Notorious by Roberta Lowing

I WALK THROUGH THE ALPHABET OF SAND.

THE VAST SILENCE OF THE DESERT CLOAKS ME.

THE SILENCE BEYOND THE SILENCE OF DEATH.

I SEE MY WAY HOME.

She came walking out of the desert, just as the famous poet had centuries before. Impossible for them both to have survived that relentless furnace, that destroyer of all life.

Now the nameless woman lies horribly scarred and close to death in an Asylum deep in the North African desert. An Australian official, a man code-named John Devlin, has come to question her. It is clear that the woman and Devlin share a past and all kinds of secrets, but the greatest secret is the one she will die to protect. The inhabitants of the Asylum will discover they are linked by a diary, a diary that for 120 years everyone who sees it wants........and will do anything to possess.

" I looked through the ice-sheathed gates to the black jagged trees and the clumps of snow ribbed by black Polish earth.

The driveway ran straight to the austere silhouette of the mansion I had come so far to see."

For some, like the ruthless Polish aristocrat Aleksander Walenska, the diary holds secrets that will bring riches and power.

For his troubled and religious son, Czelaw, it is a book of death, a penance to be fulfilled by sacrifice in a an ancient Sicilian village.

"The village rose on either side of the cobbled street in lines of plain, two story stone houses. The narrow windows were were unblinking against the grey sky. The buildings tilted, overhanging the street.

'Isolated,' said Dante. 'Inward-looking. Festering.'

For Czelaw's sister, Agnieska, it is a book of the desert which, if returned to its rightful owner will redeem her family's name. Running from her father's influence as a young woman in the 1970's she makes her home in Casablanca ...........

"Strange, she thought, walking through the zebra light of the narrow alleys, stepping across the gutter running down the middle, that in a land so changeable, so filled with the shifting curves of the desert, that the occupiers felt compelled - or threatened - to build in squares, block upon block rising out of the sand, hunched into each other."

For Devlin, the diary is worthless, the desert not a place of revelation but the birthplace of modern terrorism. Broken by his own ghosts and the memories of his time working for the government in Borneo this is his last chance to make amends.

"It was worse than he thought. The forest looked as though it had exploded from inside: debris from the huts lay scattered on the smouldering ground. Here and there were broken crockery and smashed plates but almost everything else - clothes, tools, people, dogs, chickens - had vanished."

Notorious is the debut novel of Australian author Roberta Lowing.

 ' A literary mystery, a love story, a book of poetry and violation, faith and love, redemption and destruction.'

For me it was a real page-turner !

Loved it!

I recommend!