Barbara Jenkins: So long as It's Wild - Standing strong after my famous Walk across America, Dexterity Publishing, US, 9781947297739, hardbackm ebook available

Now this is quite a personal choice of a book and not for everyone.Barbara Jenkins walked with her husband Peter from 1976 until the end of 1978 from New Orleans to the coast of Oregon. Their walk was sponsored by National Geographic and I remember reading about them in their magazine, totally in awe and disbelief.

Barbara, now in her seventies, retraces the good and plenty of the bad of her epic walk after a road trip with her son Jedidah who is a writer himself. Born dirt poor into an Ozark hillbilly family, her thirst for education brought her to a Christian university in New Orleans where she met her husband, a celebritiy who had already walked there from the East Coast. Totally unfit,  freshly married, madly in love but not really knowing much about her husband, they set out, Barbara ignorant of nature's cruelty and her husbands expectations. She writes about the hardship of her journey, her disappointment in her marriage, the time after their walk and fame when Peter laps up all the fame and she is treated as a side line, about settling in Tennessee and having 3 children, their eventual separation  and rebuidling a new life with grit and determination. Barbara has the gift of a Southern storyteller and as someone who loves to hear about peoples unusual life stories,  I had great fun listening to her side of the story despite not sharing her southern christian beliefs. 

 Garry Disher: Day's End, 9781800817371, paperback, Viper, 9. August pub date

Garry Disher sits in a quality of his own as an Australian noir crime writer with my favourite character, Hirsch, at its center,  the only policeman on duty in a God foresaken place called Tiverton and an area to patrol that would make anyone in Europe go pale. 

The upcoming " Day's End" is the 4th in the Hirschhausen series which I have become addicted to,  but maybe because this is the third Aussie crime novel I have read lately with crystal meth dealers in its plots, this new "Hirsch" does not get my usual five stars simply because I found the story not completely tight and sometimes confusing.

Disher's  great writing is always a treat as is his ability to start the book with seemingly benign assignments, here driving an international visitor, Janne Van Sant, to her sons last employer before he disappeared, resulting in a whole firework of events. Disher is great when describing life in the outback, Hirsch's plight and emotions,  the strange and dangerous characters living in these place. Even if not 5 stars this time, always such captivating reading.