Our weekly reviews of the latest books from home and abroad.
Ryan Perry has made a fortune writing computer software and is living a very good life when he suddenly collapses and is diagnosed with a heart condition, which can only be treated by a transplant.
His initial shock and disbelief leads him to the bizarre conclusion that he has been poisoned, and he embarks on a wild search to find the culprit, with no success.
When a heart becomes available after a very short wait, Ryan undergoes the procedure and has a very successful recovery.
However, months later, he suddenly starts receiving strange gifts, finds his usually impregnable home invaded and has money taken from his bank account.
When the perpetrator finally is revealed and badly injures Ryan, the unbelievable story unfolds and he is forced to confront the truth about his new heart.
Although it's fast-paced and quite entertaining, I thought the novel too far-fetched.
The supernatural aspects that occur throughout were incredible.
I wouldn't recommend it to anyone waiting for a new heart. - Helen Adams
It is the story of a young girl who believes herself capable of flying. She sees things and visits places.
As someone who shudders at the notion of sharing a bed with a sibling, maybe it is how she escapes the starfish imitations of her older sister.
But she claims she isn't - it's just her dreaming in 3-D.
Of course, her mother wants her to keep this story to herself otherwise in a small town she will be marked as eccentric.
And eccentricity is a bit of a recurring theme in her particular family.
There are other secrets that her mother is trying to hide but everything comes out in the end.
The novel works its way through Gwenni providing information which makes people wonder how she could know, but she claims to observe things during her nocturnal quests.
It is a tired theme and makes its way laboriously in the telling, with lots of little details about the village and the numerous folk who live there.
This, the endorsement on the cover suggests, is "a compelling narrative [with] lovingly drawn characters". For myself, I found it overdone.
It takes too long to discover the meaning behind the title and, while all the situations resolve, it simply tried too hard.
Possibly someone with an irrepressible daughter or who remembers being theatrical as a young girl herself might delve into the book with more appreciation. - Kathy Young
The novel is a vivid fictionalised diary of Jack Lovelock, the great New Zealand middle-distance runner, winner of the 1936 Olympic 1500m - "the diary that he never wrote", said McNeish in 1986.
The most important new material is "The Man from Nowhere", McNeish's diary of his stay in Berlin in 1983 when he was searching out material on Lovelock's off-the-track experience there at the 1936 Olympics.
The diary is an excellent example of McNeish's way of working, as we see him following up clues as to what Lovelock might have done in Berlin and then working up a theory of a possible traumatic meeting with an anti-Nazi German ex-athlete, a theory brought to life in a memorable sequence in the novel.
The new material and the "flexibind" format result in a book attractive in both form and matter, making available again in an enhanced form a convincing novel of an athlete's obsession with perfection.
- Lawrence Jones
Strangely, he's still the same age he was back in 1886, and is accidentally given a new identity. Meanwhile his other self, having survived the Tarawera disaster, heads back home to Scotland with some of his family and lives out the remainder of his life in a surly and self-centred fashion.
We're told in the blurb that this is going to happen, but it takes nearly 100 pages before it does.
These provide a long expository section, but lack any page-turning suspense.
My feeling was they could have been cut down to 20 or 30 pages so we could get on with the more interesting part of the story.
And even after the splitting in two of the main character happens (with no explanation), the story meanders on for another 200 pages or so, again without any real sense of suspense.
We have no idea why the two halves of Tom exist, whether they're likely to get back together again, or why the Scottish half is such a misery-guts.
Cairney is a stylish writer but the one interesting idea in the book isn't truly developed.
There's no sense of plot, which might have given the story some structure and, because he never really develops the mystery aspect, the reader is left paddling in a shallows of what could have been a much more lively read. - Mike Crowl
