Book Reviews for Booklovers from The Booklover • November

This Month's Must Read:

A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Secret Game that Won the War
Simon Parkin $38

This is the story of the game of battleships that won the Second World War. In the first week of 1942 a group of unlikely heroes - a retired naval captain and a clutch of brilliant young women, the youngest only seventeen-years-old - gather to form a secret strategy unit. On the top floor of a bomb-bruised HQ in Liverpool, the Western Approaches Tactical Unit spends days and nights designing and playing wargames in an effort to crack the U-boat tactics. A GAME OF BIRDS AND WOLVES takes us from the sweltering fug of a U-boat as the German aces coordinate their wolfpack, to the tense atmosphere of the operation room as the British team plot battles at sea on the map. The story of Operation Raspberry and its unsung heroines has never been told before. Investigative journalist Simon Parkin brings these hidden figures into the light and shows the ingenuity, perseverance and love needed to defeat the Nazis in this gripping tale of war at sea.


Mutual Admiration Society:
How Dorothy L. Sayers and Her Oxford Circle Remade the World For Women
Mo Moulton $38

A group biography of renowned crime novelist Dorothy L. Sayers and the Oxford women who stood at the vanguard of equal rights. In 1912, Dorothy L. Sayers and five friends founded a writing group at Somerville College, Oxford; they dubbed themselves the ‘Mutual Admiration Society.’ Brilliant, bold, serious, and funny, these women were also sheltered and chaperoned, barred from receiving degrees despite taking classes and passing exams. But things for women were changing - they gained the right to vote and more access to the job market. And in October 1920, members of the Mutual Admiration Society returned to Oxford to receive full degrees, among the first women to be awarded such honours. Historian Mo Moulton brings these six indomitable women to vivid life and reveals how, together, they fought their way into a new world for women.


My Penguin Year:
Living with the Emperors – a Journey of Discovery
Lindsay McCrae $38

Emperor penguins have the most extraordinary lifecycle. They march up to 100 miles over solid ice to reach their breeding grounds. They choose to breed in the depths of the worst winter on the planet; and in an unusual role reversal, the males incubate the eggs, fasting for over 100 days to ensure they introduce their chicks safely into their new frozen world. MY PENGUIN YEAR recounts author Lindsay McCrae’s adventure to the end of the Earth, spending a year living alongside the most resilient creatures in nature. He experienced every aspect of a breeding emperor’s life, facing the inevitable sacrifices that came with living his childhood dream, and facing down the personal obstacles that, being over 15,000km away from the comforts of home, almost proved too much.


Damascus
Christos Tsiolkas $37

Damascus is a work of soaring ambition and achievement, of immense power and epic scope, taking as its subject nothing less than events surrounding the birth and establishment of the Christian church. Based around the gospels and letters of St Paul, and focusing on characters one and two generations on from the death of Christ, as well as Paul (Saul) himself, Damascus explores the themes that have always obsessed Tsiolkas as a writer: class, religion, masculinity, patriarchy, colonisation, exile; the ways in which nations, societies, communities, families and individuals are united and divided.


The Bee and the Orange Tree
Melissa Ashley $40

It’s 1699, and the salons of Paris are bursting with the creative energy of fierce, independent-minded women. But outside those doors, the patriarchal forces of Louis XIV and the Catholic Church are moving to curb their freedoms. In this battle for equality, Baroness Marie Catherine D’Aulnoy invents a powerful weapon: ‘fairy tales’. When Marie Catherine’s daughter, Angelina, arrives in Paris for the first time, she is swept up in the glamour and sensuality of the city, where a woman may live outside the confines of the church or marriage. But this is a fragile freedom, as she discovers when Marie Catherine’s close friend Nicola Tiquet is arrested. In the race to rescue Nicola, illusions will be shattered and dark secrets revealed as all three women learn how far they will go to preserve their liberty in a society determined to control them.


Issue 104 November 2019