A vintage teaset, offered up at a car boot sale in Sussex, brings together three women from quite different lives, in Vanessa Greene’s debut novel The Vintage Teacup Club. At first glance, each lady dismisses the others and believes her need for the teaset is more important than the rest. However, they agree to settle the matter over a cup of tea and end up sharing custody of the teaset in a delightfully whimsical story.

Jenny, the youngest of the three, has her heart set on a vintage tea-party as the setting for her upcoming dream wedding to her soulmate Dan. But for Jenny, the one thing she wants from her wedding is her mother to share it with her, and that seems impossible as her mother left her family, without a word, over twenty years ago.

Stylish Maggie runs a boutique floristry, and has just signed up what may be the event of her career – supplying flowers for a celebrity wedding, themed in the style of Allice in Wonderland. She’s desperate to make this work and just knows that the teacups will be central to the Mad Hatter scenes. However, she’s also coming fresh from a devastating break-up, and the landscape architect on the wedding planning committee is anything but easy to deal with, so she’s finding her courage and energy wearing thin.

The artist Alison, stay-at-home mum to two teenage girls, is trying to build up her own business supplying quirky teacup candles. Despite their best efforts, her family seems to be sliding into a money hole and her business might be all they have left – if they can take the plunge and set up a proper selling space for her.

Between these three ladies, those teacups will have a varied life as they travel from wedding to garden party to candle. And with all three ladies scouring vintage shops, car boot sales and auctions, they are guaranteed to find all 200-odd cups that they need. But the enduring story is one of how the three women find deeper friendships than they ever expected, and how the power of a shared cup of tea really can solve what may seem impossible problems.

Definitely one to enjoy with your own cup of tea, better yet, in a vintage teacup of your own.

Available now: Hachette RRP$19.99

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The history of Scotland, and its inhabitants, is a dark and fascinating place. In her latest novel, The Island House, Posie Graeme-Evans takes a look at it in an unusual way. Firstly through the eyes of Freya Dane, a modern-day archaeologist, who inherits an isolated house on a remote Scottish island from her estranged father; and then also from the imagined perspective of a Pictish girl living on the island in the Dark Ages.

Freya’s tale starts with her father’s will and her stunned acceptance of the terms. She packs up her life in Sydney and moves across the world to the island of Findnar, not knowing what awaits her. When she arrives she finds that the house really is remote, set halfway across a loch from the town of Portsolly, and then to her surprise she finds that her father has left her a series of clues and enigmatic writings. His unexpected death by drowning has meant that the house looks as if he would walk back in at any second, and Freya finds herself suddenly reexamining their relationship and wondering how things might have worked out. For in reading his diaries, she realises that they are not so dissimilar after all, and comes across a mysterious tale of Viking treasure waiting somewhere in Findnar’s depths.

For her father had uncovered some of Findnar’s past, told through the eyes of Signy, a Pictish girl who lived on the island with her village, of which her father was the shaman. When raiders terrorise the village, she is suddenly alone and must deal with the aftermath herself. She finds an injured Viking boy and nurses him to health, only to find that soon a party of priests and nuns arrive to set up a place of Christian worship. As the three cultures clash, Signy is forced to follow Christian behaviours and it almost kills her. But worse is to come when the Viking boy escapes, and returns with raiders to drive the Christians out.

As Freya delves into Findnar’s past, eyes are watching her from Portsolly. Townspeople old and new are keen to see what she might find, and not all are looking at it from her own perspective. She finds out more than she wanted to about her father’s relationship with the town and its people, but in doing so finds out a lot more about her father, and herself, than she ever considered.

The story is beautifully constructed, with drama both big and small. The depiction of the clash of cultures in the Dark Ages is vivid and thrilling, and even non-archaeologists will find it compelling to accompany Freya along the path of the mystery.

Available now: Simon & Schuster RRP$29.99

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The Great Deception, Joy Chambers‘ latest novel, is set in Nazi-occupied Holland during the war and follows the tale of one of Britain’s highly trained Special Operations Executive (SOE) operatives, Cole Wareing, and a Dutch patriot, Laetitia de Witt as they cooperate on a deadly, but daring mission.

