AustLit

'As soon as she finished school, Natasha Chan ran away to Darwin. Eight years later, she is summoned back to Melbourne by her eldest sister, Anita. Natasha returns to the very street from which she had fled because her mother, Irene, is dying of cancer. For the next few months, she will try to build some kind of bridge to Irene, a woman with whom she has longed to be able to connect. ...'

The Memory Artist opens in 1999 when the narrator, Pasha, a young Russian writer, hears his mother has died. Pasha is a child of dissidents who grew up in Moscow amid secret gatherings as his mother and her friends campaigned for the release of political prisoners during the Brezhnev era. During his childhood the "shiny mint-green Latvian radio" on the kitchen table, with its broadcasts from the BBC or Voice of America, was a beacon in an otherwise grey world. ...'

'This police procedural is the only novel about a stolen camel that I have ever read. But the camel plot is intertwined with a darker mystery: the story of a woman whose battered body is washed loose in heavy rains from its shallow riverbank grave. The characters of the two police officers working as a team are convincing enough and the plot more or less works, but the writing is curiously flat, and many of the minor characters are stereotypes. ...'