Author Talk: Jessica Brilliant Keener and Ben Markovits in con­ver­sa­tion with Stephanie But­nick

/ Lisa Hill / 4 Comments

This author talk was part of a series called Unpack­ing the Book, co-presented by the US Jewish Book Council, the New York Jewish Museum, and the lifestyle guide GOLDA.  Miraculously the event  was timed so that although it was evening there, it was nine in the morning here, so I was able to zoom in.

The topic for discussion was: Is This the Beginning or the End? An Exploration of Starting Over.  It featured authors Ben Markovits and Jessica Brilliant Keener, in a con­ver­sa­tion with Stephanie But­nick about how their books explored  unwelcome life changes.

ImageJessica Brilliant Keener’s Evening Begins the Day (24 March 2026)  begins with a marital affair to launch the theme of betrayal (even though this is an ’emotional affair’ not a sexual one) and then widens to portray other betrayals within the family and the community.

ImageShortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives (on reserve at the library) explores what happens when infidelity occurs in a marriage after the kids leave home, and how an older, sadder man deals with what to do with the rest of his life.  Tom was a man who had had an affair himself when younger, and had promised himself eventually to leave the marriage to live a little.  But (to provide a #spoiler that was talked about in this conversation) his plans are derailed when he gets a cancer diagnosis.

So yes, these are themes that #understatement have been covered before in novels that explore relationships.  What makes these two different is that that the authors address these themes through a Jewish lens.

British-American Markovits was brought up Jewish, but his mother isn’t so he likes to write about ‘half’ Jewish characters and their culture and ways of doing things.  The Rest of Our Lives features Tom, a man who feels like an outsider because his wife is Jewish and he is not. He is portrayed as an upper-middle-class white man who’s had luck he didn’t deserve, but his position in the culture he inhabits is ambiguous.  (I think the dilemmas this situation creates are universal, in marriages that are mixed in other ways such as race, religion, ethnic background, class, or educational attainment.  This is where identity politics breaks down IMO.)

Tom’s alienation is made worse when his wife has an affair with someone from the synagogue.  This infidelity makes him realise that he has been living a ‘safe life’, where his ambition has been only to get through it unscathed.   He has been living not to get into trouble, and he feels virtuous because he’s done nothing wrong whereas his wife has, so Markovits gives him trouble with a health diagnosis that gives the novel gravitas.

Markovits himself has had a brush with cancer and he mapped this onto his character.  He said that authors often mine their own life events as interesting materials for fiction, but that as he went through chemo it certainly wasn’t ‘interesting’ any more.  But along with experiencing amazing kindness from others, he also found that feelings he had pushed aside rose to the surface, and he gave these to his character.

When I Googled Ben Markovits I discovered that he has published 12 novels and was featured in numerous interviews, articles and reviews because of the Booker nomination, but #EpicFail I had never heard of him.

I had never heard of Jessica Brilliant Keener either.   What makes her novel intriguing to me is the way she weaves a Jewish ritual called Counting the Omer into her story.  Not being Jewish, I’d never heard of this, but neither had the author — who describes herself as ‘a non-tra­di­tion­al, spir­i­tu­al Jew’.  When she stumbled on it serendipitously she thought it would bring her story together and the session included a link to an essay where she explained: https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/pb-daily/weaving-the-ancient-counting-of-the-omer-into-a-modern-day-story.

So where The Rest of Our Lives is an American road journey taken when the character drives his daughter to college, Evening Begins the Day is a spiritual journey.  BTW the title is inspired by the way many days in the Jewish calendar begin in the evening.

Stephanie But­nick was an excellent panel chair, allowing the authors time and space to keep the conversation flowing, but she triggered an interesting chat with a question about the way Time is portrayed.  Both novels begin with A Moment (finding out about an affair or getting a diagnosis) but then transition into a slow arc of time ensuing.  Counting the Omer is a great way of showing that things don’t happen overnight, but Keener is also interested in how people carry around all kinds of issues and concerns but then something happens to disrupt all that and forces change.  She wanted to show how something larger than ourselves (spiritual, but universal) can help with the struggle over common problems.

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Book of Hours owned by Catherine of Cleves c1440 (Wikipedia)

What she said about this practice of self-reflection adding honour and value to daily life through small moments, was reminiscent of Christian daily rituals and the illuminated Christian prayer books used in the Middle Ages to pray the Canonical Hours, known to us as a Book of Hours.  Practices that have survived to the present day include the daily Examination of Conscience which is for anyone, and the liturgies practised by religious orders, such as Compline (the Night Prayer) which we see in the TV series Call the Midwife.

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Omer calendar book from Verona 1826

I searched for Omer Calendar Books that were comparable with the beauty of the illuminated Books of Hours created for the wealthy, but found only this one featuring etchings at Wikipedia. I wonder whether that was because luxury prayer books were frowned upon in Jewish religious life, or whether there were some, like so much other Judaica, which were destroyed by the Nazis.

Whatever about that, *chuckle* the privacy of such intimate practices is so different to the way Keener joined a Zoom group to share her first experience of Counting the Omer!

Markovits talked about how simplifying life can be appealing.  Everything in daily life vanishes, even having to make  choices about what to wear.  For his character this meant losing everything that kept him together, while the road trip brought a feeling of starting life again anywhere and raising the question of who would I be if I lived here?  He was also curious about exploring what it feels like to make friends in later life.  Through the friendships we make in our younger days we learn that friends can become predictable, and it’s a struggle to recapture that sense of excitement that you used to have about making new friends.

This event will soon join others at the Jewish Book Council’s YouTube page where you can view multiple sessions from previous seasons of Unpacking the Books.   The next episode (April) features books on the theme of searching for a home in exile.

Image credits:

 

1975, Living in the Seventies (2025), edited by Robert Nichols

/ Lisa Hill / 7 Comments

ImageCatching up on my good intentions to read one nonfiction book each month, reading 1975, Living in the Seventies puts me back on track!

When I look through this photo-pictorial history, I feel nostalgia, surprise in what’s been chosen as representative, and pride in the political achievements of my generation.  (Younger readers may wish to revisit my review of What Do We Want? the story of protest in Australia by Clive Hamilton (2016), to understand why.)

This is the book description at Goodreads:

50 years on, the National Library of Australia looks back on this amazing year and reflects on what it was like to live in the seventies. 1975 was a year to remember. Jaws and The Rocky Horror Show filled cinemas and Picnic at Hanging Rock and Sunday too Far Away proved that Australians wanted to see their own stories on the big screen. Australia’s favourite television show Countdown provided a soundtrack for suburban life with glam rockers Sky Hooks and the infectious pop of Swedish Eurovision champions Abba. Flared jeans, platform shoes, and burnt orange dominated fashion, all gloriously rendered on brand-new colour television sets.Overseas the war in Vietnam finally ended, Papua New Guinea became independent, and conflict erupted in East Timor. At home Prime Minister Gough Whitlam struggled with rising energy prices, unemployment, and economic stagnation while also introducing major social reforms including universal health care and no-fault divorce. The year ended dramatically when Governor-General Sir John Kerr dismissed Whitlam’s government on 11 November, quickly followed by an election in December ushering in Malcom Fraser as Australia’s new prime minister. Now, 50 years on, the National Library of Australia looks back on this amazing year and reflects on what it was like to live in the seventies.

2025, just departed, was the anniversary of a tumultuous year in Australia.  For those of us who were young adults at the time, 1975 was the year that defined us.  We were the generation that achieved real change through grass-roots activism.

The early 70s belonged to the stultifying 23-year period of conservatism that ended with the election of the first Labor government in 1972, and the years after the Constitutional Crisis of 1975 when Gough Whitlam was controversially sacked, were years when Nothing Happened. In between, the world changed.

In 1975 I was a young mother living in the suburbs.  The Offspring attended free kindergarten nearby giving me opportunity to study part-time because secondary school evening classes had been made free under Whitlam.  The Ex was studying law part-time because university fees had been abolished.  There’s nothing about these impactful education reforms in the book and yet they didn’t just change individual lives, they educated the nation — when previously only an elite few finished school and went on the university.

While there’s plenty of coverage about pop groups, film, TV and *sigh* sport, most of which passed me by at the time, there isn’t anything about housing.  Nothing about the lifestyle choices that had to be made when couples were saving up for a home, and nothing about the expectations that young couples had.  We didn’t know anyone who had a dishwasher, and the idea of having a house with four bathrooms would have been absurd.  Renewed interest in  inner city terraces emerged in suburbs like Carlton, but most of us wanted space: a backyard for barbecues, cricket and a vegie patch, and a front garden to grow beautiful flowers and ornamentals. And we wanted to live near public transport because most young couples had only one car.

Damned Whores and God’s Police by Anne Summers got a mention in the section on feminism, but I looked in vain for some acknowledgement of Germaine Greer’s landmark text The Female Eunuch, published in 1975.  And though there’s a whole section on the arts, there was no mention there of any other books. The written word is represented by drama. Nothing about Patrick White publishing three novels over the decade and getting the Nobel Prize in 1973.  More egregiously, there’s nothing about the first wave of Indigenous writers to write their own personal story, nor about Margaret Tucker who in 1977 may have been the first Aboriginal woman to publish an autobiography.  (See my explorations about this here.)

‘Writing in the seventies’ gets two pages in the section called ‘Back in the Day’ and the books were chosen for their agendas: homosexual law reform (Dennis Altman’s Coming Out in the Seventies, 1979); migrant writing about alienation (Antigone Kefala’s The First Journey, 1975); changing ideas about masculinity (David Ireland’s The Glass Canoe, 1976, see my review); and drug culture and casual sex (Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, 1977).  On a page all to itself is The Rainbow Serpent (1975), a collaboration between Percy Tresize and Lardil Elder Dick Roughsey, badged as the first Dreaming story to be published for a wide readership.  Though it might be true of children’s picture books, and The Offspring had a copy of it, which I subsequently read to countless classes at school, this claim is is not actually true of a wider readership.  David Unaipon published Native Legends in 1929 and according to the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature (2008, edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Minter, see my review) it was produced by a metropolitan publisher [Hunkin, Ellis & King Ltd., Adelaide] for a white, middle-class readership in Australia and England.

These disappointments raise questions about the limitations of museum exhibitions.  I’ve been to hundreds of them over my lifetime, and they’ve shaped my ideas about all sorts of things.  But they are not histories, they are only snapshots, curated to suit a space, an intended audience and (often) an agenda.  Whatever they are intended to represent, the artefacts on display are those that the museum has, or can borrow.  (As they say in the video, they begin with the artefacts that they have and then map it onto events.) They are not, and (as they acknowledge in the video) cannot be comprehensive, and the books such as this one that we buy as souvenirs aren’t either.

Some aspects of events can’t be represented by an artefact,  We know this from watching TV news which distorts events with its preoccupation on the visual and the emotional.  If there’s no footage, there’s no story. The more weeping, the better.

How could a museum exhibition represent the attitudes and beliefs that shaped our way of life in the 1970s? Perhaps before-and-after photos of a commercial streetscape like our small local strip shopping centre?  In 1978 when I bought my first (and only) home, we shopped local.  There were competing supermarkets, butchers and greengrocers (i.e. not just one of each), and three service stations too, and those spaces they had for repairs and servicing is now taken by convenience store offerings including take away.  Today it’s hard to keep track of the number of thriving eateries: 13 at last count, not counting holes-in-the-wall where you can’t sit down. Then there are two nail bars and two beauticians, six hairdressers, a massage place, a chiropractor, a Men’s Health service and three pharmacies which sell more stuff than medicine.  These businesses have replaced a hardware store, a dress shop, a dry cleaners, a shoe-repair shop and a wool shop.  Today the strip is a service-based economy, and that number of eateries and coffee shops would have been unimaginable in the 70s. Back then, before gentrification, the suburb was mostly older people near retirement and young people moving into neglected old houses because they were cheap.  With mortgage interest rates at 13.5% the young cohort had no money to spare in coffee shops, and the oldies were too thrifty to consider it!

You can watch a video about the exhibition at the NLA here.  There’s a couple of segments with interviews from people ‘who were there’, and maybe adding those to the curatorial mix were included in the exhibition but (of course) not in the book.

Editor: Robert Nichols
Authors; Guy Hansen, Peter Appleton, Grace Blakely-Carroll, Shelly McGuire, Allister Mills, Karen Schamberger and Nicole Schwirtlich
Title: 1975, Living in the Seventies
Publisher: NLA (National Library of Australia) Publishing, 2025
Cover design: Virginia Buckingham, internal design by Amy Cullen
ISBN: 9781922507914, pbk., 95 pages
Source: review copy courtesy of the NLA.

 

The Shortest History of India (2022) by John Zubrzycki

/ Lisa Hill / 7 Comments

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I had good intentions of reading at least one nonfiction book each month this year, but here we are in mid-March and I’ve only just finished John Zubrzycki’s The Shortest History of India (2022) which I started on January 6th. Black Inc’s  series website claims that books in this series can be read in an afternoon but that’s not how it worked out for me…

It’s only partly because I knew so little about India’s history; it’s also because the book was a catalyst for exploring various rabbit holes.   A ‘Shortest History’ can’t tell you everything you want to know; it’s a taster and a provocation to discover more…

As anyone who’s been to Bali knows, India’s ancient history includes empire building.  Yes, that’s right, they were themselves colonisers back in the day.  The Majapahit empire and its Hindu religion and culture extended as far as Indonesia in the 12th-13th century and via trade for centuries before that.  On Bali the Hindu religion and traditions persist to this day.  It resisted the introduction of Islamisation throughout the region, and it still does.

