Island life: ‘Spirit of the Crocodile’ by Aaron Fa’Aoso & Michelle Scott Tucker with Lyn White
A middle-grade story about a youngster growing up on Saibai Island in the Torres Strait, this well-told yarn skilfully introduces aspects of daily life and the unique Torres Strait culture in a lively and relateable way.
Ezra is twelve, and he and his best mate Mason love their life on Saibai, where they fish, go to school, play sport, learn Island dance and song, and try (sometimes unsuccessfully) to stay out of trouble.
But the school year is drawing to a close and next year they must leave Saibai and travel to Thursday Island, where the nearest high school is located. This means being away from home and family for much of the year. While Mason is keen for the adventure, Ezra is not so sure. Why can’t everything just stay as it is?
Then trouble arrives with a dangerous, out-of-season storm combined with a surprise high tide that hits the island. It poses a threat to everything Ezra holds dear – his home, even his loved ones. And he and Mason are called on to help out in the emergency. Can Ezra measure up to the expectations? It’s a scary time and even the adults around him are troubled by this disaster. Is this another result of climate change, along with the rising sea waters that may eventually swallow their beloved island?
The story opens with the excitement of a crocodile spotted on the island’s jetty. The crocodile is the totem of Ezra’s clan – Koedal – and as the novel progresses, he draws strength from the knowledge that his totem animal represents ancient power and toughness.
Readers will learn much about aspects of Torres Strait culture and traditions: food, dance, ceremony, the importance of family and community connections and ties that keep individuals strong. It’s fantastic to see a book for younger readers that focuses on a First Nations community about whom many Australians might know relatively little.
My one disappointment is that there is minimal language other than English used in the narrative. As most people in the Torres Strait speak at least two, if not three, languages fluently, it would have been a great opportunity to introduce more words from Torres Strait Creole and the Saibai language of Kala Kawa Ya.
I have a personal interest in this book and its subject matter: I spent some time on Saibai back in the 1980s and my son is a member of the Koedal clan through his father’s people. So naturally I was interested in the portrayal of the island life today and from a youngster’s perspective.
I found Ezra’s character entirely relateable to any twelve-year-old facing the challenges of growing into the teenage years, facing major change, family complications, and environmental challenges.
He makes mistakes, but by the end of the novel he has learnt some valuable lessons about himself and importantly about others and his community. He learns that it feels good to be involved and to work with others to help make things right again after the storm. He also learns that the right thing to do is usually pretty obvious.
Spirit of the Crocodile is published by Allen & Unwin in 2025.
Buried secrets? ‘Treasure and Dirt’ by Chris Hammer
Published in 2022, Treasure and Dirt is set in the fictional outback NSW town of Finnigan’s Gap, loosely based on Lightening Ridge, famous for its opals.
Chris Hammer does ‘place’ brilliantly in all his novels. As Sydney-based Homicide detective Ivan Lucic steps off the plane at the Finnigan’s Gap airstrip to investigate the bizarre murder of a long-time resident and miner, readers can feel the slap of the heat as it hits him, dressed as he is in city clothes. The heat and the surrounding landscape of the town become characters in themselves, factors that locals and visitors alike must navigate simply to exist in this unforgiving environment.
There are multiple layers to the crime and the investigation. The murder itself, of course, and the complexities surrounding motive, method and circumstances that are revealed as the detectives begin their work.
Lucic is assisted by an inexperienced detective, Nell Buchanan, who had previously been stationed at Finnigan’s Gap and so has valuable local knowledge. She sees this as her big chance to make her mark, get started on the ladder of successful solves while working alongside a well-known Detective like Lucic.
However their early encounters leave Nell with mixed feelings; she isn’t sure what to make of him. Having read later books featuring the Ivan and Nell team, such as The Tilt and The Seven, I enjoyed reading their ‘back story’: their first time working together, with all the awkwardness and unfamiliarity that comes with that.
Another complicating layer in this investigation is thrown in by the police Professional Standards unit: a whiff of corruption or wrongdoing always throws the cat among the pigeons, after all. There are corporate mega-rich who seem to act with total impunity (just imagine!!) lots of hard-drinking, hard-living, worn out miners leading somewhat eccentric lives (to put it mildly), a small team of local police with their own issues to deal with, and a twenty-year old family tragedy. Oh, and a local cult led by a pretty bizarre chap who calls himself the Seer.
Just your everyday outback community, then.
Maybe not, but it does make for a heady mix for our investigators to dig through in their search for answers.