Starting in 1947, the novel shows Cole and his new wife Shelly living in a post-war idyllic retreat on a farm in the NSW Southern Highlands. But when three sinister figures appear out of the dark one night, all Cole’s wartime instincts are triggered and he knows he must run to save his life, and that of his wife as well. For the men in the dark are convinced he is a traitor who has hoodwinked the authorities on his return from the war. But since Shelly knows nothing of Cole’s part in the war, he leaves her behind with little more than a note and a mystery.

By chance in 1944, Cole strongly resembled a colonel in the SS, who happened to be returning to Nazi Holland after being wounded on the Eastern Front. SOE had taken advantage of the opportunity and assigned Cole to a dangerous and potentially deadly mission – that of impersonating the SS Colonel Lucien Bayer and infiltrating Nazi command. His goals were to send information back to England, and if possible, arrange sabotage or destruction of Nazi assets. Along the way, his drop team and compatriots are assisted by Laetitia de Witt, a Dutch national with the appearance of being a Nazi collaborator but who is in fact secretly in league with the Resistance. Unexpectedly, she found herself falling for Lucien/Cole and he for her. But the perils faced by Cole’s fellow operatives are brought to a head when they attempt to bomb a secret factory in Holland and find themselves wondering where Cole’s loyalties actually lie. Is it possible that the impersonation has become a reality?

Back in 1947, as Cole races across the globe to find out crucial information to prove his innocence, his wife Shelly uncovers SS regalia and a curious photograph addressed to Lucien/Cole back at the farmhouse in Australia. She realises that she cannot be left behind once again, so she packs a bag and makes her own way across the oceans to Europe, armed only with the address of the photographer in Monte Carlo, but knowing that this is the start of the trail to find out more about the man she married. As Shelly and Cole head towards their answers, the three men in the night are also chasing Cole.

A dramatic story, greatly detailed, with references to real people, places and events in wartime Holland.  The human touch added by the romance and conflicts that each character experiences makes this story seem only more real.

Available now: Hachette RRP$29.99

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Tina is seventeen, and lives in a squat in Kings Cross. By day she sleeps, and by night she stands on the street hoping for a mark to make $20 to see her through the next few days. She has worked hard to build up solid walls between what she does, and what she feels, in order to survive the world she is in. But in the opening pages of The Boy Under The Table by Nicole Trope, it seems that Tina has come up against something that will crack those walls. For she has gone home with her mark and there she sees a small boy, tied under a table, with bones sticking out and obviously mistreated. What is Tina to do?

The complex story of Tina and how she ended up on the street, is intertwined with the story of the boy. It turns out that the boy is Lockie Williams, kidnapped from the Sydney Royal Easter Show in what would be any parent’s nightmare. After four months, when he hasn’t been found, his parents Doug and Sarah are almost falling apart as Doug tries to hold the family farm together out at Cootamundra. Local cop Pete does his best to keep them reassured but Lockie has just disappeared. But Tina knows. In fact Tina can’t stop thinking about the boy. He reminds her of another boy, lost to her years before, and she knows that she is probably this boy’s only hope.

Told in parallel narratives, The Boy Under The Table is gripping and I was unable to put it down. Tina’s grim determination to get through each day and night is a realistic reminder of what life can be like for the homeless, even those who choose to be; and then there is the tale of the parents who are left behind and who grieve for a lost child. When Tina realises she has the power to make a difference she resists it as long as she can, knowing that as soon as she starts to feel emotion about the boy she will also be lost.

While the novel seems like it might be harrowing, Tina’s story is told honestly and it becomes a story of hope and of determination, despite the grim beginning.

Available now: Allen & Unwin RRP$29.99

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Two women’s lives, 100 years apart, are centred on a single isolated lighthouse and town on the Queensland Coast, in Kimberley Freeman’s latest novel Lighthouse Bay. In 1901, Isabella Winterbourne is the sole survivor of a shipwreck bringing a stunning jewel-decked golden mace as a gift from her husband’s family to the new government in Australia. She survived the wreck, and clutches the chest containing the mace and a far greater treasure to her – a baby bracelet from her baby son, who died as an infant of 15 days old, three years ago. She survived the wreck, and watched as her husband drowned, and does not regret that one bit, nor does she miss him, for he and his family were unforgiving and unloving and she has never felt accepted by them at all.