ImageBut The Shortest History introduced me to the work of archaeologists discovering India’s much more ancient ‘lost civilisations’ and its Bronze Age Harappan empire that stretched from Afghanistan in the west to Bengal in the east.  It’s fascinating to learn that 5000 small seals first found during work on the Multan to Lahore railway in 1856, have secrets yet to be revealed. Scholars have yet to decipher the characters on the seals, partly because fewer than one in a hundred objects with ‘writing’ have more than ten characters. 

If this was a form of writing, it would make the Harappan civilisation the largest literate society of the ancient world, and arguably its most advanced. It would not be until the third century BCE that evidence of writing emerged on the Indian subcontinent.  Unless archaeologists stumble upon a buried library or archives, the mystery of the script, if indeed that’s what it is, will remain just that. (p.15)

ImageThis chapter sent me to our 1992 Time-Life Lost Civilisations series, edited by Dale Brown, which arrived chez nous when The Spouse united his library with mine.  Ancient India, Land of Mystery had a whole chapter on the third-millennium Harappan Civilisation, with excellent colour reproductions of artefacts and an aerial photograph of the now world-heritage citadel of Mohenjodaro with its Buddhist stupa on top. This chapter supplements what The Shortest History has to say with extensive coverage of the sites that show how advanced this civilisation was.

However, Zubrzycki  quotes the historian and Indologist A L Bashan as saying that much of Indian history before the middle of the first millennium BCE remains ‘a jigsaw puzzle with many missing pieces…lacking in the interesting anecdotes and interesting personalities which enliven the study of the past for professional and amateur historians alike. Zubrzycki does his best with his material but much of the era before British rule seems to consist of assorted rulers wasting their opportunities.  Like fabulously wealthy people the world over, they wasted their money on luxuries too, and failed not only to keep an eye on the envious and those who might betray them, but also to keep effective standing armies ready for the next invaders.  I suppose Indian schoolchildren have to learn the intricacies of the Mughals the way the Brits have to learn the succession of royals who’ve reigned over them for centuries without doing anything to improve the lives of the commoners.  Schoolchildren are supposed to be proud of them all the same.

I suspect that the only names that survive this tedious form of history-teaching are the interesting ones. For me, the only one who is mildly interesting is the first female ruler of an Islamic dynasty in India. Bollywood made a film called Razia Sultan in 1983 and caused a controversy by portraying her in a fictional lesbian relationship with one of the women in her harem. Alas, though the sets are amazing, the elephants are impressive and the music is romantic, the acting is woeful, the dubbing of the singing is terrible, the scimitars aren’t very convincing, you have to wait about an hour and a half before there’s any Bollywood dancing, and the video at YouTube doesn’t have English subtitles.

Yes, I had to watch most of it (in a half-hearted way) to know that.

What I love about Bollywood dancing — India’s gift to the world — is that it’s for women with real bodies, and all you need is a good memory for the moves and boundless energy.  And some bling.

But I digress.

The book becomes more interesting in the chapter called ‘Merchants and Mercenaries’.  It charts the rise of the East India Company and its most notorious entrepreneur Robert Clive, along with its eventual takeover by the Brits to become the Raj.  Enough detail is provided to show that Britain wasn’t quite as rapacious as as popular history would have it, and the Indian princedoms’ habit of betraying each other contributed to their downfall but weren’t entirely to blame either.

Post colonial discourse blames Britain for the slaughter that accompanied partition but Zubrzycki says that historians are divided on whether hastening the transfer of power avoided a civil war or precipitated violence.  He shows that no one was entirely blame-free including the much lionised Gandhi who sabotaged the last hope of a united India by refusing to endorse any deal that gave the League and Congress equal constitutional representation, calling it such parity ‘worse than Pakistan.’ 

Relations between the two sides deteriorated drastically.  After meeting Nehru in Bombay, Jinnah declared he would have nothing more to do with his adversary and announced a Direct Action Day on 16 August 1946 ‘to oppose Congress tyranny’ and support the creation of Pakistan.  Black flags hung over the houses of Muslims.  His declaration sparked what became known as the Great Calcutta Killings, which left thousands dead in a week-long orgy of communal bloodletting. (p.211)

Even though I’d read Train to Pakistan and seen a couple of films about partition, the statistics cited by Zubrzycki are still shocking.

Partition, when it came, triggered the largest and, by some estimates, bloodiest forced migration in history.  Up to 15 million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs crossed the newly demarcated borders to their promised homes.  The brutality that accompanied the settling of scores was medieval, with axes, scythes, swords, spears and clubs used. Thousands of women were raped, abducted or mutilated.  Recent research puts the death toll at between 500,000 and 600,000, divided more or less equally between Muslims and non-Muslims.  With the British army already beginning its withdrawal and Mountbatten ordering intervention only when English nationals were in danger, there was little that local police and military personnel could do.  A 50,000-strong boundary force was largely ineffectual, as it was made up of Hindu and Muslim troops not inclined to intervene against their own communities. (p.214)

It is also shocking to read that despite the massacres Nehru remarked:

‘I would rather have every village in India go up in flames than keep a single British soldier in India a moment longer than is necessary.’ (p.214)

…and that Gandhi was sulking in Calcutta because he had opposed partition:

Absent from the ceremonies marking independence in Delhi was Mahatma Gandhi,  He was 1500 kilometres away in Calcutta, fasting, spinning and praying.  When government officials asked him for a statement in honour of 15 August, he responded that ‘he had run dry. There is no message at all.  If it is bad let it be so.’ Gandhi’s disillusionment related to the partition of the sub-continent, which he had fought so hard to oppose.  His presence in Calcutta secured a temporary reprieve to the savagery that had beset the city for more than a year, with Hindus and Muslims marching together to celebrate independence.  But what was regarded as the ‘Calcutta Miracle’ lasted for only nine days.  When Hindu and Muslim mobs renewed their attacks, Gandhi resorted, yet again, to fasting. (p.214)

Gandhi’s legacy is mixed.  Still revered around the globe for his belief in nonviolent change, Gandhi’s contribution to Indian independence is questioned by some historians. On the one hand, he inspired collective action in a country that had no history of it, but on the other…

Professor of Indian history R C Majumdar lowers Gandhi’s pedestal, insisting that he was ‘lacking in both political wisdom and political strategy.’ Far from being infallible, he ‘committed serious blunders, one after another, in pursuit of some utopian ideals and methods which had no basis in reality. (p.216)

Zubrzycki also suggests that for all the hagiography surrounding Gandhi, it can be argued that India would have achieved independence without him.  He quotes scholar Judith Brown:

Far deeper economic and political forces than the leadership of one man were at work loosening the links between Britain and India — forces that had their origins in India, in Britain, and in the wider world economy and the balance of power. Yet his skills and his particular genius marked the nationalist movement and gave it a character unlike that of any anti-imperialist nationalism of the century. (p.216)

Curious about this, while well aware that Wikipedia is only too open to partisanship and hagiography, I checked out the legacies of Jinnah, Nehru and Gandhi at Wikipedia:

Jinnah’s legacy is Pakistan. According to Mohiuddin, “He was and continues to be as highly honoured in Pakistan as [first US president] George Washington is in the United States … Pakistan owes its very existence to his drive, tenacity, and judgment … Jinnah’s importance in the creation of Pakistan was monumental and immeasurable. <snip> He is also seen as one of the greatest Muslim leaders of the 20th century, uniting the diverse Muslim population of the Indian subcontinent under his leadership and turning a vulnerable minority into a sovereign nation — legally, constitutionally and at a scale unmatched in Muslim political history.

Perhaps if Jinnah had not died in 1948, his legacy might have included economic stability and democratic governance.  Nehru’s legacy is more impressive:

As India’s first Prime minister and external affairs minister, Nehru played a major role in shaping modern India’s government and political culture along with the sound foreign policy.  He is praised for creating a system providing universal primary education, reaching children in the farthest corners of rural India. Nehru’s education policy is also credited for the development of world-class educational institutions like the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Indian Institutes of Technology, and the Indian Institutes of Management.

Following the independence, Nehru popularised the credo of “unity in diversity” and implemented it as state policy.  This proved particularly important as post-Independence differences surfaced since British withdrawal from the subcontinent prompted regional leaders to no longer relate to one another as allies against a common adversary.

And Gandhi? It’s hard not to admire the most prominent pacifist of the 20th century.  However, his philosophy of non-violence isn’t much use against such intransigent regimes as the Nazis or Islamic fundamentalists, and it certainly didn’t prevent the slaughter during Partition.  And today, some of his ideals seem naïve.

India, with its rapid economic modernisation and urbanisation, has rejected Gandhi’s economics but accepted much of his politics and continues to revere his memory. Reporter Jim Yardley notes that “modern India is hardly a Gandhian nation, if it ever was one. His vision of a village-dominated economy was shunted aside during his lifetime as rural romanticism, and his call for a national ethos of personal austerity and nonviolence has proved antithetical to the goals of an aspiring economic and military power.” By contrast, Gandhi is “given full credit for India’s political identity as a tolerant, secular democracy.”

The truth, as John Zubrzycki would have it, lies somewhere in between. 

Not so tolerant is India since the rise of Hindu nationalism.  Zubrzycki recognises that India sees itself alongside China in reasserting the pre-Renaissance status quo.  Political neutrality is being reshaped, and the ugly face of creeping xenophobia makes it into international media.

In late 2021, seven Indian Muslims in the state of Uttar Pradesh were arrested for allegedly celebrating Pakistan’s T20 Word Cup victory over India.  Far worse has been the recent spate of lynching of Muslims on suspicion of consuming beef or for merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time, with beatings and abuse being aired on social media drawing little or no condemnation from the government. (p.251)

We in Australia have seen what happens when governments don’t condemn intolerance and threats of violence.

The book is marred by sloppy proof-reading.  Constitutions have tenets, not tenants and that’s not the only howler or typo.  While there’s a useful succinct timeline of events at the beginning of the book, the size, labelling and placement of maps is poor. Not only that, there isn’t a list of maps so the hapless reader must flick through the book to find one that shows places under discussion.

More irritating is the failure to keep topics together.  The  controversial Temple of the Hindu god Ram is first mentioned on page 79, where the provocative siting of the temple on the site of a mosque built by Mughal emperor Babur is explained.  But speaking as a reader who read this book mostly as a chapter-a-day,  by the time I reached page 238 I had forgotten all about this temple and why it provoked violence.  It didn’t help when it was alluded to merely by the city of Ayodhya where the temple was built and it wasn’t at all clear why the city was a catalyst for yet another political assassination.   Then there’s a whole page and a bit about India’s failed intervention in the Sri Lankan Civil War before the temple is back again on page 243 under the heading ‘The Rise of Hindu Majoritarianism’.

I think the author deserved much better editing.

Author: John Zubrzycki
Title: The Shortest History of India
Series: Shortest History Series (Black Inc)
Publisher: Black Inc Books, 2022
Cover design by Akiko Chan
ISBN: 9781760641788, pbl., 262 pages plus Suggested Further Reading, Image Credits, and an Index
Source: Personal library, purchased from Benn’s Books Bentleigh $27.99

Image credits:

The Fortunes (2016), by Peter Ho Davies

/ Lisa Hill / 4 Comments

ImageIt’s Reading Wales Month at BookerTalk and so it seemed a good time to read The Fortunes (2016) by Peter Ho Davies. Notable for his Booker longlisted first novel The Welsh Girl, (2007) Davies is not a prolific author, but released a third novel, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself in 2021.

I have scraps of Welsh ancestry myself and I was very impressed by The Welsh Girl when I read it back in 2007, not long before I started this blog.  I found it a thought-provoking exploration of Welsh nationalism during WW2, and his complex characterisation and a deft plot exemplified the theme of betrayal really well. But The Fortunes has very little to do with Wales. Born and raised in England, but now resident in the US for many years, Ho Davies has both Welsh and Chinese ancestry, and the focus of The Fortunes is Chinese identity in the United States.  So while it’s an interesting book to read about the complexities of identity, I think it’s an outlier among other books chosen for Reading Wales, because it’s not set in Wales and we don’t learn anything about Welsh culture or history from it.

This is the book description:

Sly, funny, intelligent, and artfully structured, The Fortunes recasts American history through the lives of Chinese Americans and reimagines the multigenerational novel through the fractures of immigrant family experience.

Inhabiting four lives—a railroad baron’s valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labour, Hollywood’s first Chinese movie star, a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes Asian Americans, and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption—this novel captures and capsizes over a century of our history, showing that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive—as much through love as blood.

Building fact into fiction, spinning fiction around fact, Davies uses each of these stories—three inspired by real historical characters—to examine the process of becoming not only Chinese American, but American.

The first three narratives, as outlined above, seem to have little connection to each other, until #SpoilerAlert the fourth narrative reveals that they are an author’s incomplete attempts to write the ‘Chinese-American story’ as  novels. The first narrative is the longest, depicting the determination and resilience of Chinese migrants in cities where their labour in laundries and brothels is all that they can access of the American Dream.  When luck gives Ling the opportunity to chart his own future, the novel depicts the Chinese contribution to building America’s railways while also giving vivid examples of the discrimination endured.  The second narrative is written like a series of stills from a movie as it portrays the career of  a Chinese film star called Anna May Wong. Passed over for the plum role as the lead in Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, Anna seems to be more philosophical about it in Ho Davies’ novel than in real life. (Wikipedia suggests that she took her career to Europe because she was fed up with being typecast while also denied lead Asian roles.) The third narrative draws on the 1982 real-life racially motivated murder of Vincent Chin with a character who was his friend, reflecting on racism in first person.

