Whitcoulls Recommends: Home Seeking and Presumed Guilty

The Sunday Session with Francesca Rudkin

Home Seeking by Karissa Chen. This is one of those big, epic sweeping stories which starts in one place and finishes up a long way away. Suchi and Haiwen are good friends and then teenage lovers in Shanghai during the Civil War. When Haiwen volunteers to go and do National Service (a gesture he makes so that his brother won’t have to) they lose track of each other. Life and the years then intervene so that it’s sixty years before they recognise each other in Los Angeles and slowly start to re-establish their connection. There’s a lot to this book – about identity, families, finding a place in the world and what one might have to sacrifice in order to do that.

Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow. In 1987 Scott Turow wrote Presumed Innocent, which knocked my socks off at the time – it was so, so good. Some years later he wrote a second book, Innocent, but here’s the one I’ve been waiting for which captures the essence of that first one all these (38!!) years later. Rusty Sabin is now older. Over the course of his career he’s been a prosecuting attorney, a judge, and even a defendant and convicted felon. Now he’s essentially retired, living in a small town and settled in a great relationship when suddenly all that is threatened when the son of his partner is accused of murder and Rusty steps up to help out. Great family and courtroom drama – the first in this series predated John Grisham by 4 years. Scott Turow really was a trailblazer and he’s still going strong.

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