In 2011, Libby Slater has just watched from a distance in Paris as her married lover Mark Winterbourne was buried, knowing that while she feels the same grief as his lovely wife, she is not able to show it or share it for their liaison was a guilty secret kept from the world. Libby, in fact, has kept many secrets not least being that she is from an isolated town on the Queensland coast, and that Mark had bought her the cottage near the lighthouse as a gift that they could share one day.

While in 1901 Isabella makes her slow, dangerous way along the coastline to the lighthouse she can see in the distance, Libby makes her decision to move back to Australia and to the cottage, which is a stone’s throw from her sister and secrets she had left behind twenty years ago. When she gets there, she discovers that the old is in serious danger from the new, as developers are vying for her attention to buy her cottage and make a resort on the last remaining piece of land in the area. Her sister, none too pleased to see her, instantly assumes Libby will sell up and in so doing, destroy the town, as she seemingly destroyed her sister’s life so long ago. Libby, in turn, gets distracted from her grief by a mystery that emerges when people are found lurking round her cottage, and the disused lighthouse, under cover of darkness. She uncovers the story of a love between a loner lighthouse keeper and a mysterious woman referred to only as I, who seems to have a supply of jewels about her.

Isabella’s story, of a lone women making a life for herself after all she had was washed away, is one of determination and of finding support in the most unlikely places. On the other hand, Libby, a strong and independent woman, finds that she needs to both give support and let others help her in order to move on from her own past. This is a well-constructed story with great attention to detail of the lighthouse keeper’s life in early Australian history, as well as a gripping mystery that kept me turning the pages long past bed time!

Available now: Hachette RRP$32.99

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At first glance, Becky Wicks‘ latest book Balilicious seems just like another travel memoir, but soon enough you will change your mind as it becomes clear that Becky Wicks is not your ordinary travel writer. If you’ve read her previous work, you’ll be familiar with her dry style, which admittedly I found a little wearing after a while. However she does present a very different perspective on the current fashion for “finding oneself” in some tropical locale.

In Balilicious, Becky is running from a relationship (it is not quite clear whether it failed, he failed, or she did) and intending to spend six months in Bali to regroup, renew and reveal her true self. While there are plenty of “touristy” locations, she ends up settling in Ubud – which it seems is home to expats from many countries seeking a simpler, more spiritual lifestyle – some permanent, and some, like Becky, just temporarily. What it does present is a central location to all manner of assistance in “finding yourself”.

Becky explores and gets to attend and take part in some of the most beautiful and fundamental rituals of Bali life. The Balinese are deeply connected to their land and their life revolves around keeping the spirits at ease, on several levels. Becky gets to witness blessing ceremonies, exorcisms, spiritual healing and plenty of yoga, which are what you would call mainstream in Bali. As well as that there are some less mainstream experiences that she delves into like the shaking ashram, where tobacco is taken nasally, trance dance sessions, talking with the dead and some very intimate purification rituals. All this is told with Becky’s signature delivery, never quite taking herself seriously and also, it seems, never quite letting go enough to really “find herself” out there.

As well as the spiritual renewal Becky also shares some truly delightful experiences that are just part of daily life in Bali, from the locals she sees on the streets of town with their cocks (and a cockfight), to remote villages where just bringing a shopping bag full of coloured pencils and paper is a treat beyond imagining. She visits schools, supermarkets, and sanctuaries. There is even a visit to the silversmiths of Kerobokan Prison, as well as terrific motorbike rides up and down the countryside.

All this, amidst the beauty of the tropical landscape – rainforests, rice paddies, and rural hillsides. This book is for you if you have ever dreamed of going to Bali, or if you have been and dream of going back.

Available now: HarperCollins RRP$29.99

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Set in Saudi Arabia in 1967, In the Kingdom of Men explores the life led by “Aramco wives” – the women of the oil engineers, managers and drillers who were working and living on Aramco owned oil platforms and towns. Kim Barnes has taken the Kingdom of the title to mean both the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – a fiercely patriarchal society, where women are hidden away, dressed modestly and mostly invisibly – and the Kingdom of American oil towns, which are enclaves isolated from the local populace where women are free to do and wear anything they please, as long as they stay within the fence.