When the Chinese band together to get justice for Vincent, it is the birth of a movement. But it is not a movement of united minorities.

But making a federal case is literally what we did — what we had to do to get the case reopened and prosecuted by the Justice Department as a hate crime. Only it had never been done before.  Civil rights legislation hadn’t been applied to Asians previously; doing so now was a hot topic,  a choice.  Whose lot to throw in with?  Blacks, for whom the legislation had been written, some of whom were suspicious of a possible usurpation, or dilution, as if Asian struggles were equivalent? Or white, whom many of us aspired to be like? (p.190)

Racism is such a complex, widespread scourge in societies around the world, yet as Ho Davies puts it so cogently in the last sentence of this paragraph, it has no logical basis.

The thing about racism, I always think, the worst thing, okay, is not that someone has made up their mind about you without knowing you, based on the colour of your skin, the way you look, some preconception. The worst thing is that they might be right.  Stereotypes cling if they have a little truth, they sting by the same token.  A lot of us do work hard; many of us (who hail from Canton, anyway) are short. […] How would you feel if I called you racist?  The white stereotype.  But some of you are racist, right? It doesn’t mean that what’s true of the many has to be true of the one, any more than what’s true of the one must be true of the many. (p.193)

The fourth narrative is the most engaging.  A couple undertaking inter-country adoption in China are confronted with the recurring question of his identity and the blunt truth behind China’s surplus girl children, under the One Child Policy.  We see bi-racial John Ling Smith’s soul-searching when his expectations about ‘fitting in’ aren’t met.  He had thought that he would feel comfortable being in a country where people like him are a majority and not a minority, but he doesn’t speak the language, he likes the ‘wrong’ kind of Chinese food, and he doesn’t understand the culture.  He struggles too, with decisions about teaching his new adopted daughter about her culture:

Will she resent them for taking her from a resurgent East (at the start of the Chinese century) to a fading West (at the end of the American one? Or for her name? (Pearl? Kids will call her Pearl of the Orient, Pearl Harbour, he realises; she’ll have to tell them I’m not Japanese or Hawaiian!)? For her sense of alienation, marginalisation?

Or maybe, just maybe, she will belong… maybe in 2032, on the fiftieth anniversary of the tragedy, America would declare a Vincent Chin Day to honour the diversity of Asian America. (p.262)

The Fortunes is also reviewed at the Washington Independent Review of Books.

You can find out more about Peter Ho Davies at his website and from this interview at The Guardian.

I read this book at this time for Reading Wales Month hosted by BookerTalk.

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Author: Peter Ho Davies
Title: The Fortunes
Publisher: Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton (Hachette), 2016
Cover design not acknowledged
ISBN: 9780340980248, pbk., 268 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Benn’s Books Bentleigh $32.99

2026 Climate Fiction Prize longlist, and a shoutout to Australian authors of Eco-Fiction

/ Lisa Hill / 18 Comments

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Thanks to a heads-up from Stu at Winston’s Dad, here’s the longlist for the 2026 Climate Fiction Prize UK, and hey! there’s three Aussies  nominated (underlined, below) and I’ve read one of them!

  • Dusk by Robbie Arnott (Chatto & Windus, Vintage), see my review
  • Every Version of You by Grace Chan (VERVE books)
  • The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha (John Murray Press, Hachette)
  • Helm by Sarah Hall (Faber & Faber), on reserve at the library
  • Albion by Anna Hope (Fig Tree, Penguin Random House)
  • Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan (Simon & Schuster)
  • The Price of Everything by Jon McGoran (Solaris, Rebellion Publishing)
  • Hum by Helen Phillips (Atlantic Books)
  • Endling by Maria Reva (Virago, Little, Brown)
  • The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien (Granta Books)
  • Juice by Tim Winton (Picador, Pan Macmillan), on my TBR
  • Sunbirth by An Yu (Harvill, Penguin Random House)

BTW on International Women’s Day, it’s notable how many of these authors are women!

You can read more about these books and their authors at the prize website.

The shortlist will be announced on 18th March. Ticket details for a free public event to celebrate the shortlist will be announced soon.

The winner will be announcement on 27th May followed by a winner’s event at Hay Festival on 30th May.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Australian authors are paying close attention to climate change.  We are not uniquely vulnerable to its impacts, but the increasing range and severity of bushfires is a frightening portent of what is to come.  We’re experiencing more and nastier cyclones, and widespread flooding that used to be an occasional disaster from which communities could recover and rebuild, are now impacting huge swathes of land and the waters are taking very long periods of time to drain away because our landscape is so flat.

So far, because we have good infrastructure and emergency services,  we have been comparatively lucky — there hasn’t been widespread loss of life as in Southeast Asia, China, and the Indian subcontinent (as in Megha Majumdar’s novel A Guardian and A Thief, see here) where floods have been catastrophic, costing thousands of lives and causing widespread food insecurity.  Nevertheless for Australians the cost of home and contents insurance is becoming prohibitive… and what happens to rural and regional communities, and to people on the urban fringe of our big cities when they don’t have insurance and have no money to rebuild after ‘natural’ disasters?  What kind of future is there going to be when already daytime summer temperatures reach 50°+ and 30°+ overnight?

Other Australian novels where climate change is the focus include those exploring species extinction, social disruption, economic disparity impacting on survival and the pernicious effects of climate change denial. Some of these titles show that authors like Jane Rawson, Meg Mundell and Sue Parritt were using speculative fiction to draw attention to these issues more than a decade ago.  Links go to my reviews:

I haven’t read widely in speculative fiction, so I welcome suggestions for other novels that tackle climate change and its associated issues. What have you read that’s left a lasting impact?

Image credit: longlisted books, from the Climate Prize website. 

Six Degrees of Separation, from Wuthering Heights…

/ Lisa Hill / 21 Comments

ImageDid you know that there are 11883 editions of Wuthering Heights listed at Goodreads, which Kate at Books are My Favourite and Best. has selected as this month’s starter book for #6Degrees?  I went looking to see if I could find the cover of the edition I read when I was a teenager, and even if I filter the results down to hardcovers there are 113 pages of results. So I tried AbeBooks, and found what might be the right one: the seller’s info doesn’t give the date of publication but my Odhams’ set of Dickens which has the same red boards doesn’t either.  My copy certainly didn’t have the lurid cover of the Abe Books edition!

ImageWhen it comes to lurid cover art, nobody can match the Elek English translations of Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquet cycle.  If you check out Jonathan’s Lurid, Gaudy or Tasteless Covers page at Reading Zola you can see a slide show that reveals just how ghastly they are.  Their translations weren’t great either: I started with the 1965 Alec Brown translation of The Beast in Man in the Elek edition (cover at right) and promptly abandoned it for the Oxford World’s Classics translation by Roger Pearson.  For me, La Bete Humaine (1890) turned out to be the best of the series, see my review.  Who knows how many readers were turned off by those execrable covers and so never read Zola?

Yes, I know we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but we do, don’t we?

ImageRemember that fad for covers with headless women against a banal landscape? Kate Grenfell’s Sarah Thornhill wasn’t the most egregious but it was such a disappointment after the stunning design for The Secret River, which had all black boards, no writing on the spine or anywhere else, with a moody jacket and historic maps for the endpapers.  The Sarah Thornhill novel was a disappointment too, see my thoughts here. Actually, it’s been a while since Grenville wrote anything I’ve wanted to read, and yet she used to be one of my favourite authors.

ImageGrenville credits the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) as giving her career a start with her 1991 novel The Idea of Perfection.  It’s not reviewed here on the blog but I really liked its quirky characterisation and a plot revolving around middle-aged love.

ImageThe Women’s Prize IMO hasn’t always delivered great fiction, but I enjoyed what I read of last year’s longlist though most of what I really liked didn’t make the shortlist.  I thought The Safekeep was a good but flawed novel (see my review) and I wouldn’t have given it the win.

OTOH I would have been hard pressed to choose between The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, A Little Trickerie by Rosanna Pike, The Artist by Lucy Steeds and  Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, so I don’t discount the difficulty of picking a winner!

ImageI’ve read three of this year’s longlist and am impressed by Flashlight by Susan Choi, (see my review) and A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar, (see my review) but am leaning towards The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine, (see my review). It was also longlisted for the £10,000 Gordon Burn Prize, which celebrates exceptional writing with an unconventional perspective, style or subject matter.  

Would that there were more of that, eh?

Indeed, that might even be what saves the publishing industry from AI. At Paula’s Winding Up the Week, she posted this snippet:

The Korean Times: 1 year, 1 publisher, 9,000 books: AI-generated titles flood Korean shelves – Kim Se-jeong says the Korean “publishing industry [is warning] of [a] crisis of reader trust” over the recent flood of AI-generated books.

And to think we used to worry about self-publishing!!

Next month (April 4, 2026), we start with Virginia Evans’s epistolary novel, The Correspondent which has just been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

A Guardian and a Thief (2025), by Megha Majumdar

/ Lisa Hill / 8 Comments

ImageLonglisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction (open only to US citizens) and winner of the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, A Guardian and a Thief is the second novel of Megha Majumdar, born in Kolkata but resident in the US for 20 years.  So this novel that interrogates the life chances of two families in a Kolkata struck by famine and floods, comes from the pen of someone who understands acutely what privilege really means.

This is the book description:

In a near-future Kolkata beset by flooding and famine, Ma, her two-year-old daughter, and her elderly father are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma’s husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring long-awaited visas from the consulate, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning they awaken to discover that Ma’s purse, containing their treasured immigration documents, has been stolen.

Set over the course of one week, A Guardian and a Thief tells two stories: the story of Ma’s frantic search for the thief while keeping hunger at bay during a worsening food shortage; and the story of Boomba, the thief, whose desperation to care for his family drives him to commit a series of escalating crimes whose consequences he cannot fathom. With stunning control and command, Megha Majumdar paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of two families, each operating from a place of ferocious love and undefeated hope, each discovering how far they will go to secure their children’s future as they stave off encroaching catastrophe.

The novel begins with Ma getting her possessions sorted before departing for the US, where she will join her husband in Michigan.  Her fractious toddler Mishti doesn’t understand the break in her routine, and is only briefly placated by food which Ma has stolen from her job as manager of a shelter for homeless people.  Despite their comparative wealth and privilege— with a house, clean running water, aircon that works, a lifetime of possessions that  must be left behind and precious visas that enable migration to the US — the family does not have enough to eat.  Both Ma and her elderly father Dadu are hungry but they give most of what they have to Mishti.

Both have private reservations about the move they are about to make:

Dadu felt invigorated by the city around him, the only city in which he knew who he was—a young man, with a heart given to a love of small things.  The more banal and comedic, the more fervent his love.  In Michigan, he would never be able to share with a new acquaintance, if he even found one, that he did not want to introduce himself by his job.  His job represented very little of him.  Perhaps only his discipline, and his sense of responsibility.  But the parts of him that he delighted in—his creativity, his pull towards rhymes, his curious eyes and ears, his laughter—these he would never be able to claim in a new land, before a new peer.  These, too, would remain in Kolkata.  That old self would roam the vacant house like a ghost. (p.11)

In better years, in this kitchen, Ma had hummed as she cleaned chickens to roast, flesh like her flesh, washed potatoes sprouting white eyeballs and mushrooms with mud in their caps, measured and rinsed cups of rice, pouring the residue, like an overcast sky in the bowl, down the drain, not minding if a few grains slipped into the sink.  There had been years of such abundance.  In those years, she had relished the comfort of an hour to herself, songs playing, greens soaked, carrots peeled.  Goodbye, she thought, jubilant and not, to the drowsiest of those afternoon hours when she had carved out of the clock a turn for herself, made lemonades with three cubes of ice twisted from a tray and sat down on the floor to drink, nightie lifted up to her knees, like a girl.  But she knew too, she had said goodbye to those days a long time ago. (p. 24)

Not far away, the adolescent Boomba is planning his heist.  A refugee from a village beset by floods that have destroyed his family’s home and scanty livelihood, he has inveigled his way into Ma’s shelter meant only for families with children, and he has seen Ma purloining eggs for her family.  Boomba loves his family with a passion and sense of responsibility that is the equal of Ma’s.   He has worked hard in the city only to lose his savings time and again, sabotaging his promise to find a new home for his parents and little brother.  He is so hungry that the act of scaling Ma’s gate exhausts him.  The paucity of his resources means that when he steals the precious passports, he doesn’t know what they are because he can’t read.

Punctuated by occasional optimistic and encouraging missives from the oblivious husband in Michigan, the narrative juxtaposes the desperation of these two characters in their struggle for hope and survival.  It is heart-breaking to read, especially since we know that real life disparities in the wealth of individuals and nations make it possible for some to insulate themselves from the devastating effects of climate change, while others — not just on the Indian sub-continent — are experiencing the disasters caused by years of wilful collective inaction.  Climate-induced ‘natural’ disasters and food insecurity are not just fiction, they are already a reality for millions.

