The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club - Sophie Green

Title: The Inagural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club
Author: Sophie Green
Genre: Cultural, fiction
Rating: 4.5/5
# pages: 432
Date read: March, 2022

In 1978 the Northern Territory has begun to self-govern. Cyclone Tracy is a recent memory and telephones not yet a fixture on the cattle stations dominating the rugged outback. Life is hard and people are isolated. But they find ways to connect.

Sybil is the matriarch of Fairvale Station, run by her husband, Joe. Their eldest son, Lachlan, was Joe's designated successor but he has left the Territory - for good. It is up to their second son, Ben, to take his brother's place. But that doesn't stop Sybil grieving the absence of her child.

With her oldest friend, Rita, now living in Alice Springs and working for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, and Ben's English wife, Kate, finding it difficult to adjust to life at Fairvale, Sybil comes up with a way to give them all companionship and purpose: they all love to read, and she forms a book club.

Mother-of-three Sallyanne is invited to join them. Sallyanne dreams of a life far removed from the dusty town of Katherine where she lives with her difficult husband, Mick.

Completing the group is Della, who left Texas for Australia looking for adventure and work on the land.


I basically picked up this book because of the title, and stayed on because of its setting. The atmosphere is very much "Cooper's Crossing" (from the TV show "Flying Doctors"). It's a bit slow to start, but I soon ended up absolutely loving it.

You follow the lives of 5 women and their families over the duration of 3'ish years - share in their joys and sorrows, their hardships and their successes. It doesn't shy away from describing the hardships of an Outback existence, but never becomes a depressing book, even if not everybody gets the HEA we could have wished for.

The book is written in vignettes and jumps from character to character, but with enough of a red thread that it never feels disjointed, and I grew to love all the women of the book club - even if Kate did quickly become (and remain) my favourite).

An unassuming book, that I ended up loving a lot more than I had expected to.

Laurus - Eugene Vodolazkin

Title: Laurus
Author: Eugene Vodolazkin
Genre: Historical fiction, Christian
Rating: 3/5
# pages: Audiobook ~13hrs
Date read: March, 2022

It is the late fifteenth century and a village healer in Russia is powerless to help his beloved as she dies in childbirth, unwed and without having received communion. Devastated and desperate, he sets out on a journey in search of redemption. But this is no ordinary journey: it is one that spans ages and countries, and which brings him face-to-face with a host of unforgettable, eccentric characters and legendary creatures from the strangest medieval bestiaries. Laurus’s travels take him from the Middle Ages to the Plague of 1771, where as a holy fool he displays miraculous healing powers, to the political upheavals of the late-twentieth century. At each transformative stage of his journey he becomes more revered by the church and the people, until he decides, one day, to return to his home village to lead the life of a monastic hermit – not realizing that it is here that he will face his most difficult trial yet.


Not entirely sure it was the right decision to 'read' this as an audiobook. There were several times where I would have liked to flip back and reread passages (especially when he started skipping around in time - that part really threw me at first), so I'm pretty sure I missed stuff along the way.

I liked the beginning, and the atmosphere reminded me quite a bit of both "Pope Joan" and "Physician" which are two of my favourite historical novels, but I wasn't entirely comfortable with how he treated Ustina, and while I found his experiences as a holy fool interesting, this was also the point where the author decided to start treating time as inconsequential, and I couldn't always figure out exactly what happened when.

But it was quite a departure from my normal reading habits, and I appreciated being pushed out of my comfort zone like this.