In the end, they are unable to tie everything up with a neat bow. Much more like real life, I suspect. Towards the novel’s final pages, Nell reflects that:
They’ve achieved something, she and Ivan. Maybe not enough, but something. Brought justice to some, resolution to others. She looks to her partner and realises that she likes him. At last, she likes him. Understands him, respects him. Maybe even admires him. A good man, trying his best.
Treasure and Dirt, p703 (ebook)Treasure and Dirt was published in 2022 by Allen and Unwin.
Simplicity & austerity: ‘Stone Yard Devotional’ by Charlotte Wood
For some reason, I had resisted picking up a copy of Charlotte Wood’s 2024 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, though I had read and admired her earlier works such as The Weekend and The Natural Way of Things.
A contemplative work, about a middle-aged woman seeking solace in a religious community on the sparse Monaro Plains of southeastern NSW? It sounded too quiet, too contemplative, too…austere.
It is indeed all of those things.
The setting, after all, hardly invites images of lush rolling pastures. The Monaro, frequently drought-affected, frost-bitten in winter, is a harsh environment at the best of times. The region has its own appeal but it is definitely an austere kind of beauty.
And the retreat at which the unnamed narrator arrives at the novel’s opening is an unembellished place where routine and simplicity prevail.
The reader is privy to the inner life of the narrator so that we experience these details through her eyes and live the day-to-day there with her.
Her reasons for being there are just hinted at. Difficulties in her marriage. Burnout from a demanding job in the not-for-profit environmental sector, facing down environmental crises on a daily basis. Overwhelm from the modern world’s too-busy pace.
Understandable that she should want to escape all that for a while.
It would be a spoiler, actually, to say much more about what happens during her time there.
Except that the little religious backwater is in reality both a haven from and a microcosm of the outside world. The narrator has plenty of time to examine her own impulses and reactions to the daily irritations and petty doings of the community; but there are broader themes at play here too.
Memories of shameful episodes from childhood.
An unsolved crime from years before.
Is it possible to both admire and dislike someone?
Environmental impacts at the local level.
Faith and prayer.Our Simone once took me to task over my ‘sneering’ about prayer. My notion of prayer was juvenile: forget this telephone line to God bullshit, she snapped, hot with impatience. It wasn’t even about God, she said, which I thought must surely be blasphemous. Praying was a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking, she told me. It’s admitting yourself into otherness, cracking open your prejudices. It’s not chitchat; it’s hard labour.
Stone Yard Devotional ebookp170 of 308The novel is full of snippets of insights, of struggle, of contradictions, as the narrator tries to square her very humanness with the experience of living in a community dedicated to the religious. In the end, I suppose, what we see is the very humanity of organised religion. It is, after all, a very human construct and endeavour.
So despite my earlier resistance, I was pleased to read this book and to give myself over to the very interior nature of its story. From a novel told from within one one person’s head and within such a small setting, it has some big ideas to think about.
Stone Yard Devotional was published by Allen & Unwin in 2024
Brilliant insight: ‘More or Less Maddy’ by Lisa Genova
I’ve read two previous novels by American nueroscientist and author Lisa Genova, and loved them both. Still Alice (made into a feature film) and Left Neglected offered fascinating insights into early onset dementia and a brain injury known as Left Neglect, respectively. More or Less Maddy likewise tells a very human story behind a medical diagnosis that devastates individuals and their families.
When bipolar disorder strikes Maddy, a young college student from a comfortable middle class family in Connecticut, she is already struggling with a sense of not fitting in. While her sister and brother seem to belong to the picture perfect world of their parents, happy with the already mapped-out life trajectories of education and career pathways, marriage, family and lovely home, Maddy dreams of a career as a stand-up comedian in New York.
Her first episode of mania at first feels wonderful. It rockets her out of the depression she has suffered for months, seemingly overnight. Suddenly she feels she can do anything, achieve anything. She doesn’t need to sleep, she writes brilliant comedy, and is sure she will soon be writing an authorised biography of Taylor Swift, her artistic heroine.
It all comes to a sticky end and that is when her distraught and frightened family step in and she is confronted with hospital, therapy, doctors and medication. She is fortunate to be connected with a knowledgable and empathic doctor who skillfully guides both Maddy and her troubled family on this new and frightening journey.
But there are plenty of pitfalls, not least of which is the diagnosis itself. Maddy’s struggles with the lifelong nature of her condition, and the burden of the stigma it carries, are brilliantly and sensitively portrayed in the novel; as are those of her family, who only want to keep her safe.