Despite the urgency of its theme and its devastating conclusion, A Guardian and a Thief has its lighter moments.  Mishti’s tempestuous voice lightens the mood as she interprets events from  her own understanding of the world:

‘The house can’t come with us?’ Mishti had asked some days ago.

It can’t,’ Ma had said.

‘But why?’

‘Why do you think?’

Mishit had considered this question. ‘Because, ‘ she had said after a minute, ‘ the house have no toes.’ (p.25)

And, considering the awful consequences of Boomba’s crimes, he somehow steals a place in a reader’s heart. After his bicycle is stolen…

Maybe, if he had had somebody caring for him in the city, he would not have surrendered his bicycle and his money so easily to the policemen or the robbers, whoever they were.  Now he felt ashamed, and resentful.  Where was the new person he had vowed to be, mean and free? He had retreated, conceding to the person he had always been, gentle and grinning, baffled before the barbed edges of the world.  That person would not survive in the city. (p.89)

The image of Boomba tenderly feeding Mishti is unforgettable.  Despite his exploitative intentions, he takes her to a feast in the Hexagon, a floating island of unimaginable wealth where the cynical host celebrates a wedding with a feast for the children of the city’s poor.  Spoonful by spoonful he feeds her one luxury item after another till she is sated.  This is what he would do for his little brother if he could.

I discovered Megha Majumdar’s writing during the pandemic via the digital Melbourne Writers Festival, and saw the same preoccupation with how vulnerable people prey on each other in A Burning (2020, see my review). A Guardian and a Thief blurs the line between the ambiguities of morality and the consequences of wrongdoings, large and small.

Highly recommended.

Author: Megha Majumdar
Title: A Guardian and a Thief
Publisher: Knopf (Penguin Random House), 2025
Cover design by Tyler Comrie
ISBN: 9781398555617, pbk., 205 pages
Source: Kingston Library

 

2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist

/ Lisa Hill / 27 Comments

ImageI wasn’t going to do a post about the 2026 Women’s Prize Longlist because I assumed it all the booklovers I know would already know about it, but I enjoyed last year’s nominations so much I decided to read as many as I can this year too, and I need to keep track of them.

Thanks to Cathy at 746 Books, I have a text-friendly list of the nominees.  I’ve printed this out, sorted into those I’ve already read (see links below), those I have on reserve at my local libraries, and those not available that I’ll probably need to buy if they make the shortlist.  (Breaking my retirement budget policy of buying Australian books and borrowing international ones.)

I’ll update this list with more links to my reviews as I complete them.

  • Gloria Don’t Speak by Lucy Apps (Weatherglass Books)
  • Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi (4th Estate, HarperCollins Publishers UK), reserved at the library
  • Moderation by Elaine Castillo (Atlantic Books), reserved at the library
  • Flashlight by Susan Choi (Jonathan Cape, Vintage, Penguin Random House UK) , see my review
  • Dominion by Addie E. Citchens (Europa Editions UK)
  • The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine (Sceptre, Hodder & Stoughton, Hachette UK), see my review
  • The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Michael Joseph, Penguin Random House UK), reserved at the library
  •  The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson (Cassava Republic Press)
  • The Others by Sheena Kalayil (Fly on the Wall Press)
  • Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly (Saraband)
  • Heart the Lover by Lily King (Canongate), reserved at the library
  •  Audition by Katie Kitamura (Fern Press, Vintage, Penguin Random House UK) , reserved at the library
  • A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (Scribner, Simon & Schuster UK), finished last night, review coming, see my review
  • Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (Canongate), reserved at the library
  • The Best of Everything by Kit de Waal (Tinder Press, Headline Publishing Group, Hachette UK), reserved at the library

Image credit: cropped from the image at the Women’s Prize Facebook post.

Empathy (2025), by Bryan Walpert

/ Lisa Hill / Leave a comment

ImageLonglisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards, Bryan Walpert’s absorbing new novel Empathy was unlucky not to make the shortlist. I had just finished reading  it and was mulling over the cunning way that the theme plays out when the news came through.  I can’t really comment on the shortlist of four because the only title I’ve read (is Catherine Chidgey’s The Book of Guilt (2025, see my review) and the other three are proving hard to get hold of, but they must be very good indeed to have trumped Empathy and Wonderland, (see my review) for a place on the shortlist.

Anyway…

What makes Empathy such a powerful novel is the way  it speaks to our yearning for a less divisive world. No matter how carefully we curate our ventures into social media (in my case, that means only BlueSky, Goodreads and (reluctantly) Facebook to keep abreast of family overseas, and no matter how scrupulously we avoid the nastiness of of Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, we still know about its malevolent effects because legacy media sites feed on it.  Scan through their tabloid headlines and you can see the hashtags bleeding through.  These days, being ‘informed’ means being tainted by the unfiltered basic instincts of people we would never otherwise want to have in our lives.

Walpert’s novel humanises the quest to create a fix for the miasma in which we find ourselves.  It traces the way a chemical solution to this quest derives from the interaction between commercial opportunism and the idealistic desire for greater connectedness.  If empathy in a perfume can be developed in a lab, then monetised and marketed, there’s money to be made and the manufacturer looks like a good corporate citizen.  If a role-playing video game that rewards empathetic choices can be developed, a start-up company can make near-instant wealth if it becomes very popular.  What could go wrong?  The world needs more empathy, right?

Walpert’s novel does not allow a naïve answer to that question.  Exploring the limits of empathy as an unmitigated good, he shows that the answer depends on context.  Do we really want to empathise with people doing evil things so that we allow them to continue doing it?  When does engaging with another’s point-of-view morph into making excuses for unconscionable behaviour? And what if others exploit empathy to get submission to what they want?

This is the book description:

Marketing executive Alison Morris bets her reputation on a project to sell empathy in a perfume bottle. Her husband, Jim, is inspired to try a similar thing in a game he’s developing – sinking all their money into EmPath, where people progress by learning to understand one another without direct communication. All at once Alison’s fragrance develops dangerous effects and Jim’s game falters in the market, then the chemist working on the perfume project vanishes. His son, David, seems to be the only one looking for him. A widower with two children, David is a man of routine who just wants to get on with his life, but his love for his father takes him into a murky world where empathy can be bought and sold and can lead to murder.

Set mostly in 2024, the novel begins with Edward Geller, a research chemist, tied up in the boot of a Lexus.  He thinks of his loved ones, and his thoughts wander to fond memories until he recognises that his mind is generating these inappropriate thoughts to distract him from the peril he is in.  And then his brain kicks into strategy, and recalling what he’s seen on crime drama TV shows, he does what he can to spread his DNA in the boot, forcing it into crevices where it will be found as a signal for the future to follow back to this moment. 

Ensuing chapters trace Edward’s son David doggedly pursuing a trail that seems to have gone cold, and these are interspersed with events from the year before, when Alison Morris is trying to make her mark in the all-male atmosphere of a marketing company.  It is her intervention in encouraging a younger colleague to speak up with what seems like a crazy idea, that is the catalyst for the development of a perfume to stimulate empathy.  She’s idealistic but she’s also ambitious.  So is her husband Jim, a computer engineer with a love of gaming, who has plunged all their finances into developing a game to achieve the same thing — and failed to practise due diligence in regard to his business partner’s contribution to expenses. Walpert has written each of these interwoven chapters to generate reader empathy with the ideals, ambitions, frustrations, self-doubts, follies and relationships of these characters who yearn to make a better world.

So imagine this reader’s horror when less altruistic forces arrive and under the influence of the game and the perfume,  we see these characters empathising with the amoral thugs…

Empathy is not a thriller is genre sense of the word, but once all these elements come together to form a horrifying scenario, it is certainly unputdownable.

Empathy is also reviewed at the NZ Review of Books where Guy Somerset writes

One moment you’re in a contemplative novel admiring Walpert’s sensitivity towards his characters and their relationships with each other, the past and the situations in which they now find themselves; the next you’re being shocked and scared witless by one of the most ruthless and unrelenting villains this side of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.

Empathy is available from multiple outlets in Australian and NZ, but it’s also available as an eBook at the publisher’s website.

Author: Bryan Walpert
Title: Empathy
Publisher: Makaro Press, an imprint of The Cuba Press, 2025
Cover design by Paul Stewart
Cover artwork: ‘Return’ by Claire Beynon and John Allison
ISBN: 9781067011314, pbk., 293 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Fishpond

 

2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Shortlist

/ Lisa Hill / 8 Comments

ImageThe 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Shortlist has been announced.  This is the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction shortlist.

I’ve read some of the remaining longlisted titles:

  • 1985 by Dominic Hoey (on reserve at the library)
  • Before the Winter Ends by Khadro Mohamed (not available in my libraries)
  • Empathy by Bryan Walpert (review coming) see my review
  • Star Gazers by Duncan Sarkies (on my TBR)
  • The Last Living Cannibal by Airana Ngarewa (Ngāti Ruanui, Ngā Rauru, Ngāruahine), see my review
  • Wonderland by Tracy Farr  see my review

I’m disappointed to see that two very fine books didn’t make the cut, so I’ve only read one of the shortlisted titles, Catherine Chidgey’s The Book of Guilt. From the longlist, as you can see from my enthusiastic reviews, I thought Tracy Farr’s Wonderland was a pleasure to read, and I’m very impressed by the originality of Bryan Walpert’s Empathy which I finished just last night. (Review coming soon). 

The finalists, winners and the four Mātātuhi Foundation Best First Book Award recipients will be celebrated on 13 May 2026 at a public ceremony held as part of the Auckland Writers Festival.

The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards are supported by Ockham Residential, Creative New Zealand, the late Jann Medlicott and the Acorn Foundation, Mary and Peter Biggs CNZM, BookHub, The Mātātuhi Foundation and the Auckland Writers Festival.

 

The Minstrels (2026) by Eva Hornung

/ Lisa Hill / 15 Comments

ImageA new novel from award winning Australian author Eva Hornung is always an event for booklovers.  A Victorian-born author who now lives in rural South Australia, Hornung is not a prolific writer,  and we have to wait a while before there is something new to pique our interest.

Writing as Eva Sallis, Hornung won the Vogel for her first novel Hiam (1998), (which I read pre-blog).  She won the  2004 Steele Rudd award for Mahjar (2003) while The Marsh Birds (2006) won the (now defunct) Asher Award and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Age Book of the Year Award. Writing as Eva Hornung, she won won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award  for Dog Boy (2009, see my review), while The Last Garden (2017, see my review) was shortlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin and Voss Literary Awards, and longlisted for the ALS Gold medal.

The Minstrels is worth the wait. Charting the course of one woman’s life from about the late 20th century into her old age in a near future becoming dystopian, the novel asserts the power and possibility of remaking identity in the face of changes which impose adaptation and acceptance. This is the book description:

Gem and Will grow up on a farm above the chasm and pool known as the Minstrels, a site where both are broken, each by the other. One will disappear. One will, eventually, be transformed.

Through her encounters with people and through art, land and language, Gem is remade while the world outside changes and time runs out.

This long-awaited new novel from one of our finest writers is a sweeping epic set in literal and figurative blight in a fictional Australian geography; a work of self, time and the very end of something. Wild, mythic and potent, The Minstrels is an apocalyptic redemption fable that weaves the history and probable fate of the world into the life of one woman.

Part I is the wholly absorbing story of Gem and Will, siblings of vastly different temperaments and abilities, growing up on a farm in a landscape drawn from the author’s imagination.

The Minstrels, unlike the drought, were real: a half chasm, half gorge through which the river ran and then reissued, changed, a mile downstream.  The chasm and pool at the base of the waterfall bordered their farm and the Covernses’ farm.  (p.12)

Just who owns The Minstrels isn’t clear, and no effort has been made to find that out.  For generations there had been unspoken access for all, and the notion of private property rights over it would have been faintly distasteful to those old farming families. It’s a place for picnics and swimming and diving.  It has a sad history of accidental deaths and suicides, and its own legends and mysteries.

Even on a breathless day, the Minstrels played a strange music of sighs, murmurs, whines, whistles and echoes.  This must have been how they were named, although no one really knew who had named them.  (p. 13)

The Minstrels are also the site for a bizarre end-of-year adolescent ritual.  Parents don’t talk about their own participation in this ritual, and the young people conceal their preparations for it with care.  A subsequent harvest of newborns is not the only consequence of ‘the run’…

Part II transitions into speculative fiction that traces the transformation of Gem from city aimlessness into a farmer confronted by changes that cannot be denied.  Her relationship with her parents had been unsatisfactory in many ways, but there was a brief period of intimacy (of sorts) with her father when she embraced learning about farm tools and machinery.  In her forties she celebrates her mastery of these skills as she returns to the farm, where unlike the other farmers, she is not burdened by debt, family responsibilities or future inheritance issues.  Initially she develops her model farm as ‘performance’, to impress the locals who had always treated her as an outsider.  But as time goes by, her acceptance of change and subsequent adoption of ‘best practice’ becomes part of her willing withdrawal from contemporary life and is more about reshaping her identity and sense of self.

Image(Although The Minstrels is utterly different, the portrayal of a competent and dynamic older woman adapting to climate change reminded me of Lucy Treloar’s Wolfe Island 2019, see my review.)

