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.
The beautiful & the broken: ‘The Chateau on Sunset’ by Natasha Lester
Epic Love. Tragic Loss. Beautiful Friendship. The entrancing story of an orphan who grows up surrounded by the beautiful and the broken in the world’s most infamous hotel.
Australian author Natasha Lester writes lush, epic novels, mostly in historical settings. I’ve enjoyed several of these, especially the ones featuring stories from WWII. Her novels are always focused on women from the past who face seemingly insurmountable obstacles, but who nevertheless triumph. The Paris Photographer is a good example of this, about the photographer Lee Miller whose wartime work in Europe was famous, for a while, but who faded into self-imposed obscurity after the war ended.
The Chateau on Sunset seems, at first glance, to be a different beast altogether. The first part of the book is set firmly in the USA in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and is about a teenage girl who is sent to live with her reclusive aunt when her parents are killed in an accident.
This takes her from her home in New York to Los Angeles – or more precisely, Hollywood. Her aunt is a ‘washed up’ star of the silver screen, and her new home is the Chateau Marmont, a famous (notorious?) hotel where the rich, famous and wanna-be stars gravitate around movie moguls and film icons.
Aria is young and naive and grieving terribly for her parents. She is helped to adjust to this very new environment by two aspiring actresses, Calliope and Flitter (their ‘stage names’, I was relieved to find out). The three become firm friends, sisters of a kind, despite the age difference between Aria and the other two.
But the world of Hollywood starlets and burned-out stars is not a safe place for a youngster and Aria has to quickly learn the rules of survival. She becomes a reluctant party to a secret that haunts her and makes her potential prey to at least one of the Hollywood sharks that swim in the murky waters of the hotel.
She realises that she must leave the hotel to find her own way in the world and live life on her own terms. How she eventually does so is the crux of this story.
The author references Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, a favourite childhood book, for the inspiration for this novel. In a way, it is a re-imagining of this classic story, but one in which Jane, not Rochester, is the character with agency and control over her destiny, despite her shaky start. There is a passionate romance with accompanying doubts and troubles, but by the end of the novel Aria is steering her own ship towards a future she has chosen.
The darker elements of this book concern the behaviours of characters we might think of as ‘Harvey Weinsteins.’ The author channels her rage at the predatory behaviour of that man and others like him, and the destructive Hollywood studio system, into a gripping novel that has us cheering for those who defy the unfairness of the place and time.
You get the future you give in to, or the one you fight for.
It’s time for me to be the star of my own goddamn life.
The Chateau on Sunset ebook loc 86%Hollywood’s famous Chateau Marmont is brought to life in the characteristic style of this author, with attention to the details, large and small, that made up this iconic building and those who lived there, in the mid-twentieth century.
The Chateau on Sunset is published by Hachette Australia in March 2026.
My thanks to the publishers and to NetGalley for an advanced 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
Connections: ‘The belburd’ by Nardi Simpson
The new novel by award-winning Yuwaalaraay singer and writer Nardi Simpson is tricky to describe. It is unlike any book I have read.
There are two narratives within the book, seemingly disparate but actually closely connected. There is the story of Ginny, a young poet trying to make sense of her world and her place in it. She writes poems and ‘plants’ them around her environment, literally planting them with some soil and a little water as she moves around her neighbourhood.
Then there is the being whose experience as a birth spirit is told in first person. ‘Sprite’ is rolling around in Eel Mother’s belly, meeting other spirits who are waiting to be born, and those who did not make it or do not survive.
The two narratives connect when we realise that Sprite and the other birth spirits see all. From this, we can perhaps understand that everything and everyone are connected, from times past into the future.
It is a fascinating way to introduce readers to a view of the world and the spirit that is very different from mainstream Western thought and traditions.
For this reason, it is a book to come to with an open heart and an open mind, and let the ideas and language wash over you, absorbing their meaning without trying to.
The belburd is published by Hachette in October 2024.
My thanks to the publishers and to NetGalley for an early copy to 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.
