The tragedy of war: ‘When Sleeping Women Wake’ by Emma Pei Yin
‘When sleeping women wake, mountains move.‘
This is the kind of historical fiction that has me turning immediately to the Author’s Note, and then searching for more information on the events and places depicted, as I read.
I knew next to nothing about the fate of Hong Kong Chinese under the brutal occupation by the Japanese Imperial Army in WWII, and this novel (the first by Australian-Hong Kong Chinese author Emma Pei Yin) certainly whet my appetitie to learn more.
It follows three women through the war; their stories and eventual fates connected but separated for a time after the invasion of their home.
Mingzhu is married to a wealthy businessman, leading a luxurious but unsatisfying life. As First Wife, she adores her daughter Qiang but must endure the taunts of her husband’s concubine with whom he has a son. Mingzhu is intelligent and strong-willed and to ensure her daughter has opportunities that were denied to her, she chooses a compassionate and well educated English man to tutor Qiang as the girl grows into young adulthood.
Biyu is her companion and maid, who came into Mingzhu’s family when Mingzhu herself was born. Loving and loyal, Biyu has devoted her life to her mistress and will do anything to protect her and young Qiang.
Qiang dreams of more: an education, a profession…and when the war hits, she dreams of fighting to protect her home and family.
But when the Japanese Army descends on Hong Kong, the three women are separated. Each endure hardship and witness unspeakable acts of cruelty, alongside courage and kindness, sometimes from unexpected sources.
The story traces the development of the East River Column, a group of resistance fighters. This part of the novel is based on a real group whose acts of sabotage, theft of weapons, rescue of downed Allied pilots and victims of the Japanese Army, all played a part to hinder the invaders in their goal of complete domination of Asia. It’s a thrilling story, underlaid with the real human tragedy of war, represented by Mingzhu, Biyu and Qiang and those they encounter.
These three women also represent some of the best attributes of the human instinct for survival, loyalty, love and courage. While the novel doesn’t have a stereotypical ‘happy ending’, it does offer hope and a profound respect for those caught up in suffering at the hands of others.
When Sleeping Women Wake was published in 2025 by Hachette Australia.
A nod to the gothic: ‘The Midnight Estate’ by Kelly Rimmer
I’m a bit of a sucker for ‘book within a book’ stories. Done well, they can have you intruiged from the moment you realise there is a connection between the two seemingly unrelated narratives. Think Magpie Murders which added a delightful dual-timeline component as well as two murder mysteries to solve.
Australian author Kelly Rimmer writes excellent historical fiction, often weaving together legacies from the Second World War with modern-day protagonists in very moving ways. The Midnight Estate is a little different, although here, too, past events cast long shadows over the present.
Fiona Winslow moves back to country NSW after an emotionally exhausting year, planning on restoring the crumbling mansion that belonged to her beloved uncle and was once home to herself, her mother and her cousin. Since her uncle’s death it has stood empty and neglected and she is faced with a mammoth task, not helped by inexplicable opposition by her mother towards her plans – and rumours in the town that the house is haunted.
While cleaning and sorting her uncle’s old furniture and belongings, she comes across a box of books, sent by the publishers to her uncle, who had been a famous award-winning writer. As she begins to read The Midnight Estate, Fiona is puzzled, then intruiged by apparent similarities between her family’s story and the novel’s. Her uncle’s name is not on the book, but who wrote it? And why do some of the characters resemble people she knows?
The old mansion house, while a beautiful haven for Fiona as a child, begins to feel less welcoming, as she begins to piece together parts of a family story that go back a generation. There are dark secrets that must be uncovered before Fiona can reconcile what she thought she knew about herself and her family with what she learns, and finally feel that she has come home at last.
There are enough creaks in the night for The Midnight Estate to feel like an old-fashioned gothic mystery. However, the novel’s theme deals with an enduring and contemporary issue, that of coercive control and intimate partner violence; skillfully done and very believable.
The Midnight Estate is published by Hachette in July 2025.
My thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for a review copy.
A gift: ‘Memorial Days’ by Geraldine Brooks’
I am a long-time admirer of Geraldine Brooks and have read pretty much everything she has written, at least in book form. Australian-born, raised in the suburbs of Sydney, she has worked in the US and been a journalist in war zones around the world. For thirty years she was happily married to American writer Tony Horwitz and they raised two sons at Martha’s Vineyard, an island in the US state of Massachusetts.
Until the day in 2019 when out of the blue, she received a phone call from a harried doctor in a Washington DC hospital, informing her that Tony had collapsed on a street in that city and was dead.
This terrible moment opens the book and from there she recounts the moments, days, weeks and months that follow, as she tries to gather her ragged thoughts and emotions and do what needs to be done. Tony had been on a national tour promoting his latest book and his schedule had been tight. Geraldine herself was struggling to finish her own book (later the award winning novel, Horse.) One son was overseas and the youngest, still at high school, was also a journey away from home and from her.
Instead of giving herself over to the overwhelm of her grief, she instead faced long to-do lists, administrative tasks and the needs of others, all requiring her attention.
In our culture, this is what death demands. We do not have grieving rituals or customs that allow the bereaved to withdraw from worldly matters in order to process emotional ones. We are expected to fill out forms, remember what government or other agencies to notify, plan a funeral and/or wake or memorial service, greet well-wishers with appropriate words and behaviours, continue to pay utility bills on time, and carry on with the minutia of daily life, and very often, hold down a job, attend study, and otherwise continue as before.
For three years the author did exactly this. At great cost.