Hornung tackles contemporary issues that impact on farming in Australia today.  The threat of fracking is the catalyst for a long overdue relationship with the local Indigenous people with all that implies for access to and custodianship of the land.  It’s also a catalyst for Gem to begin learning their endangered language, with an urgency prompted by her discovery that there are only nine living speakers of that language. Hornung doesn’t shy away from the angst that surrounds this issue: as she says in the Acknowledgments, Hornung has drawn on her own experience learning the Adnyamathanha, Yura Ngawarla language being reclaimed in the Flinders Ranges.  In the novel some members of the community resent Gem’s contribution to the Ngawarla Reclamation Group because they don’t want outsiders being able to speak the language better than they can.  This attitude is what prevents access to learning my own local Aboriginal language.  I understand this attitude, and I respect the view that it’s not my decision to make.  Still, I believe that endangered languages need any and all available allies if they are to survive, and in the novel elder Uncle Jim agrees to teach Gem — for whom learning the ancient language of the farm is more than a whim.  It’s part of remaking her identity, and it’s also an act of (albeit imperfect) restorative justice.

In addition to the question of Indigenous access to lands not covered by Australia’s Native Title legislation, Hornung introduces the issue of the growing gulf between city and the bush.  Gem’s land is visited by vegan campaigners from the city.  Though she farms cattle, and their interference in treating a highly contagious and potentially fatal condition called pink eye is ignorant, Gem’s response is not intransigent.  Though she doesn’t resile from her own position, she listens to their point-of-view and takes time to explain the animal welfare issue.  She enlists their help to treat the cattle, and gives them one of the cattle to raise as a pet.  Their visit appears to be resolved with mutual respect on both sides, only for Gem to discover that she was wrong about that. Hornung illuminates the amoral positioning of protest when her generosity is betrayed:

He stood up.  He was stiff and formal again.  ‘Gem, you were decent to us.  And you wept when you shot the [diseased] calf. But they believe very strongly that kindred behaviours weaken us, and that the cause is more important that any obligation to you.  They had to be bigger than that.  They have to, even with their own families.’

A cult, that’s what it sounded like. (p.233)

A perfect example of how the extremist Left justifies contemptible behaviour towards those that it ‘others’.

As the novel morphs into speculative fiction, farming becomes a discredited occupation, and laws are passed to force landowners to share their land for public use in ‘Adventure Zones’.  There is a droll sequence when a group of medievalists arrive from the city to hold their jousting competitions (without horses), and food shortages start to occur as farmers struggle to adapt to changing climate patterns and the way their land is compromised by adventurers’ activity.   If ever a novel were an argument for genuine political representation for farmers, The Minstrels is it because it portrays so clearly how city interests dominate the political landscape with results that are sometimes disastrous for the farms that provide our food supply.  Rosalie Ham has traversed this territory in her novel The Year of the Farmer (2018, see my review) and so did Richard Anderson in his novel of small-scale farming in Small Mercies (2020, see my review).

I am thinking maybe I should create a tag or a category for FarmLit, because there’s also Locust Summer (2021), by David Allan-Petale (2021, see my review) and Stephen Orr has written novels that also tackle inheritance issues in The Hands (2015, see my review).

Whatever you think about veganism/vegetarianism or Big Ag or intensive (factory) farming or food miles, as development encroaches on the market gardens on the periphery of our cities and climate change impacts on crops, the vulnerability of our food supply becomes more and more obvious.  Even if we are able to import food in the climate-changed future, I don’t want to eat it, especially not from countries that allow unregulated use of ag-chemicals.  And yet my own vegie patch has proved yet again this summer that there are some plants just don’t produce a crop any more.  My preserving kit sits gathering dust on the shelf… yet tomatoes remain an indispensable ingredient in Italian cuisine. Will the time come when we can’t grow them at all any more?

As you can see from my responses to this novel, it would be an excellent choice for book groups.

Author: Eva Hornung
Title: The Minstrels
Publisher: Text Publishing, 2026
Cover design by Imogen Stubbs
Cover image by Eva Hornung
ISBN: 9781923058781, pbk., 359 pages
Review copy courtesy of Text Publishng

Once the Deed is Done (2025), by Rachel Seiffert

/ Lisa Hill / 16 Comments

ImageLonglisted for the 2026 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, Rachel Seiffert’s latest novel explores an aspect of WW2 that seems not to have had much attention in historical fiction: it tackles the nightmarish experience of DPs: displaced persons in the aftermath of the German defeat.

As the Allies advanced towards victory, they encountered chaos on an unprecedented scale.  Although The Aftermath (2014), by Rhidian Brook comes to mind as a novel of British Occupation in postwar Germany, not much fiction has been written from the perspective of those whose job it was to cope with the survivors of the conflict.  As Helen Lewis’s story of her father’s experience shows in The Dead Still Cry Out, the Story of a Combat Cameraman (2018), in the early days and as liberation progressed, these were military men who were utterly unprepared for the enormity of the Holocaust psychologically and logistically.   At the same time, there were places where soldiers came across the shattered remnants of the Nazi slave labour force that propped up the Reich.  The true enormity of this war crime became clear as the Western front was liberated and the fate of about six million displaced survivors was recognised, but Seiffert has focussed her novel through the small but illuminating lens of events in a small town in Northern Germany.

One of the reasons the Soviets fought so ferociously against the Nazis was they understood from what occurred in German-occupied Soviet territory that the threat was existential.  Nazi ideology classified Slavs as Untermenschen (subhumans) to be eliminated from their homelands in order to make space for the extension of the Third Reich into Eastern Europe.  Although slave labour was brutishly deployed throughout Occupied Europe and in North Africa, it was for those from the Eastern Front that conditions were the worst.  Men and women deemed fit to work were deported from occupied territories to farms and factories serving the war economy of the Reich.  So although they weren’t subjected to industrial scale extermination as the Jews were, they were regarded as expendable and they were often literally worked to death.

And of course those men and women had families.  They had children.

As the author’s note at the back of the novel tells us, their fate, as their parents were shunted from place to place, resulted in horrific numbers of surviving displaced children, collated into one register by the UN in 1948 as it tried to reunite families and organise repatriation:

They surveyed orphanages, hospitals, care homes and foster homes across the English, French and American zones, and the western sectors of Berlin [LH: i.e. not including those in the USSR], finding a total of 347,057 children.  191,199 were in institutions, 130,682 in German foster homes, and 21,176 had been adopted by German families. (p.445)

Seiffert portrays this unimaginable chaos with polyphonic viewpoints: local Germans of all ages and political perspectives; DPs from Ukraine, Poland and elsewhere;  and Ruth Novak from the Red Cross, working with the British Occupying forces to arrange repatriation of the DPs to their homelands. The novel begins with the  naïve perspective of Benno, younger brother of the more worldly Udo, who hangs out with the other bigger boys in the Hitler Youth and confuses Benno with their war-talk bravado.  Benno wakes up at night and witnesses his father, a policeman, being called out, together with a gathering of townsfolk,  On that same day he had seen — not the usual convoys of worker transports — but a straggle of women on foot, with only two guards.  He reads the cautious body language of his brother and parents, but he doesn’t understand what he has seen. His mother doesn’t allow war-talk, so he says nothing to anyone.

Further out of town on their hof (a homestead with a yard for the chickens) old Hanne Buchholz hears the siren too.  She’s waiting out the war, hoping her wounded son Kurt will be home soon, and wishing for the Allies to come soon too though she wouldn’t dare say so in public.  Her husband Gustav summons her to the woodshed, where to her astonishment there is a scrawny young woman wearing a torn patch ‘P’ identifying her as a Polish worker.  She lifts her shawl to conceal the tell-tale patch but still tries to shield the baby in her arms.

…Hanne could see that it was a girl, and little more than a baby yet.  A bare and curled head, a pair of child cheeks raw with cold, sore with grime, eyes large and tired and blinking.  The woman had wrapped the shawl to carry her, now she tried to wrap the girl to keep her warmer, only her fingers were too raw to manage it. (p.19)

Despite their fears of retribution, Hanne and Gustav do what they can for her, but in the morning she is gone, leaving the nameless baby behind.  And she has taken Gustav’s winter jacket as well.

— Verdammt nochmal!

He pressed his old hands to his forehead.

The coat was worn, but thick and lined: brown corduroy.  Hanne imagined the woman, tearing along the verges, zipped into that warmth.  It’ll come to her knees, she thought.  But that was all to the good.  It would cover the woman’s torn patch, keep her from capture; it would keep out the cold too while she ran onwards — and the further she ran from here, the safer they all were. (p.23)

The mosaic of voices captures the confusion and chaos well.  There are the naïve, confused German children and brash adolescents shamed by the defeat;  the Occupying British adults overwhelmed by responsibility and the magnitude of the task and struggling to suppress their contempt for people who ignored what was under their noses.  There are resentful German townsfolk blaming each other and their British occupiers; and then there are the DPs relishing their liberation but cooperating only in varying degrees because they’re no longer willing to surrender their autonomy.

Readers looking for a love interest with be disappointed (though I bet Hollywood will add one if they make a film out of it). The Red Cross worker Ruth — daughter of German Jewish exiles in London — is wholly preoccupied with her role, which quickly expands to include the need to document DP details which will facilitate reuniting them with family.  But she is also unsettled by inconclusive evidence in the remains of a hastily burnt register that there were women workers unaccounted for.  By now she knows about the extermination camps but she does not know the depths to which the Nazis would sink with slave labourers.  Readers, however, can guess.  It becomes a matter of whether Seiffert will resolve the story by revealing their fate.  Similarly, readers become invested in the fate of the baby Ditte, and also the Ukrainian children Yeva and Sasha who refuse to leave the town where their mother might yet find them.

Suffice to say that Seiffert does not sacrifice realism for a tidy ending.

Author: Rachel Seiffert
Title: Once the Deed is Done
Publisher: Virago, 2025
cover design: Hannah Wood
ISBN: 9780349014173, pbk., 445 pages
Source: Bayside Library

 

Venetian Vespers (2025), by John Banville

/ Lisa Hill / 37 Comments

ImageLonglisted for the 2026 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, John Banville’s latest novel Venetian Vespers is a curious tale indeed. I can’t say that I was much invested in the mystery that bears the plot, but was puzzled enough to keep reading to discover what Banville was on about. I kept sensing allusions to other novels set in Venice, (most obviously but not only The Turn of the Screw), and a narrative voice channelled from Henry James, but I could not fathom any preoccupation of significance.

I’m not sure that I do now.  It’s not Banville at his finest, it’s just what Graham Greene used to call an ‘entertainment’: genre fiction written for the commercial market rather than the literary fiction which made his name.

Banville is a hit-and-miss author for me, and this is a miss.  It’s deliberately transgressive, in the sense that it has a central character of #understatement dubious character, whose narration is narcissistic and unsavoury, to say the least.  Venice as a gothic destination is overdone, and so is the depiction of an Englishman abroad as an uncultured boor who is not only scornful of everything about the city (including St Mark’s Basilica) but even the Italians who have a preference for speaking their own language.

If there is anything much to take from this novel, it’s that tourists project their own culture onto the places they visit.  For Evelyn Dolman the city of romance is a tawdry destination, tainted by his own slime.

Not even an allusion to Monteverdi’s Venetian Vespers can save this novel.

I’ve read some of the other nominations for the 2026 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and I would rather they made the shortlist when it is announced in April.  The longlisted titles are:

  • Venetian Vespers by John Banville (Faber & Faber)
  • The Two Roberts by Damian Barr (Canongate)
  • Eden’s Shore by Oisín Fagan (John Murray Press)
  • Helm by Sarah Hall (Faber & Faber), reserved at the library
  • The Pretender by Jo Harkin (Bloomsbury)
  • Boundary Waters by Tristan Hughes (Parthian Books)
  • The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly (Bloomsbury), reserved at the library
  • Edenglassic by Melissa Lucashenko (Oneworld Publications)
  • Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Polygon)
  • Once the Deed is Done by Rachel Seiffert (Virago) (I have this from the library to read next) see my review
  • The Artist by Lucy Steeds (John Murray Press), see my review
  • Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (Viking), see my review

Author: John Banville
Title: Venetian Vespers
Publisher: Random House, 2025
Cover design by Kelly Blair
ISBN: 9798217170166, pbk, large print edition, 400 pages (Normal size print editions are about 350 pages)
Source: Bayside Library

Wonderland (2025), by Tracy Farr

/ Lisa Hill / 6 Comments

ImageLonglisted for the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Awards, Wonderland is Tracy Farr’s third novel.  It won the 2024 NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize: a prize set up by the family of novelist, playwright and poet Laura Solomon in her memory.  Open to NZ citizens and permanent residents, the prize calls for new writing with a ‘unique and original vision‘.  The winner receives a cash award of $2000 (as an advance) and a publishing contract with The Cuba Press.  Runners-up receive $1000 and it appears that some of them achieve publication too.  (See below for previous winners.)

Wonderlands is such a refreshing book, and it does indeed have a unique and original vision.  It feels refreshing because there is nothing strident or agenda-driven about it.  There are no dysfunctional characters, they are all just human.  It is a family story of love, kindness, generosity and the strength of what the term female friendship fails to convey… we used to call it The Sisterhood because it implied being at one with women around the world, not just the ones you like.  And — miraculously —the novel achieves all this without being sentimental.

