Book critics Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll cast their eyes over recent fiction and non-fiction titles. Here are their reviews.
When Walter Rosenberg did the impossible and escaped from Auschwitz in April 1944 with a fellow inmate, their goal was to tell the world what was happening. Journalist and novelist Jonathan Freedland dramatically re-creates their tale in such a way that it reads like the best of thrillers, the more powerful for being true.
Here, Rosenberg became Rudolf Vrba and dictated his story to the Jewish Council president, who got it to Churchill via a British journalist. Vrba’s testimony was used at a war crimes trial in Frankfurt after the war. It sounds disrespectful to call it a page-turner, but it is, as well as being erudite, sad and inspiring.Inala Cooper, Monash University Publishing, $19.
Spurred by an outbreak of female suicides and murders around 2010, she contextualises the problem by examining it both in India and here. At its heart is dowry violence and murder, husbands railing against “insufficient” dowries and abusing their wives – one of her many case studies being “Rima”, a young, educated wife who put up with it until she left her husband. But there is hope that things can change and Durga will have her day.
As King says, “Wisdom works both ways”, and in giving these girls a voice she also gives their parents a way of entering their mindset.Two deaths a century apart – one born of heroism, the other hedonism – mark this subtle and admirably compressed family saga from British author Cressida Connolly.
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