Joan's picks: Girl Falling and Home Truths

Girl Falling by Hayley Scrivener. She wrote a book a few years ago called Dirt Town which fit right into the recent genre of Australian country/Outback thrillers, and I loved. In this one, Finn and her best friend Daphne have been extremely close friends all their lives, growing up in the Blue Mountains in NSW. Now that they’re older, Finn is away at university and Daphne’s working as a guide in the Mountains where she’s fallen in love with a beautiful woman named Magdu. This romance puts real strain on her relationship with her old friend who starts to act strangely, trying to keep control of the friendship they’ve always had. One day, the three of them go mountain climbing and Magdu falls to her death – is it suicide, or a terrible accident, or something more sinister…? 

Home Truths by Charity Norman who is a New Zealand author living in Hawkes Bay. This book though is set in Yorkshire, where Livia and her husband Scott have a very happy life with their two children, until Scott’s disabled brother dies suddenly one day which spins their whole world out of control and Scott goes searching for answers – a search that takes him into the world of conspiracy theories.  As his grip on reality slides, he makes a decision that will put the family on a collision course with tragedy – as we see at the very start of the book where Livia is on trial for attempted murder. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talk SEDB.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Joan Mackenzie joins me now to talk books. Good morning,
Good morning. Now I have I can recall reading Dirt
Town and I loved it.

Speaker 3 (00:23):
By Hailey Scrivener. Yes, yes, it was a really good book.
There is a genre that's come to be in Australia
in recent years which is kind of Australian noir out
back crime. There's a number of authors now writing into it,
and she did Dirt Town I'm going to say three
or four years ago. It was really good of that genre.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
I think I was reading it after maybe reading some
Jane Harper. I sort of got onto it after that.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
Yes, okay, you will like Hailey's and if you liked
Dirt Town, then you will like this new book, which
is called Girl Falling and is set in the Blue
Mountains near Sydney. My understanding actually is that Hailey Scrivener
did a PhD in creative writing and her thesis was
all about how you can write from really unusual points

(01:08):
of view in fiction, and that's what she did very
well in the first book. And she's done it again
in this one, And I will just deviate too and
say I think the cover of this one is just gorgeous.
I'm not sure whether it is the Blue Mountains, but
it's lovely anyway. It's the story of two young women
who've grown up together and at school they were bonded
a little bit by the fact that each of their
sisters had committed suicide, and so they had this dreadful

(01:31):
thing in common and it made them over the years
very very close and reliant on each other. And as
they get older, Daphne goes off to university and Finn
is still living in the small town in the Blue Mountains,
living with her mum. She's working in a cafe and
she's a mountain guide in her spare time, and Daphne
has always been the really controlling one in the relationship.

(01:53):
I guess you could say there are elements of the
psychological thriller about this. And when Finn, who is the
mountain guide cafe worker, meets a young woman called Magdo
and falls madly in love, Daphne is beside herself tries
to manipulate things so that it doesn't go well for
Finn and her girlfriend, and one day the three of
them go climbing in the mountains and mag Do sadly

(02:15):
falls over the edge and falls to her death. And
the question then, of course, is was it a terrible accident?
Was it something else? The beginning of the book, actually
the opening lines say something like why would my best
friend want to destroy my life? And as the police
get more and more involved, that's exactly what happens.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
Okay. Intriguing tell us about Home Truths by Charity Norman.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
Yeah, Charity Norman's terrific writer. She lives down in Hawk's Bay,
I believe, but this book is set in Yorkshire, which
is also an area that she knows really well. And
it's told from the perspective of the family where things
are going really well. The mother's a probation officer, dad
is an English teacher. Their kids are great, everything's good.
And when their daughter, Heidi turns thirteen, her birthday treat

(03:00):
with her dad is to go for a bike ride
and they're going to bike to a pub and they're
going to have lunch together and have a nice father
daughter outing. And while they're out, his brother, Dad's brother,
his name is Nicky. He is a Type one diabetic
with some intellectual disability who's been living on his own,
and sadly, while they're out on this birthday bike ride,
he dies. And when they get home from their bike

(03:23):
ride and Scott the father picks up his phone, he
sees all these missed calls from his brother, who is
desperately trying to get in touch with him before this
awful thing happened, at which point, of course, he just
feels so terribly guilty, and he starts going online and
spending lots and lots of time, which morphs into being
consumed with conspiracy theories. I should have said that this

(03:46):
happened the story in twenty nineteen, which of course is
the beginning of COVID. And so when he, as a teacher,
goes to school and despouses all his anti vax theories,
he gets fired. A friend of his from Uni days
called Anthony, turns up on the scene and befriends him
at a time when he needs a friend and things
are looking quite good, but for the family, things go
from bad to worse. And at the beginning of this book,

(04:09):
the mother, her name is Livia, is entering a courtroom
to hear the verdict that the jury will have decided
on whether or not she's guilty of attempted murder. What
you don't know is who she might have attempted to
murder and why. But as you read through what happened
from twenty nineteen onwards, it all falls into place.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
Two books, two deaths, and two mysteries still unfold. There
is a theme today. I love it so that last
book that Joan mentioned was Home Truths by Charity Norman,
and the first book was Girl Falling by Hailey Scrivener.

Speaker 1 (04:45):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks it'd be from nine am Sunday,
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