This is the book description:

Doctor Matti Loverock spends her days and nights bringing babies into the world, which means her daughters—seven-year-old triplets Ada, Oona and Hanna—have grown up at Wonderland, the once-thriving amusement park owned by their father, Charlie. Then a grieving woman arrives to stay from the other side of the world, in pain and incognito, fleeing scandal. She ignites the triplets’ curiosity and brings work for Matti, diverting them all from what is really happening at Wonderland. In a bold reimagining, Marie Curie—famous for her work on radioactivity—comes to Aotearoa and discovers both solace and wonder.

The narration is sheer genius.  I nearly wrote that it is written from three points of view because there is one third person perspective, (the mother Matti’s) and two first person perspectives, (Marie Curie’s and the triplets’) but no, it’s five, because Ada, Oona and Hanna burst onto the page as one voice that is somehow three.

The sound of a bell ding-ding-dinging down the road, closer to home, wakes us.  We leap from the bed at the sound of our father’s familiar morning call—Rally, rally, rally, ratbags!—and slither bedwarm into our knickers and vests, then run through the house and stop in a pile by the front door to step our feet into cold canvas slippers. We open the door, and there is our mother, propping her bicycle against the verandah post, home and weary after her long night shift at the baby hospital in Newtown. She bends to kiss each of us in turn, then straightens to kiss our father last and longest. We watch her pause at the Lady’s door, listening, but not opening it.  Her doctoring bag looks heavy in her hand, unbalancing her.

On the first few days of the Lady’s visit, our routine was abandoned. But today it’s business as usual, starting with the calisthenics that our mother and father insist on, for health and vitality. We step off the verandah, past our mother’s big black bicycle, and sing our way into the day. We sing an exercise song

wind! rain!

sun! fog!

calisthenics, whatever the weather!

as we march across the road to the beach, through the low dunes, and onto the flat of the tide-wet sand. Our father is close behind us, his long-ago-wrestler’s belly (now pie, pork and beer belly) barely contained by his neck-to-thigh black stretch woollen swimsuit. Look at him! The fluff of his chest, the wire of his legs, the ham of his arms!  And look at the three of us! What a fine advertisement for modern life we make, our sleek, strong limbs, brown to the edge of our vests, our lily-white torsos underneath. (p. 38)

All these narrative voices combine their limited perspective to form a coherent whole.  The joyous, exuberant voice of the three children quietens when they are listening to the muffled anxieties of their parents or the conversations of their mother with The Lady.  (Though Marie Curie is here incognito, using her Polish name Marya Skwodovska, they are supposed to call her ‘madame’ or ‘professor’ but having overheard their impulsive, exasperated father refer to her as ‘Lady Bloody Radium’  — they call her ‘Lady’ as their private joke.)  Through Matti’s private perspective we learn about the state of Marie Curie’s health and Matti’s own concerns: managing the extra work while soothing Charlie’s views about Ernest Rutherford imposing their guest upon them.  We also learn about her friends with whom she occasionally lets down her hair for some boozy, raucous downtime.  (My goodness, there are so many references to smoking, I thought that disaster would strike when Matti fell victim to lung cancer, but no, it’s a different tragedy that derails the family.)

Marie Curie is multilingual, but her English is rudimentary, and so is Matti’s French, so there are moments of mutual incomprehension and Farr has fun with the Lady’s mishearing of verandah when she calls the ‘balcony’ a Miranda’.  But the depiction of her sickness, even as it gradually improves, is a chilling reminder of the real-life death of Marie Curie from radiation poisoning.  And the real-life poison of gossip and innuendo.

Early 20th century Wellington is superbly realised, making me remember once more how lucky we were not to have experienced its infamous wind when we were there in 2019.  Charlie’s Wonderland was a real amusement park on Wellington Harbour, but even if the triplets don’t join the dots and Matti doesn’t realise the extent of it, the reader can tell that it’s in financial trouble because the girls pester their father to open it for a Winter Wonderland… and that means there’s not enough patronage for it to be a year-round operation.  By the time we realise this, we readers are invested in the fortunes of this unforgettable family… and devastated by the disaster that befalls them.

So much so that the ending seems just right and not contrived at all.  That’s masterful writing!

Wonderland deserves a wide readership and I hope its nomination for NZ’s most prestigious literary prize gives it international attention.

Update, later the same day: I’ve just had an email from Tracy and she tells me that

The Cuba Press have just this month released the e-book of Wonderland (so recently that I haven’t updated my website yet!) – it’s on most of the usual platforms incl Kobo, Apple Books, though possibly not Kindle? [LH: No, I’ve just checked and it’s not there yet], as well as from the publisher.

Author: Tracy Farr
Title: Wonderland
Publisher: The Cuba Press,  2025
Cover design by Paul Stewart and Tracy Farr
Cover image: Wellington’s Wonderland at Miramar, The Water Chute by Zak (Joseph Zakariah), 1907 (modified)
ISBN: 9781988595931, pbk., 310 pages
Source: personal library, purchased from Fishpond, $29.95 +postage

Here are the previous winners of the Cuba Award.  Links are to Goodreads, except for Wonderland which links to Fishpond because that’s where I bought it from.  I have assumed that if I couldn’t find a title at Goodreads it hasn’t been published (yet) but as always am open to correction if I’m wrong.

2021: Lizzie Harwood, Polaroid Nights.
2022: Rachel Fenton, Between the Flags.  Runner-up: Philippa Werry, Iris and Me.
2023: Lee Murray, Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud. Runner-up: Melanie Kwang, Faultlines.
2024: Tracy Farr, Wonderland.  Runner-up: Abigail von Ahse, Flawless.
2025: Susanna Elliffe, Relic Party.  Runner-up: Belinda O’Keefe, Trespassers Will Be Baked, Scrambled, Fried and Eaten

I read books from Indie publishers all the time but I read this book at this time for
Kaggsy’s #ReadIndies Reading Independent Publishers Month.

 The Cuba Press has a very tempting list.  It’s based in New Zealand so the best place for Australian readers to find their publications is at FishpondAU but note that they now charge for delivery. International buyers should choose Fishpond.com

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Yes, I have (had to) change the look of my blog

/ Lisa Hill / 69 Comments

Today was the last straw: on top of bullying its hapless users into using its horrible Block Editor, today I discovered that WordPress had removed my subscribe-by-email widget.  They removed my blogroll widget a while ago too.  No courtesy notification, they just did it.

So now I’ve had to cave in and waste an afternoon finding a new theme that approximates what I had — and there’s not much to choose from. (This is the one I wanted, it’s called Pilcrow, but ‘search themes’ couldn’t find it.  I may try again later when I’m not so grumpy.)

I loved my old theme.  Appropriately called Ocean Mist, it used my favourite colour blue, and it suited me perfectly.  We were all used to it, my readers and me.  It had a nice small header which I had customised with a photo of some books that represent the best of Australian literature.  More importantly, you didn’t have to scroll down to get the waste-of-space header out of the way.  This new intrusive header is too big and too fat and it’s ugly and I dislike hate it.  I had a look at it on my phone and you can hardly see my lovely books behind that clunky black heading.  So apologies to anyone who uses a phone to read my blog.

Plus the bottom footer which showed major categories has gone too.

ImageMaybe I can get it back, and maybe I can restore my old blog roll and rearrange the widgets so that they are where I want them but I have already wasted enough time, because what I wanted to do today was to write my review of Tracy Farr’s terrific new book, Wonderland which has been nominated for the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

That is why I am here, that is why I do what I do.  I don’t want to spend my time responding to changes I never asked for and don’t want.

Why can’t things that work well just be left alone?!

 

Green Hands (1943), Barbara Whitton

/ Lisa Hill / 13 Comments

ImageMany years ago when we were having one of those ‘Did we do the right thing?’ conversations that migrant families inevitably have about leaving their birthplace, my mother said something that I did not really understand at the time.  ‘I don’t ever want to live again in a country that can’t feed itself.’  I knew she was referring to wartime food rationing in Britain, but I didn’t know then that Germany and Finland deliberately used starvation as a military strategy in the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944).

Well, according to the Introduction to Barbara Whitton’s Green Hands (1943), even before war, [and certainly before the brutally effective German strategy of trying to starve Britain into surrender by targeting the Merchant Navy convoys], the Brits had worked out that food shortages were going to be a problem.

The WLA [Women’s Land Army] had originally been formed during the First World War. It was re-established in June 1939 when it was identified that if war came, an extra two million acres of productive agricultural land was needed to offset the loss of imported food from the empire. Without a substantial number of women helpers, this would have been impossible.  To make up the labour shortfall (although being a farmer was a reserved occupation, being a farm labourer was not) Land Girls found themselves working alongside older male labourers, German and Italian prisoners of war, and even schoolchildren, who were allowed up to 20 days off school each year to help on the farms. (p. viii)

ImageThe first thought that sprang to mind from that paragraph was: huh? a women’s land army formed during WW1??!  A quick search and I found that others have been there before me, and at the Women’s Land Army website there is a history called Holding the Home Front, the Women’s Land Army in the First World War by Caroline Scott. The accompanying photo shows some women wearing trousers as they fork some hay, which must have been rather risqué at the time.  From there I also learned that in WW2 there was also a Women’s Timber Corps, formed in 1942 after the German Occupation of Norway caused a shortage of timber. The women were called Lumber Jills, and the page includes photos of them hard at work, including one that shows a woman wearing shorts.

The issue of clothing is not as trivial as it might appear…

A young woman, wearing the Land Army uniform, stands with a pitchfork in her left hand and holds her jacket in her right. She surveys a field of wheat.The Introduction also tells us that for the first time ever, in WW2 single women were conscripted into the services, and could choose to join the female versions of the military services i.e. WAAF, the ATS or the WRNS), or work in a factory manufacturing war production essentials, or join the ‘Land Girls’.  But recruitment for the Land Girls ceased in 1943 because it was more popular than the other options. This was possibly because of the idealised ‘healthy outdoor life’ promised by the recruitment posters, but also because women liked the WLA uniform.  Many of us have seen this in TV re-enactments, such as this one:

However… as any reader of Green Hands will immediately see, the uniform that was issued was #understatement lacking. Written from personal experience by Barbara Whitton (the pen name of Margaret Hazel Watson (1921-2016), the novel begins on a freezing cold farm in Scotland, but the women have not been provided with warm clothing, rainproof outerwear, tough gloves or even boots that fit.  In stark contrast to the idyllic sunshine portrayed in the recruitment posters, Bee and her co-workers Pauline and Anne are soaked through to the skin from their first day when the sleet arrives at about eight-thirty.  Deployed without any training, they are billeted with stingy hosts in shabby accommodation where there isn’t even hot water for a bath at the end of their day’s labour, which began at six in the morning, with no breakfast until nine o’clock. The work, harvesting mangolds (a root vegetable used for feeding cattle and pigs), is back-breaking.

So, given the real-life experience of the author, the novel could have been a barely disguised misery memoir, but it’s not. It is laced with dry humour, though that’s a bit too often at the expense of Pauline who is mocked relentlessly by everyone.  But it’s also fascinating to read a slice of wartime life from the perspective of someone who actually did this work for the best part of the year, first in Scotland, and then in somewhat more congenial conditions on a dairy farm in England.  The work was still physically taxing, but at least they were fed generously, and there were opportunities for a bit of recreation and the chance to meet a nice man or two.

Reading Green Hands from a 21st century perspective, despite Whitton’s light touch, we notice the explicit and casual sexism; we notice the women accepting the prevalence of ‘a slap on the rump’; and we notice the disparity in pay which meant that they barely had pocket money after paying for room and board (which in Scotland was rudimentary to say the least).  But we also notice working conditions for all the workers, that no one would accept today.  Extremely long hours, without weatherproof clothing, and without proper training in the use of tools and equipment that could be perilous. On the dairy farm Bee’s role is in part to do the daily deliveries, and she gets one day to learn to drive the van and the route and no written instructions about who gets how much milk!

After half an hour has gone by, the van is at last started; but not until it has been pushed down the hill and hauled back up again many times, and we are all feeling very warm.

We take it back to the yard and the crates are once again loaded.  By this time, milking has stopped, and wonderful smells of cooking breakfasts are being wafted out of the cottage doors.  I am ravenously hungry after all our exertions, but we have already dallied too long. Leaping into the driver’s seat, Charlie drives away like a madman.  We rocket down the road.  I cling desperately to the swaying van, and my springless seat leaves my tail and hits it again repeatedly.  We shoot round a corner, the milk bottles banging in the back with a noise like a machine gun, and the crates rattling together, so that I am almost deafened.

‘Have to be careful round this bend,’ says Charlie, accelerating at it on the wrong side of the road. ‘Nasty in the winter when the wet leaves are about.’

I long to point out that wet leaves and snow have much the same skidding tendencies, but we fly round it on two wheels. (p.87)

Aspects of this novel make me wonder who its intended audience was in wartime. People of Whitton’s own class, I expect. She wrote under a pen-name, but her real-life companions had the names Pauline and Anne, and the Introduction says that despite the mockery of their characterisation in the book, they remained in touch for many years. Call me cynical if you like but I suspect that the butt of Whitton’s humour is actually based on some other Land Girls who worked with them, and not her friends at all (who would have enjoyed the joke).

Whitton writes with humour about the rivalry between the women and some boys who are more experienced and competent than they are, but would she have been as sanguine about them missing school if they had not been working class lads? There’s not much biographical detail to be found out about her, but what there is (due to study Art in Paris, her training was curtailed by the outbreak of the Second World War), suggests she was upper middle-class or more.

