The Australian Women\'s Weekly - June 2018

190 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JUNE 2018

Books

Ivy & Abe

byElizabeth Enfield, Penguin

An astonishing writing

feat, set in 11 different

eras, from 1965 to 2032, as

the author depicts what the

relationship of childhood

friends Ivy Trent and Abe

McFadden, may have been,

depending at what stage

in life they met. She begins

in futuristic 2026, when

widowed grandma Ivy

bumps into Abe in a

supermarket 60 years since

they last saw each other.

They marry, with their

children’s blessing, but the

unthinkable happens. In

2015, ifty-something Ivy

meets Abe as she is relecting

on how “all the little things

that used to annoy me”

(about her late husband

Richard) she now misses.

Abe is separated but still

ixes locks at his wife’s house.

His son is hostile about the

woman Dad “met on a

bench”. Their affair ends, Ivy

realising “it’s too soon to be

unhappy again”. In 2000,

married Ivy trains it to a

hotel to meet Abe. The sex

leaves her loating, but she

is a “middle-aged woman

with a mid-life crisis involved

with another version of what

she already has”. The most

clarifying book ever written

about what love means.

“Not only is nothing what it seems, it’s not even what it

seems after it’s been revealed to be not what it seems,”

wrote one critic of Turton’s ground-breaking debut, which

fellow crime writer Sophie Hannah said “blew my mind”. On

the anniversary of the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle’s brother

Thomas, Lord and Lady Hardcastle invite the same guests

who dined on that night to their melancholy pile, 1920s

Blackheath House, for “The Masquerade”. Doctor Death – a

guest dressed as a medieval plague bird – announces that

Evelyn will die tonight, unless three chosen rivals can solve

her murder. “There are two other people trapped in this

house, wearing the bodies of guests and servants, just like

you”, our panicked protagonist Aiden Bishop is told. We

meet him staggering in a wood, 40 years of memories

wiped, swaying from a towering height that is not his, as he

will gasp from the wolfing appetite of another he inhabits.

“This day will be repeated eight times, and you’ll see it

through the eyes of eight different hosts.” First he inhabits

the body of laudanum dealer Sebastian Bell, but wakes as

the butler. “It’s a rum business.” It’s also intoxicatingly funny.

Coffee table

A TABLE IN VENICE by Skye
McAlpine, Bloomsbury
Skye McAlpine has lived in a pink
house on a Venetian backwater
since she was six. This recipe book
pays homage to that childhood
and to her life today with her
husband and son. Skye’s cooking
is real and passionate as she
recreates her favourite dishes.

Unlocking Venetian cooking: “It is the

food cooked in homes and made with

local ingredients, the recipes passed

down through generations.”

REVIEWS BY KATIE EKBERG. OPPOSITE PAGE: JESSICA TOWNSEND PHOTOGRAPH BY DAN O'BRIEN.

The Seven

Deaths of

Evelyn

Hardcastle

by Stuart Turton,
Bloomsbury

Ivy&Abe