THREE NOVELS

These three novels, briefly reviewed here, have little if anything in common I guess, except that they are all fiction, and that each is a well-written, outstanding even, example of its genre.

TELL IT TO THE SKIES
Erica James Orion $39

With eleven previous best-selling novels to her name, four short-listings in the Romantic Novel of the Year Awards, and her previous title Gardens of Delight winning that Award, Erica James could be called be one of the leading contemporary writers in her genre.
Her novels are, if you like, serious romantic novels with fabulous settings, well-developed characters and believable plots. They are also substantial with this latest for example running to some 400 pages.
Here’s how it starts:
It happened so quickly.
She had been hurrying from the market side of the Rialto Bridge, trying to avoid the crush of tourists in the packed middle section of shops, when a single face appeared in the crowd as if picked out by a bright spotlight entirely for her benefit.
Lydia has lived in Venice for many years, it’s a place she loves and then this day she glimpses that face in the crowd and she is reminded of a secret she thought she had long ago buried.

If you enjoy romantic novels, they don't come any better than this.


ACTS OF LOVE
Susan Pearce Victoria University Press $30

Something much more serious and certainly not a romantic novel in spite of a title that might suggest otherwise.
This is a first novel from Wellingtonian Susan Pearce, a highly regarded exponent of the short story, and an MA graduate in Creative Writing from Victoria University.
And what a stunner of a first novel it proves to be. I’m sure the publishers will be entering it for the Montana NZ Book Best First Book Awards with some confidence.

The story opens in 2004 in the Hutt Valley with the most domestic of scenes featuring a long-time married, pretty ordinary couple who unbeknown to them are about to have their quiet lives turned upside down.
Forty years before Rita and her husband Bill had met in the US while in a religious cult and all these years later Rita is still somewhat obsessed with the cult leader, Leland Swann. Out of the blue Leland Swann writes to say he is coming to Wellington and would like to stay with them.
A compelling read, an impressive debut.

Here is Rachael King on this title.


THE INDIAN CLERK
David Leavitt Bloomsbury $38

This guy is in a class of his own, an English professor at the University of New Orleans and one of America’s leading contemporary literary novelists.
This is a literary historical novel in which the author uses real people and then uses his imagination to play about with the facts and expand the lives of those real people depicting them as they may or may not have been.

The book is loosely structured around a lecture given by Cambridge don and brilliant mathematician G.H.Hardy in 1913. Hardy receives a letter from Ramanujan, a young Tamil mathematician, later to be recognized as one of the greatest mathematicians ever.
Hardy invites him to Cambridge where he takes him under his wing and where the young Indian becomes something of a celebrity.
It is this seemingly unlikely relationship between Hardy and Ramanujan that Leavitt uses as the basis of this impressively well researched and elegant novel.
There is the occasional mathematical formulae which I happily skipped without losing the story at all and I must also mention a wonderful metaphor that Leavitt uses in describing Hardy’s sister that really appealed to me, “a woman as thin as an exclamation point and just as emphatic.” Superb.