The story follows the life of Gin McPhee, who married her high school sweetheart Mason in order to escape from her own Kingdom – one in which her grandfather ruled with an excess of Puritan piety. In a burst of rebellion Gin escapes and elopes and turns her back on Shawnee, Oklahoma and all it holds. Mason, while dreaming of going to university, gets a succession of labour jobs in Texas until finding a position with Aramco which puts him and his brand-new wife onto a plane to Saudi Arabia and a whole new life.

In the American oil town the behaviours that the wives have range from allowed to disallowed to encouraged or ignored – in many cases it’s a combination of all four. The husbands are often on platforms or rigs, for weeks or months at a stretch and when they return home, as one wife puts it, all they want is food, sex and sleep. Gin adjusts to this strange new Kingdom and its rules, the written ones and the unwritten ones, and eventually learns enough to start bending them. Kim Barnes’ descriptions are detailed and thorough, and capture the surrealism of having these very American enclaves within a very Arabian landscape.

She starts a casual, then not so casual, friendship with their driver Abdullah, a Bedouin who lives in a tent outside their enclave with his mother and sister, and her baby daughter. Abdullah’s sister is married to Alireza, who is essentially the local crime lord, and refuses to return to his home. Despite the language barrier, Gin and Abdullah’s sister might have become friends if fate hadn’t intervened. For Mason has been investigating some accounting discrepancies at Aramco and also supporting the local peoples’ push for better wages and conditions, and in doing so has stepped on a number of toes. The impact of his investigation has far-reaching consequences which reach all the way outside the tents, outside the enclave, outside Aramco, and even outside Saudi Arabia.

Available now: Random House RRP$29.95

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Written in an autobiographical style, In the Shadow of the Banyan is the tale of the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in 1970, through the eyes of a child. While the story is fictional, some elements are based on Vaddey Ratner’s own experience as a child at the time.

The story is told by Raami, a 7-year old girl living in the compound of her father Prince Sisowath Ayuravann of the royal family. On the eve of New Year, the family is forced from their home by Khmer Rouge soldiers and they drive several hours through roads choked with refugees, to their summer house outside Phnom Penh. But that too is only a short respite as the soldiers continue to harry the educated and wealthy classes, chivvying them from town to town and forcing them to leave behind more and more of their possessions until finally the family is walking, carrying Raami’s younger sister Radana. Raami, as a survivor of polio as a baby, needs a brace to walk but this is confiscated and thrown in the river by a soldier, as a symbol of Western medicine which is against the Khmer Rouge’s principles. This theme of returning to traditional living is the main reason that millions of city dwellers are exiled to the country and forced to work on communal farms in rural villages.

For a while it seems that Raami’s family are able to stick together but soon someone recognises her beloved Papa, poet and gentle teacher, as a member of the royal family, and educated overseas, and he is torn from the family to an unknown fate. In the novel it is bad enough but realising that these events were happening all over Cambodia, to thousands and thousands of people, makes it even more horrifying. Raami never hears from her Papa again and soon is settled into a village near the border with Vietnam and Thailand, with her mother and sister, and her mother’s brother who through some miracle has survived to find them.

The conditions that they are forced to endure are awful, starvation and disease taking as many victims as overwork and abuse at the hands of the guards. Raami’s mother and uncle are assigned to earthworks, making new rice paddies out of unusable land, rice paddies which will wash away in the first monsoon and make all their effort worthless. Eventually Raami loses the ability to process what she sees around her and becomes a shell – with only her mother to keep her anchored to this world.

Finally, Raami and her mother make it into an escape party which heads for Thailand and freedom. But at the cost of leaving behind everything they knew. Still, their memories are intact, and that is something that the Khmer Rouge has been unable to strip from the people. Even though this has been fictionalised, you can tell that these experiences are still alive for Vaddey Ratner, and that Raami’s tale is not unique amongst the chaos that was the Khmer Rouge takeover.

