Each week Better Read Than Dead's founder, Derek Dryden, reviews three books with John Kerr on New Day Australia, broadcast by Sydney's Radio 2UE and heard all around Australia at 3.45am on Sunday.
Books reviewed by Derek on 7 March include:
Destination Saigon
Walter Mason
PB $24.99
From the crazy heat and colour of Saigon to the quieter splendour of Hanoi, Walter Mason gives us a rare, joyous and at times hilarious insight into twenty-first century Vietnam. Seduced by the beauty and charm of its people, and the sensuousness of its culture, we can almost taste the little coconut cakes cooked over a fire in a smoky Can Tho kitchen, or smell the endless supplies of fresh baguettes and croissants just out of city ovens.
As colourful city cafes and bars make way for visits to out-of-the-way shrines and temples, we take an impromptu visit to forbidden fortune tellers, and glimpse a little of the Cao Dai religion, made famous in Graham Greene's The Quiet American
The Man From Beijing
Henning Mankell
PB $34.95
One cold January day the police are called to a sleepy little hamlet in the north of Sweden where they discover a savagely murdered man lying in the snow. As they begin their investigation they notice that the village seems eerily quiet and deserted. Going from house to house, looking for witnesses, they uncover a crime unprecedented in Swedish history. When Judge Birgitta Roslin reads about the massacre, she realises that she has a family connection to one of the couples involved and decides to investigate. A nineteenth-century diary and a red silk ribbon found in the forest nearby are the only clues. What Birgitta eventually uncovers leads her into an international web of corruption and a story of vengeance that stretches back over a hundred years, linking China and the USA of the 1860s with modern-day Beijing, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and coming to a shocking climax in Londons Chinatown. The Man from Beijing is both a gripping and perceptive political thriller and a compelling detective story.
Roses
Leila Neacham
PB $32.99
East Texas, 1916When precocious 16-year-old Mary Toliver inherits cotton plantation Somerset from her father, the first seeds of familial discontent are sown. By becoming the new mistress of Somerset, Mary betrays her mother Darla and her brother Miles, and the Toliver dynasty will never recover.And when Mary and timber magnate Percy Warwick decide not to marry, though fiercely in love, it is a decision which will have sad and tragic consequences not only for them but for generations of their families to come.Set against a panoramic backdrop, Roses is a heartbreaking love story of sex, scandal and seduction. It covers 100 years and three generations of Texans.
Top sellers for the week ending 7 March
1 Destination Saigon - Walter Mason
2 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson
3 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
4 The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest - Stieg Larsson
5 The Brain that Changes Itself - Norman Doidge
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