The Outlander by Gil Adamson

Bloomsbury €12.99 (Easons price)
MARY Boulton is bolting. She’s killed her husband - it’s not clear why, but there seems to have been a baby involved - and she’s on the run, pursued by his implacable red-headed rifle-toting giant twin brothers across the wilds of 1903 Canada.
So far so good.
Gil Adamson’s first novel was 10 years in the writing, and it is a honed and crafted piece of work.
As ‘the widow’ flees from shelter to shelter, the writing is impeccable, beautifully observed. But somehow I didn’t warm to the story.
Mary takes shelter first with an old widow who takes in waifs and strays, then, disappearing in the night with the widow’s mare and some valuables, she wanders starving and crazy through the mountains.
As she meets other strangers to life, we’re given glimpses of her life with her late husband - marital rapes, dying baby, gambling.
We discover her childhood in the black-bordered home of a depressive minister in mourning for his dead wife.
The Canadian libraries’ candidate for the IMPAC award, this comes with impeccable credentials.
It’s soaked in turn-of-the-century authenticity, and calls up a more realistic version of the world celebrated in a thousand cowboy movies.
An interesting new writer - let’s see what she does next.
Publisher's site

Song of the Humpback Whale by Jodi Picoult

Hodder & Stoughton €14.99

WHAT a baffling book this is - until you realise that it's Jodi Picoult's first, published way back in 1992 and now reissued.
The story is all over the place, told in fractured scenes, with the culmination repeated in fragments.
Jane Jones is escaping a marriage that's sliding into violence by driving with her daughter Rebecca to her brother. star-
But her husband, a world-famous marine biologist who knows more than anyone else about the songs of the humpback whale, has spent his life tracking whales, sets out to track his wife and daughter.
Two love affairs, the death of a lover, a childhood of abuse and the maturation of a teenager in an extended road move are rattled around and thrown out again in a fragmented story.
Jane and Rebecca are heading towards the apple farm where Jane's brother Jolie works. They find three men there: the owner, Sam, and his employees Jolie and Hadley.
The novel was controversial because of its age-barrier-crossing shock tactics - Sam and Hadley are both 25, and the mother falls for one and the daughter for the other.
This was and is a bestseller. Don't let me put you off.
I didn't much like it. Oliver isn't a particularly nasty guy; a pain in the ass, certainly, and a control freak - but half of the women of Ireland are married to that.
But be assured, you're in the hands of an expert, even in Picoult's first published novel.