Available now: Simon & Schuster RRP$29.99

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Set in the historic Gold-Rush town of Millbrooke in rural NSW, Mr Chen’s Emporium is the tale of Amy and Angie – two women who live in Millbrooke and almost by accident, end up finding it to be the root from with they can grow. The key fact here being that Amy Duncan lived in Millbrooke during the Gold Rush in the 1880′s and Angie Wallace has run from the memory of her late husband and landed in Millbrooke in the present day. In Millbrooke, Deborah O’Brien has created a town that can hold both their stories and provides space for these women to grow.

When Angie rents, and then starts renovating, the Old Manse of Millbrooke she finds a tin box holding Amy Duncan’s treasures from so many years ago. This is the start of her fascination with Millbrooke’s history – what happened to the 18-year-old pretty girl in the portrait photo in the box? Why is it that her headstone is absent from the town cemetery, yet on her her mother’s headstone it is clear that she survived well into the 20th Century? Coupled with a host of charming country-town characters, the mystery of Amy Duncan’s life becomes something that Angie can hold onto while she recovers from the loss of her husband. At the same time, Angie is discovering that the town’s population of platypuses is being threatened by a foreign mining company looking to reopen works at the abandoned diggings. Her new loyalties to the town and its supportive network of people, and her old loyalties to the memory of her husband, are challenged when one of the mine’s fixers, Jack Parker, rents a room from her for a princely sum.

Interleaved with Angie’s discoveries, Amy’s tale is told delicately and well. As the oldest child, and daughter, of a strict minister, she has always learnt how to keep up appearances as the demure and dutiful daughter. But one day in Millbrooke she comes across the Emporium of the title – a treasure house of tea and porcelain, silks and ornaments, run by Charles Chen, a Chinese national who was taken in by the town’s founding family the Millers, when his father was killed in an accident at the goldfields. Charles was so highly esteemed by his adoptive family that they set him up with enough to open his store and he now provides delicate Oriental wares to the town and its surrounds. Amy and Charles are instantly fascinated with one another – but her father is vehemently opposed to having anything to do with the Celestials, or Chinamen, as they are called by the miners.

Both stories are told as if they are happening now. The mystery of Amy in the present day, unfolds in Amy’s own time, while Angie and her new friends gradually prise the details out of the history books and the architecture of the town itself. As the mystery is cleared up, Angie gradually realises that she also is being “cleared up” and finding out that she can make a new, happy life for herself without her husband. While the ending was a little abrupt, Deborah O’Brien has created such a detailed and vivid picture of the town and of the people that I can imagine there will be a follow-up to find out more about the town – then and now.

Available now: Random House RRP$29.95

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Christelle is your average receptionist on the outside – obsessed with fashion, gossip, and celebrities. And celebrity fashion and gossip. But in Carla Caruso’s novel Cityglitter, things are not quite what they seem. For one thing, Christelle is obsessed with fine white powder – not the stuff you think, but sugar. Because Christelle is a fairy. Well, half anyway.

In an idea that is so hilarious that it is almost believable, Christelle is part of a hidden subculture of fairies – the kind with wings – in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs. These “Cityglitters” go to regular visits with their fairy therapist who clips their wings (think Brazilian, for the shoulders) and serves flower tea. They can’t get enough of sugar and have to have regular check ups with the Tooth Fairy. Their only weaknesses are a tendency to wear pink with everything and the fact that dogs tend to go barking mad whenever they are around. And their favourite bar? The Green Room where they are served absinthe – and presumably occasionally get visits from a fairy of the green kind?

In a typical romantic-comedy plot, Christelle is unadvisedly attracted to her all-human boss Jasper, and sinister actions hint at hidden undercurrents in the cityglitter arena, but there isn’t anything a Fairy Godmother couldn’t solve in a wave of her wand. Until a spanner in the works arrives in the form of Christelle’s kid sister Trixie who tumbles into town without even dusting off the glitter. Trixie manages to track down her and Christelle’s human father in an attempt to find out the truth of why he left their mother, while Christelle would be just as happy to leave the past alone.

There is not much that is serious about this novel – it’s a fun, lighthearted read that will suit a beachside villa, amidst cocktails with umbrellas (pink, of course). And you might just cast a second glance at those well-dressed, fashionable young ladies about town – is there a telltale flash of pink?

Available now: Penguin E-Book RRP$4.99

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