Despite these reservations, I enjoyed reading Green Hands and I’d be interested to know if there were any other accounts of Land Army experiences.

Was there an Australian Women’s Land Army? Yes, there was, and they waited a long time for recognition of their service too.

Author: Barbara Whitton
Title: Green Hands
Publisher: Imperial War Museum 2020, first published 1943
Introduction: Imperial War Museum i.e. not credited to the individual who wrote it
Series: Imperial War Museum Wartime Classics
Design by Clare Skeats
Cover illustration by Bill Bragg
ISBN: 9781912423262, pbk., 195 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased via AbeBooks

I read books from Indie publishers all the time but I read this book at this time for
Kaggsy’s #ReadIndies Reading Independent Publishers Month.

The Imperial War Museum has a wide range of wartime publications.  It’s based in London.

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Spell the Month in Books February 2026

/ Lisa Hill / 8 Comments

ImageSpell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month, but that’s the day for #6Degrees, so here we are, a week later instead. This month, is a ‘Freebie’ themed Month…

So I’ve chosen to do a kind of ’round the world’ theme.  The books below are by authors who come from countries that begin with letters from the month of February. I’ve chosen to make it harder for myself by not choosing the obvious countries that come to mind for F, B, R and U.  Links go to my reviews.

F:

No, not France…. Finland!

The Islands (2022), by Emily Brugman

E:

Ethiopia

The Shadow King (2019), by Maaza Mengiste

B

No, not Britain… Belgium

War and Turpentine (2013), by Stefan Hertmans, translated by David McKay

R

No, not Russia: Rwanda

The Past Ahead (2008), by Gilbert Gatore, translated by Marjolijn de Jager

U

No, not the US… Uruguay

The Woman from Uruguay (2021), by Pedro Mairal translated by Jennifer Croft

A

Albania

The Fall of the Stone City (2008), by Ismail Kadare, translated by John Hodgson

R

Still no, not Russia: Romania

Sword (2020), by Bogdan Teodorescu, translated by Marina Sofia

Y

Yemen

Hurma (2012), by Ali Al-Muqri, translated by T.M. Aplin

Next month:

March 7: Take your pick from Pi Day, March Madness, or Green Covers

April 4: Easter OR Pastel Covers

Out of Time (2019), by Steve Hawke

/ Lisa Hill / 15 Comments

ImageIf anything in this review raises issues for you,
contact Beyond Blue or White Ribbon Australia or services in your own location.

There is discussion about dying with dignity when dementia has been diagnosed.

Melbourne-born but based in Western Australia since the 1970s, Steve Hawke is an Australian writer who deserves more attention than he’s had so far.  He’s a playwright, screenwriter and author, and has published nine books, mostly non-fiction, and some in collaboration with Indigenous communities.  But of course it’s his fiction that I like because he tackles most interesting themes, and I’ve reviewed The Valley (2018), and The Brothers Wolfe (2023). Out of Time was published in 2019 but I didn’t come across it until I spied it at Ulysses Bookshop in Hampton on Love Your Bookshop Day in 2023.

This is the book description:

Joe and Anne’s relationship has finally found the sweet spot and they are looking forward to what retirement brings. But time is not on their side. Inexplicably, Joe – a gifted architect – finds himself losing things, making miscalculations, blanking parts of his day. As Joe’s condition worsens, he and Anne face the agonising question: what is the point of no return?

Sometimes, in fiction, a character with dementia is mentioned as part of a patchwork of human experience:  as long ago as 1948, Ruth Park did this with the characterisation of Granny Kilker in The Harp in the South, while more recently Catherine Chidgey’s The Beat of the Pendulum (2017) documents her day-to-day life while revealing the encroaching tragedy of Nana’s encroaching Alzheimer’s.   Sometimes dementia is used as a device to interrogate the reliability of truth and memory, as in Our Shadows (2020) by Gail Jones, and in Miles Allison’s In Moonland (2021) which depicts the frustrations of seeking out a father’s history from dementia-addled friends.

ImageImageLess common is a novel devoted to the experience of coming to terms with dementia, usually via a character who has a loved one with the condition. The award-winning Delirious (2024), by Damien Wilkins features a man haunted by memories of his dead mother who had dementia, while The Spoon and the Sea (2025) by Rachel Caplin, shows us a character who learns from carers about ways to keep communication going for as long as possible.

Even less common are novels that depict the experience of a character who articulates encroaching dementia.  Thea Astley’s Coda, (1994) is the earliest example that I know of, but there is also A Hundred Small Lessons (2017) by Ashley Hay and the more recent You Must Remember This (2025), by Sean Wilson.  It’s written from the confused perspective of Grace, portraying her chaotic thoughts in a non-linear way, while readers can deduce the present from the perspective of her daughter Liz, who struggles to navigate the loss of her mother’s capacities.

ImageI don’t know of many novels that depict early-onset dementia.  There is A House Built on Sand by Tina Shaw, which alternates between Maxine’s confusion and distorted reality while at the same time showing that her daughter Rose often doesn’t understand what’s going on either.  Steve Hawke’s Out of Time, however, is the first novel I know of that is written from the perspective of a man with early-onset dementia, and more significantly, it portrays the terror that people can feel about the looming diagnosis, while confronting the moral complexities of wanting to take action to forestall an intolerable future.

Last year at an author talk, I had a glimpse of what might be Kylie Ladd’s next novel.  Because her day job as a psychologist is diagnosing dementia, she was toying with the idea of writing a novel about the moral complexities of Australia’s laws about Voluntary Euthanasia, which — so far — prevent people from using its provisions for dying with dignity when dementia has been diagnosed.  That is the dilemma that Joe faces, and Out of Time portrays the experience of his loving wife when she realises what he wants to do.

The book explores how Joe thinks he is the first to notice the gaps in his thinking and his memory lapses, and it shows his efforts to manage at work without anyone knowing that something is wrong.  His period of denial lasts longer than is good for him, and the novel shows how hard it is for his wife Anne, who struggles with wanting to respect his wishes and having some certainty in her own life.  She hates his desire to keep the diagnosis from his daughter because she hates keeping secrets but also because it denies her the support that her daughter can provide.

Out of Time, however, is not all doom and gloom.  Joe and Anne are a loving couple who share a good sense of humour. Along the way there is the stuff of family life: managing projects for Joe’s architectural practice and his mentoring of a successor; Anne’s work as a teacher; not getting along with a son-in-law, and the excitement about a grandchild on the way.  Anne is a keen bird-watcher, and she takes solace from getting out into the Kimberley to catch a glimpse of rare birds. But there is also a terrible moment when Joe reveals what he wants to do and how he wants to do it, and I had to close the book and put it aside while I processed the confronting dilemma that this family faces.  I think we all know people who say that they would like to pre-empt their fate in this situation, but this novel doesn’t shy away from what that might really mean.

Steve Hawke’s mother Hazel — the very popular and respected first wife of Prime Minister Bob Hawke AO (1929-2013) — was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease when she was only 72, and had made the decision to go public about it in 2003 to raise awareness of the disease.  She died ten years later aged 84.  The dedication in the book reads Always thinking of you, Mum. In the Acknowledgements he writes:

Perhaps inspiration is not the right word in the circumstances, but my mother Hazel was an inspiring person to me and to many others.  Being a witness to her journey into the badlands of dementia is fundamental to why I decided to tackle this book, and has informed its writing in many ways.

Hazel Hawke’s daughter Susan Pieters-Hawke also published a book called Hazel’s Journey: A personal experience of Alzheimer’s (2004, co-authored with Hazel Flynn.)

Update 15/2/26: We have learned not to get too excited about ‘promising breakthroughs’ in dementia research, but using a new CAR T-cell therapy to fight brain tissue inflammation in mice, may have potential to treat numerous neurodegenerative disorders.

Author: Steven Hawke
Title: Out of Time
Publisher: Fremantle Press, 2019
Cover design by Nada Backovic
ISBN: 9781925815283, pbk., 290 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Ulysses Bookstore, $27.99

I read books from Indie publishers all the time but I read this book at this time for
Kaggsy’s #ReadIndies Reading Independent Publishers Month.

Fremantle Press is an indie publishing company based in Fremantle WA.

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The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen (2025), by Shokoofeh Azar, translation anonymous

/ Lisa Hill / 20 Comments

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One day in the future, our bloody dance will continue in the free and joyous laughter of our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, even when we are forgotten.  (p.513)

It is hard to read these final lines of Shokoofeh Azar’s magnificent new novel The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen, right now when it appears that the theocratic regime has crushed the protests that began in December 2025, with a death toll of at least 3000 according to official sources, and somewhere between 6000 and 25000 according to reports that are unverifiable due to the internet blackout imposed by the regime.  America, which promised help to the protestors, is instead now ‘in talks’ which appear to be more about Iran’s nuclear ambitions.  Freedom for the Iranian people seems a long way away at the moment, and my heart goes out to the diaspora who do not even know the fate of their loved ones.

And this week Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi who campaigns for women’s rights, has been sentenced to six more years in prison.  It is hard not to feel despair about the intransigence of this evil regime.

And yet, I finished reading The Gowarkan Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen with hope in my heart.

Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Shokoofeh’s novel sets the scene for these events.  It’s an historical novel, but not as you know it.  Fabulous events (somewhat like those in Rushdie or Marquez) occur alongside the story of a large and dynamic family, who live in a large mansion in the provinces from the waning years of the Shah to the Iranian Revolution (1979) and the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). The spirits (and the machinations) of people long dead are the voices of the silenced, and they are there in the novel to show that they will not be forgotten.

The family’s mission is to keep alive ancient Iranian culture, traditions and artefacts despite the encroaching imposition of Islam, which in fundamentalist Iran and elsewhere tolerates no other religions.  As Zoroastrians, believers in an ancient monotheistic religion, they are the guardians of the sacred fire, and it is their ethical responsibility to  protect books and artefacts from seizure by the Revolutionary Guards. You know of this religion’s prophet if you recognise Richard Strauss’s tone poem, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Op 30,(1896).

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Detail from Raphael’s The School of Athens, 1511

After I’d read the book, I found that clicking on this link at the BBC enriched my understanding of some aspects of the novel such as the significance of birds in burial traditions and the power of the Ball of Light, given by the matriarch Khanom Joon to Shokoofeh when she sets out on her perilous journey to find her brother Mehrab, missing in the war.  Aunty Malek, who is only sane when she sees the need, gives her a centuries old jade stone, and I learned about pre-Islamic jade and its power to ward off the evil-eye and ensure victory for its wearer here.  Not that it matters, this is the kind of novel where strange things happen and don’t immediately make sense.  Shokoofeh uses magic realism, mythic texts and ancient Iranian lore to develop her theme of celebrating the culture and artistic beauty of Iran and the necessity to confront the imposition of authoritarian power.  There are some explanatory footnotes but the wise reader leaves Google alone and just reads on.

(It is helpful, however, to jot down the names of the characters as they emerge, to form a family tree.)

Trees, BTW, are significant in the novel, and not just the Gowkaran tree that emerges in the middle of the kitchen.  It is a symbol of permanence, rooted in the country’s soil and nurtured by an indefatigable family.  Its diverse fruits and birds represent luxuriant life, and opportunity.  (One of the siblings climbs its branches to a future that no one can see.)

#Digression: Oh. Oh no! I had almost finished this review yesterday, and all that was needed was to prune it a bit because it was too long, but I did not want WordPress to do it for me and chew up more than half of it!  I suspect that the changes they have made to access the Classic editor, means that it no longer automatically saves changes to a draft, which could be accessed using the Revisions feature.  So a momentary loss of power because of a thunderstorm means that hours of work can disappear.  Forever.

#DeepBreath.  #FirstWorldProblem.  #Moving on…

Narrators come and go as the years pass, but the voice that emerges is a strong female voice. Even when she is just a teenager mulling over the mysteries of love, her voice is confident, determined, and impressive.  She has a mind of her own and some very forceful opinions, and while others struggle with the dilemma between resistance and capitulation, she has no hesitation in rejecting injustice. At school, she refuses to obey the command to reject a girl of the Baha’i faith despite the principal’s firm order that nobody was to shake Monireh’s hand, play with her, or talk to her, because she was unclean.  And like Monireh, when she’s had enough, she leaves.

For some time I had been experiencing an emotion that was novel to me.  The ten-day nervous madness had abated but had given way to something more deadly: disgust.  Disgust for school. Disgust for my classmates.  Disgust for the streets.  Disgust for Behnam.* Disgust for the television, the radio, the newspapers. (p.192)

*Behnam is the young man she fancies, but like many who were opposed to the corruption of the Shah, he supported the revolution.  He believed it would lead to a better, fairer and socialist society.  What he was not expecting was that a pro-Western secular monarchy would be replaced by an anti-Western theocracy dedicated to the destruction of Israel and determined to enforce Shi’ite political ascendancy and Sharia Law.  Shokoofeh helps Behnam to smuggle dissenters across the border to the USSR, but she doesn’t agree with his political opinions, and not just because her parents as ‘capitalists’ would lose everything they have.  It’s because of her family’s role as guardians of Iran’s ancient history and culture.

