Joining the club

A master and two debut authors deliver entertaining, action-packed tales

- GILL SOUTH

THE ALBATROSS, by Nina Wan (Macmillan, $37.99)

Meet the deadpan, intelligent Primrose Li, a woman obviously in crisis. We first encounter her at a dying urban golf course in Melbourne. Why a 36-yearold mother of a young daughter, with a husband recovering from cancer, would want to visit this place is puzzling until you find out this is where she went with her golf-mad high-school boyfriend Peter before he left for college in the US. He now lives across the road from Primrose with his glamorous wife, Louisa, who likes to think she's Primrose's friend. Primrose is married to lecturer Adrian, who still prefers the liquid meals of his cancer treatment and only goes to his job when he feels like it.

Primrose's therapist is pleased to hear about her sudden interest in golf, because she has a compulsion to clean that has got out of hand. Primrose is partnered with the redoubtable Harriet, a regular at the golf course, who must be nudging 80 and is the very opposite of a therapist.

This is all conveyed in the witty and unfussy prose of Wan, who used to work at the Australian Financial Review.

Harriet, for example, has eyes like diamonds set in old jewellery, while Primrose, a former hard-hitting business journalist, wishes she could just write people letters rather than speak to them.