Then she booked herself on a plane to Australia, specifically to Flinders Island, a small and somewhat remote island off the coast of Tasmania, where she had spent time before meeting and marrying Tony – and where she had once imagined living a different sort of life. She went there to be alone, and to do the work that needed doing to properly grieve.
Memorial Days’ narrative alternates between the period after Tony’s death, and the time spent on Flinders Island. The prose is sparse, beautiful, very personal, full of the insights allowed to surface once the space and quiet was made for them to do so. Also full of lovely memories of her years with Tony – bittersweet, some of them, as you’d expect. And, perhaps also to be expected, regrets and even remonstrances: why hadn’t she picked up the signs of his ill health before they’d killed him? Why hadn’t she insisted on him visiting his cardiologist earlier?
Flinders Island, with its own tragic history of the abuses suffered by the Aboriginal people taken there during colonial times, serves as a stark if beautiful backdrop for the thinking, remembering, grieving needed to be done.
If the book sounds grim, or too sad – it isn’t. It is sombre, of course, but so sweetly written that it feels something like a conversation with a friend. As a friend would do, the author leaves readers with some hard-learned lessons at the end of the book; things she’d had no idea of until faced with the realities of the ‘time after’ a sudden death of a loved one; lessons that we could all benefit from .
A gift to us from a gifted author.
Memorial Days was published by Hachette Australia in 2025.
This story of a death is the story that dominates my life. Here I have retold it, rethought it. But I can’t change it. Tony is dead. Present tense. He will be dead, in the present, in my present, for as long as I am alive. I cannot change that story. I can only change myself.
Write the truest thing you know, said old man Hemingway.
Dear reader, this is it.Memorial Days, p207
Taut: ’17 Years Later’ by J.P. Pomare
J.P.Pomare – Kiwi-born Australian author – writes taut, twisty crime thrillers. 17 Years Later is definitely that, imbued with a sense of darkness and with questions about the mystery at its heart: who really killed the Primrose family seventeen years ago?
Set in a small town on New Zealand’s North Island, the narrative is told from several different perspectives and voices.
There is Bill Kareama, the Primrose’s live-in private chef, delighted to be offered this amazing chance to kick-start his career and make good money while cooking for the wealthy family. When the shocking murders of Simon Primrose, his wife Gwen, daughter Elle and son Chester are discovered, Bill is the prime suspect – in large part due to the fact that the murder weapon is one of his chef’s knives. We hear Bill’s own account of the events leading up to his arrest, the trial and his imprisonment.
Into the town of Cambridge arrives Sloane Abbott, a successful journalist with a popular true-crime podcast. She is determined to investigate the crime because she has heard stories about how the original investigation failed to seriously consider any other suspects and overlooked evidence. Did Bill and the Primrose family receive justice? If not, seventeen years is a long time for the wrong man to be imprisoned. And troublingly, is it possible that here a killer still at large?
We hear from Fleur, the French au pair, who shares a cottage on the Primrose estate with Bill. What is her role in the family and why does she stay with them, given that the children no longer really need a nanny?
TK was Bill’s psychologist who devoted years of his life to finding the truth about what happened. He is dragged unwillingly back into the mystery by Sloane’s dogged persistence.
All of these characters are well drawn, as is the setting of a regional New Zealand town where many of the locals just want to forget the whole thing. There are plenty of twists and an action-packed ending; the story unravelling between the various players, keeping me guessing to the end.
I was engrossed by 17 Years Later and gobbled it up quickly. A very satisfying read.
17 Years Later is published by Hachette Australia in July 2024.
My thanks to the publishers and to NetGalley for a copy to read and review.
‘The Things We Cannot Say’ by Kelly Rimmer
This best-selling novel by Australian author Kelly Rimmer is a beautiful exploration of love, loss and the sacrifices that people can make for those they love most. It’s also an interesting juxtaposition of the challenges of modern lives with those faced by people in wartime.
If you have read a few of my posts and reviews, you will know that I love stories inspired by real events and people, and especially those drawn from the author’s family history. This is what Kelly Rimmer has done; by telling a story set in her grandmother’s hometown in Poland during the horrors of WWII.
I found Alina and Tomasz’s story to be engrossing, tragic, and hopeful. The details of the impoverished farm which was young Alina’s world, the terrors of the Nazi occupation, and the profound losses experienced by the Polish people, are enriched by the author’s research and visits to the places she writes about.
The story is centred firmly in this environment, but woven through it is the story of Alice, a modern day mother of two, and the challenges she faces bringing up a ten-year-old gifted daughter and a seven-year-old son who has autism.
When Alice’s grandmother begs her (from her hospital bed) to go to Poland to find something or someone she is unable to name, it seems like an impossible task. How can Alice leave her two kids, whose routines and care she tightly manages, with her busy husband, who doesn’t really have a relationship with Eddie?
She does, though, and that’s where the elements of Alina and Alice’s lives begin to intersect, as Alice discovers more about her grandmother’s experiences during the war. In the process, Alice discovers a lot about herself, her son and daughter, and her marriage.
The book does a wonderful job of bringing these seemingly disparate stories together, and portrays each woman’s challenges in a compelling way.
There are long-held secrets that Alice needs to uncover before she can truly understand her family’s past, and to allow the grandmother she adores to be, finally, at peace. In Alina’s words:
We embraced there on the deck – witness to a vow to hold on to a secret that we thought we could simply reveal one day. We had no idea of the gravity of that lie. We didn’t realize that time has a way of racing past you – that the long hard days sometimes make for very short years.
The Things We Cannot Say p394The Things We Cannot Say is beautifully realised story and readers who love historical fiction firmly rooted in real history, will enjoy it.
The Things We Cannot Say was published by Hachette in 2019.