Restrictions under the Islamic regime pile up. Even as a young woman she chafes under the intolerance towards all other religions including Zoroastrianism.  As I showed in a Sensational Snippet last week, the dress code is unbearable. ‘Divine justice’ means mass public executions, and there are book burnings to stamp out any autonomous thought.  What she hates most of all is the ugliness of it all: the grey buildings devoid of colour and imagination; the women shrouded in black chadors, never allowed on the streets except in the company of a male relative; the men screeching ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’ and old men in beards justifying their isolation from the rest of the world.  She wants colour and light and music and beauty, and she decided that she will focus only on that.

I would walk in the forest and repeat to myself, ‘I am only eighteen.  I am only eighteen and I want to live happy and free.  That’s it.  I shouldn’t have to feel guilty without reason.  I should not let the laws of the Sharia that are served up to me and us all day and night on radio and TV penetrate my body and soul and thought.  My body depends on me.  I organise my own thoughts.’

<snip>

I must not surrender to the uglinesses and narrow-minded laws and bad news.  I promised myself that I would not allow fear and sorrow and despair — in short, the common culture of those days — to penetrate me.  All of a sudden I would shout in a loud voice, ‘My duty is to be joyful.’ (p.204)

But for Azedah, Uncle Bijan’s only daughter, it is also a duty to bear witness.  And when in later years she becomes a journalist, she sends copies of a cassette tape to exiles in Europe as evidence of the crimes carried out by this regime, in the hope that one day an international court would condemn them.  [Indeed.  That would be something to see…]

However, the time comes when staying at home celebrating beauty has to come to an end.  Brother Mehrab went off to fight in the Iran-Iraq War, and in Book 2, when he is missing, she goes to find him.  There are some very confronting scenes in this second part of the novel, but they should not come as a shock when we know how violent the regime is, and how laws that oppress women do nothing to protect them from hypocritical male assault and state-sanctioned violence. Any woman alone is fair game, and though the author imagines a fellowship of women offering comfort and a punitive role for the Ball of Light, these scenes are hard to read.

Still, there are also scenes of great beauty and it is fascinating to learn about Iran’s ancient achievements.  Eblis, a character from ancient lore, is like a sort of fairy godmother, who prays to the earth and food and wine appear.  She conjures up a time before the Arabic colonisation of Persia, when the ancient Iranians invented scripts for all sorts of different purposes — one that was exclusively for recording the sounds of nature, animals, birds, rain and streams;  another that was for correspondence between kings, one for science and philosophy and another for religious texts.

I thought of how, despite all these lost sources of pride, being Iranian was still a great reason to feel proud.  As usual she read my mind, and said something I have never forgotten.  ‘All the same, bear in mind: you are Iranian with what you build, not with what you have lost.’ (p.289).

I loved The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, and I love The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen even more. Yes, it’s long, and it’s complicated, and it’s demanding, but it is magnificent.

Author: Shokoofeh Azar
Title: The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen
Translation from the Farsi: anonymous, for security reasons
Publisher: Europa Editions, 2025
Cover design: Ginevra Rapisardi
Cover image: detail of a painting by Shokoofeh Azar
ISBN: 9781787706040, pbk., 513 pages
Source: Kingston Library

I read books from Indie publishers all the time but I read this book at this time for
Kaggsy’s #ReadIndies Reading Independent Publishers Month.

Europa Editions are an indie publishing company based in New York.

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Image credits:

The School of Athens by Raphael, 1511: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_School_of_Athens#/media/File:%22The_School_of_Athens%22_by_Raffaello_Sanzio_da_Urbino.jpg

 

Escape from Communist Hungary (2013) by Zsuzsanna Bozzay

/ Lisa Hill / 18 Comments

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It’s Hungarian Lit Month, hosted by Stu from Winston’s Dad and although I’ve read a few books from Hungary, I didn’t have anything on the TBR.  So I explored the lists at Goodreads, and found Escape from Communist Hungary (2013) by Zsuzsanna Bozzay and (after a lot of mucking about with the download), I was able to acquire a copy using the Kindle Unlimited subscription that I intend to ditch the day before the trial expires.  It really is a dead loss, because the range is so limited, and the majority of them are self-published.

Anyway…

ImageEscape from Communist Hungary is a self-published memoir by a refugee who managed to escape with her mother Mimi during the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution.  The Cold War politics of this revolution is known to many Australians because it took place shortly before the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.  Although the Melbourne Olympics were marketed as ‘the friendly Olympics’, it became infamous for the ‘Blood in the Water’ water-polo semi-final between the Soviets and Hungary.  To the approval of the crowd, Hungary defeated the USSR 4-0 in what was a brutal match, and there literally was blood in the water when one of the Soviets punched one of the Hungarians in the final minutes of the game.

With some similarities to the recent uprising against an oppressive government in Iran, the Hungarian Revolution had been crushed by Soviet tanks and troops and thousands were killed. Among the quarter of a million Hungarians who fled the country were Zsuzsanna Bozzay and her mother.

The memoir begins with a brief recapitulation of Hungary’s postwar history when it became part of the Soviet buffer zone, as agreed at the Yalta Conference by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin.  Bozzay refers to this as Hungary once again [being] punished for being on the wrong side of the war, without acknowledging that being ‘on the wrong side’, in WW2, meant being complicit in one of those most evil regimes in history.

Wikipedia’s page about Hungary during WW2 explains that Hungary entered the war as an Axis Power in 1941, and fought on the eastern front for two years.  In 1943 when it became obvious that the Germans were losing the war, Hungary attempted to forge a secret peace deal with the Allies, but when Germany learned about this in 1944, they occupied Hungary, and installed a puppet government.  Later in the book, Bozzay makes a scanty reference to this abortive peace deal with the Allies in the context of her friendship with an aristocratic family who had connections with one of the negotiators.

Although the title suggests a book about the evils of communism in Hungary and why one would want to escape it, some historical context would have made this a better book.  For example, to put food shortages in context, and to clarify what is meant by ‘life returning to normal’ it would have been helpful if the memoir noted that while postwar reconstruction was funded in Western Europe by the Marshall Plan, Hungary (however unwillingly) was part of the eastern bloc and therefore not eligible. According to Wikipedia:

The Soviet Union had been as badly affected as any other part of the world by the war. The Soviets imposed large reparations payments on the Axis allies that were in its sphere of influence. Austria, Finland, Hungary, Romania, and especially East Germany were forced to pay vast sums and ship large amounts of supplies to the Soviet Union. Those reparation payments meant the Soviet Union itself received about the same as 16 European countries received in total from Marshall Plan aid.

Born in 1941, Bozzay would of course have been only a child at the time, preoccupied by school and ballet lessons and so on, but as an adult writing this memoir in 2013 after completing a Creative Writing course at the Open University, she might be expected to provide some explanatory details for a 21st century English-speaking audience who probably know little about Hungary’s war and its postwar period.  It’s not readers who should have to do the research!

The war left Hungary devastated, destroying over 60% of the economy and causing significant loss of life. In addition to the over 600,000 Hungarian Jews killed, as many as 280,000 other Hungarians were raped, murdered and executed or deported for slave labour.  After German occupation, Hungary participated in the Holocaust, deporting nearly 440,000 Jews, mainly to Auschwitz; nearly all of them were murdered. The Horthy government’s complicity in the Holocaust remains a point of controversy and contention. (See Wikipedia’s Hungary/history page.)

Bozzay’s mother Mimi had Jewish relations who perished in the Holocaust except for her brother Feri who survived in time to be liberated from a concentration camp by the Soviets, though Bozzay doesn’t name which one it was, and seems to have little to say about her mother’s trauma.

Anyway, moving on…

The memoir details the oppression of the Soviets, determined to replace a postwar coalition government with communists in power.

It took two years to achieve their aim by starting a reign of terror; deporting, imprisoning and executing leaders of the opposition as well as ordinary people. My father’s brother was imprisoned for political activities with the Smallholders Party and held in the headquarters of the secret police, the AVO on Andrássy út 60, which is now the Terror House, a museum and memorial for the victims of communism who were tortured and died there. My mother had a cousin who was a high ranking communist official there and she persuaded him to release her brother-in-law. Later this cousin committed suicide when he realised that communism was not what he thought it was.

People had to be careful of what they said in public places in case they were accused of being anti-communist and thrown into prison. We were frightened if there was a knock at the door, especially late at night in case it was the secret police. If we happened to be listening to the BBC we not only switched off the radio, but we also changed to a different station, because listening to western radio was punishable and could result in a prison sentence. But we knew that the only reliable source of news came from the BBC World Service. People could be imprisoned for no apparent reason, maybe because someone with a grudge against them accused them of being ‘enemies of the people’ and that was enough for the secret police to call and take them away. (p. 7)

Her parents’ first attempt to escape was in 1949.

The only way to get out of Hungary was to walk through the border illegally which was very dangerous, especially crossing into Austria in the west where the border was well guarded. But apparently it was easier to cross from Czechoslovakia into Austria. The border between Hungary and Czechoslovakia was not especially well guarded in the east, close to the Ukrainian border, as most people did not think of crossing there from one communist country into another. (p.8)

Their plans included a failed attempt to send treasured possessions to England with friends, and this sequence reveals one of the dilemmas faced by refugees.  Apart from the problem of leaving financial assets behind, most people have property that has sentimental value too, and Bozzay’s tells us that her parents were in dispute about this.  Her mother thought that possessions can be replaced but her father felt differently about pieces of furniture that were family heirlooms.

I had to grit my teeth when reading the casual way in which Bozzay recounts moving into a furnished flat that once belonged to a friend called Serényi Aranka, a Jewish lady, who left for London before the war.  No mention of the reasons why she might have left: no mention of the Horthy government’s pre-war oppressive laws that excluded Jews from almost all aspects of everyday life.  Some of these are briefly mentioned later in passing in the backstory about her mother, but there should have been an explanation in this part of the book where it is relevant.

Bozzay seems to lionise her mother as the hero of this family history, and she accepts what she has been told at face value.  She states that Mimi would have liked to emigrate to Israel but was frustrated by the requirement to be able to speak Hebrew.  This is not obviously not correct because it would have denied Holocaust survivors from migrating, even if they could read it as a sacred language.  There was then and still is a Right of Return for all Jews in the diaspora, regardless of language proficiency in Hebrew.

Whatever, that plan was abandoned for reasons Bozzay hints at, i.e. her parents’ differences about wanting to leave Hungary:

It takes a very special kind of person to leave all their possessions behind and move to a new country but she was not frightened by the prospect. It took all her powers of persuasion to convince my father of her plan. He was a staunch Hungarian, with very deep roots in Hungarian culture, had no talent for languages and found it hard to imagine living anywhere else, but eventually she had her way as she always did. (p. 13).

The chapter about the first escape attempt when Bozzay was eight details the plan for her parents to leave separately, the journey through Czechoslovakia, their capture near the border with Austria, and — reading between the lines — the somewhat naïve trust in a people smuggler. Her mother was imprisoned only for a couple of months because she had a convincing story about wanting to leave her husband after a row, but in the interim Bozzay was placed in an orphanage until her father could collect her, and there she caught polio.

From here, the narrative becomes more of a family history, obviously drawn from her mother’s memories, and some of it is repetitive.  The chronology breaks to provide the back story of Bozzay’s grandparents, and her paternal grandmother’s opposition to her son marrying a Jew. It covers her mother’s brief sojourn in Paris in more nostalgic depth than it needed to be, and then Mimi’s dutiful return to Budapest to look after her ailing parents.  It goes on to cover her parents’ marriage and some happy childhood memories of her father, but it also includes her childhood memories of the battle for Budapest and the vicious behaviour of their Russian liberators. Any euphoria about the end of the war was short-lived.

The narrative then switches back to Bozzay’s experience as a victim of polio, and her mother’s remarkable efforts to help with her rehabilitation, supplemented by a physiotherapist who had trained in the USA under Sister Kenny.

Bozzay was fifteen when the Hungarian Revolution broke out, and her vivid memories of it are the best part of this memoir. But optimism evaporated as the tanks rolled in and once again it was Bozzay’s mother who had the foresight to take advantage of the chaos to flee. Again leaving her father behind, they managed to cross the border into Austria and to seek asylum at the British Embassy.

In England they were taken in by Mimi’s brother Raoul and his wife, and despite communication difficulties because Bozzay had refused to learn English at school, she soon became friends with her cousins.  The usual adjustment problems were exacerbated by the Hungarians’ complete ignorance about British life and the privations suffered during the war.  But her mother’s multilingualism meant that she soon found good work and (having fudged her birth year on official documents) was able to keep working until she was 75.

Meanwhile Bozzay herself went to a convent where she received a very good education and went on to make a success of her life.  She gained a degree in Chemistry at London University where she met her husband Michael Snarey and went on to have a career in teaching while raising their family, followed by a second career in chiropody.

All through this book, which privileges Bozzay’s mother’s point-of-view, I kept wondering what had happened to Bozzay’s father because I knew from other sources that the Soviets severely punished the relations of those who left illegally.  Though late in the book we learn that after six years he was eventually given permission to be reunited with his wife and daughter, and that despite not knowing English he was able to get a job, there is nothing about his experiences during the separation or his feelings about his new life in Britain.

I’ve been hard on this book because I was disappointed by the inadequate editing, the failure to consider its audience, and its over-reliance on a selective family history at the expense of the expectations I had from its title.

Author: Zsuzsanna Bozzay
Title: Escape from Communist Hungary
Publisher: Self-published
ASIN: B07NCBRZQS
Purchased for the Kindle from Amazon.

You can find out more about Zsuzsanna Bozzay from her profile at the Open University here.