castes’. While in Scott’s work this grouping was rarely glimpsed or alluded to only in minor characters, in Bhowani Junction, two of the three main protagonists are Anglo-Indians, and the third is the British officer, Colonel Rodney Savage, effective though rather brusque. By far the largest part of the narrative is given by the first person narration of Patrick Taylor, an anglophile ‘Anglo-Indian’ Railway official, and Victoria Jones, a beautiful Anglo-Indian WAC(I).

John Masters

John Masters was born in Calcutta in 1914 and was educated at Wellington and Sandhurst. He returned to India in 1934 as an army officer. During the Second World War he served in the Middle East and Burma. After the war he was a staff officer in GHQ India in Delhi, and then served as an instructor at the British Army Staff College in Camberley. After this he left the army and moved to the United States, where he became a successful writer. He lived in New Mexico, where he died in 1983.

His many novels include Nightrunners of Bengal (1951), The Deceivers (1952), The Lotus and the Wind (1953), Bhowani Junction (1954), Coromandel! (1955), Bugles and a Tiger (1956), Far, Far the Mountain Peak (1957), To the Coral Strand (1962) and The Ravi Lancers (1972).

The Book Thief

Review by Catherine Hume

In this story by Markus Zusak we follow a young girl named Liesel Meminger as she travels across 1930s Germany to a foster family. The world around our unsuspecting heroine unfolds into an understated nightmare, where the harsh realities of Nazism and the war only just touch Liesel, her new family, her friends and her surroundings until 1943 when food shortages and bombings become de rigueur. And then comes the Final Solution, with which Liesel becomes entangled, but to a small extent.

Markus Zusak

Australian author Markus Zusak was born in 1975 in Sydney. He is the son of an Austrian father and German mother and he is the youngest of four children. He studied teaching at university and has taught at high school. Zusak lives in Sydney with his wife, daughter and son, and has taken up surfing.

Zusak began writing at the age of sixteen. The Underdog, his first novel, was published in 1999 and was followed by two sequels, Fighting Ruben Wolfe (2000) and When Dogs Cry (2001). Two subsequent novels The Messenger (2002) and The Book Thief (2005) have earned him international recognition.

The Lieutenant

Review by Catherine Hume

It’s easy to see why Kate Grenville won the Orange Prize in 2001 for The Idea of Perfection. The story of The Lieutenant begins by introducing us to Daniel Rooke, a young boy who lives with the curse of being a gifted child whose main interests are mathematics and astronomy. He is offered a place at a public school where boys still make fun of him for his exceptional abilities, but where he is given one-to-one attention in his interests.

We then encounter the thirteen-year-old Navy Officer Rooke, who is more excited at the prospect of viewing the stars of foreign skies than defending the Realm and conquering ‘natives’. Rooke, as a man-child, experiences the horrors of war, but after a time of recuperation with his family, is sent to another ship with a familiar face in the shape of friend and raconteur Lieutenant Silk.

Kate Grenville

The Australian writer Kate Grenville was born in Sydney. After graduating from Sydney University she worked in the film industry before living in Europe for several years and starting to write. In 1980 she went to the USA, where she did an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Colorado. Her first book was a collection of short stories and has been followed by seven novels (Lilian’s Story, Dreamhouse, Joan Makes History, Dark Places, The Idea of Perfection, The Secret River and The Lieutenant) and four books about writing. In 2010 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of New South Wales.

Catherine Hume

Catherine Hume was born in Norton-on-Tees in 1980, and moved to Blackpool in 1984. She is the author of one work of fiction, Coming Back to Life. While at school, she worked at open-air markets, danced, acted, painted and played tenor trombone in a brass band. During her time at university, in Stoke-on-Trent, she worked in hotels, fast food joints and then with disadvantaged people. She has since lived and worked in Scotland and North-east England.

Catherine Hume’s background as a social carer permeates all her work, whether she is writing a novel, a short play, a solo performance piece or a collaboration on a film.

Learning languages – the latest being Mandarin Chinese – is a necessary work-related evil, and an evil that Catherine regularly unleashes onto the world, especially as her favourite hobbies are travel and meeting all sorts of people, from archbishops to anarchists.

Catherine’s ambitions include more travel, and the wistful dream of one day having afternoon tea with Michael Stipe.

At The Loch of the Green Corrie

Review by Andrew Murray Scott

This non-fiction title by Andrew Greig combines an homage to the poetry of Norman MacCaig with a fly-fishing expedition to the hill lochs of Assynt.

The book could be neatly summed up in the words of one of Greig’s companions on the fishing trip: ‘Fishing for MacCaig? Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’ For not only does the book relate the author’s friendship with the Scots makar, thereby ‘fishing’ for an understanding of his lasting value as a poet, the writing of the book and the fishing trip were literally undertaken after a request from the poet to fish on his behalf as he, just months before his death, was no longer able to do so. The feisty brown trout in a remote and relatively undistinguished Assynt loch therefore becomes a sacred quest for Andrew Greig and his companions Andy and Peter Dorward on a par with the seeking of the mythical salmon of experience in Neil Gunn’s Highland River.

Andrew Greig

Andrew Greig was born in Bannockburn and brought up in Anstruther. He studied philosophy at Edinburgh University. He has written six books of poetry and five novels, including In Another Light, set in Orkney and Penang, which won the 2004 Saltire Society Book of the Year Prize. He has also written non-fiction, including climbing books and At the Loch on the Green Corrie, a book inspired by fellow-poet Norman MacCaig.

Light and Darkness

Review by Steve Savage

Set in Japan in the early 20th century, the action of Light and Darkness takes place while Tsuda, a recently-married man aged nearly 30, prepares for and undergoes an unpleasant operation and is persuaded to confront his lingering feelings for Kiyoko, a woman who refused to marry him and chose someone else, by arranging to meet her, supposedly by chance, at an inn in the mountains. The novel was unfinished at the death of Natsume Sōseki, its author, and so the reader can only guess at the consequences of the meeting between Tsuda and Kiyoko.