Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts

Overwhelming, enveloping, fascinating, amazing - I never wanted its 900+ pages to end. True story of an Australian ex criminal, jail escapee; who goes on to even more amazing adventures in richly textured India and Bombay's underworld; who falls in love with a woman, with a country and its people. There is so much passion and humanity in this person, I felt that Australia couldn't contain him once he'd experienced India like this. The book's blurb does say he's now living in India. After this immersive mind-blowing book, other books I'm now reading seem insipid...

A Place Called Here - Cecilia Ahern

Something a little different - about a place where lost things end up, and a heroine whose childhood obsession with finding lost things becomes a career and which takes her to the one place she finds her answers. Put like this it doesn't sound that enticing, but once I allowed myself to suspend my idea of "reality" and let this whimsical story pull me in, it was quite magical and in a way a personal journey. Lost things have always bugged me. I could so relate to the heroine's childhood self who overturned her house and refused to rest until she found the missing object.

Hotel Heaven - Matthew Brace

Some fascinating peeks into how the select few are accomodated. While the writing was informative and reasonably entertaining, I found it rather choppy, as if it was written in short interrupted bursts. Only once, running over several pages, did the flow carry me from luxury safari in Africa to luxury desert in South America. Took me months to complete this, whilst I read other books in tandem. Still, worth a read.

Discovering the Body - Mary Howard

Two years on, after the day she discovered the murdered body of her friend, Linda re-explores her memory of what happened and starts to see what she missed the first time round. Deftly and almost sparsely written, it draws one in to final illumination of the mystery and of the relationships.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl

What a trip! In the voice of a hugely well read and brainy teenage prodigy, this story is a thriller, murder mystery and exploration of the special relationship between a teenage girl and her father. It took me a few pages to get into the rather erudite habit of the protaganist in quoting book titles to illustrate various situations. Soon I started to laugh at the droll wit. The relationships are complex and engaging - between father and daughter, between protagonist and her mentor, between protaganist and friends; the end of the book haunted me for days. I started reading it in Melbourne, finished it in Singapore. Couldn't leave it behind.

Suspect - Michael Robotham

On a Michael Robotham library book binge, read The Night Ferry (see earlier entry), Suspect and Lost. My favourite is Suspect, his first one. I enjoy Robotham's characters who are deep and real, and emotionally complex. His first book Suspect features Joe McLoughlin the psychologist who becomes a major suspect in the murder of a woman who turns out to have once been his client, the second book features Detective Inspector Vincent Ruiz whom we met in the first book. The third book features Alisha Barba, Inspector Ruiz's protegee whom we met in the second book. This device creates a sort of continuity between the books without it being a series.