How to, or indeed whether to tell friends, old and new, of her condition, is a preoccupation. As is coping with the side effects of the various new drugs she must take. Keeping to a pretty strict lifestyle regimen: no late nights, no illicit drugs or alcohol, eating a healthy diet, watching her mood like a hawk, keeping a mood journal…all rather tiresome for a ‘normal’ twenty year-old.
But of course that’s just it. Once she has heard that word – bipolar – Maddy can never feel normal again.
I cared for Maddy a great deal, and could not wait to return to her story each time I had a chance to pick up the book.
The author does not pull punches. Maddy’s situation is not prettied up: there are relapses and mistakes, some that made me want to skip pages. But I read on because I knew this was all a necessary part of Maddy’s story. The ending is not tied up in a neat bow but there is hope for a better future for Maddy and those who love her.
If you see this book in your local bookstore or library, please do read it. It goes a long way to humanise this mental disorder that a suprising number of people live with. Lisa Genova has such a gift and I can’t wait to see what topic she might tackle next.
More or Less Maddy is published by Allen & Unwin in January 2025.
My thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for an early review copy.Vivid colonial story: ‘The Governor, His Wife and His Mistress’ by Sue Williams
The third work of Australian historical fiction by Sue Williams, The Governor, His Wife and His Mistress tells the story of the naval officer who became the third governor of the British colony of New South Wales, but also the lesser-known entwined stories of the two women who shared parts of his life.
Williams has done this twice before, with great effect. Elizabeth and Elizabeth focused on the wives of Governor Lachlan Macquarie and John Macarthur. That Bligh Girl introduced Anna Bligh, the daughter of the notorious William Bligh (of ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ fame) who replaced Gidley King as Governor in 1808.
As with those earlier novels, this new book gives a fabulous insight into the earliest, troubled years of the colony, from the point of view of women. A point of view usually overlooked in official histories of the men who, let’s be honest, made most of the decisions in those times.
Actually, this novel gives a vivid picture of the establishment of two colonies, because Gidley King was sent to put down British roots on Norfolk Island before returning to New South Wales. The author’s research is lightly handled but readers are privy to the many difficulties at both Port Jackson (later Sydney) and the even more remote Norfolk, and the logistical, moral and emotional challenges faced by successive governors.
By most historical accounts, Gidley King was an able and a fair and even handed adminsitrator. It is in his personal affairs that the other side of the man’s character are illuminated.
In this, he was definitely a man of his time and milieu. Men of his rank and situation often thought nothing of taking a convict wife as mistress, especially on the long voyage to the colonies. By the time the transport ships arrived, many had a baby on the way.
This is what happened to Ann Inett, a seamstress who had fallen on hard times when her soldier lover was killed in the Revolutionary War in America, leaving her with two small children to raise alone. One desperate crime sees Ann wrenched from her children, transported to New South Wales on a First Fleet ship, part of the great experiment of setting up a settlement from nothing on the other side of the world. Gidley King invites her to be his housekeeper, attracted by her obliging nature and quiet demeanour and, as they say, ‘one thing leads to another…’ A very common tale, part of Australia’s foundation story.
Dare I say it, more relevant to many modern Australians than the ANZAC story?
Before long, Ann has two young children with him, they are sent to Norfolk Island to endure even harder conditions there, then he is ordered to return to England…what will become of her?
It’s no spoiler to relate the next bit. Gidley King does return to Sydney. He had promised Ann marriage on his return but instead he brings back a wife, who is already expecting a baby!
It is to the author’s credit that she manages to relate this part of the story in a way which made me want to keep reading, rather than throw the book across the room. She took me into Gidley King’s head and his world view. Not a pleasant place, I admit, but it allowed me to see the constraints (as he saw them) on his moral and personal choices. So very different to today’s views. As I often say, people are no different, essentially, but society’s beliefs and expectations certainly change over time.
And as mentioned above, he was among many, many soldiers, sailors and officers who did exactly the same thing back then. Not an excuse. Just background. Captain David Collins, for example, who became the colony’s Judge Advocate, took convict Nancy Yeates, as mistress. She features in this novel too.
The real heroine of this novel, I believe, is the woman Gidley King marries, Anna Josepha. Can you image marrying a man after a very brief courtship, then boarding a ship to sail across the world to a rudimentary outpost of society, arrive heavily pregnant, to be confronted by your new husband’s mistress and his two children with her?
It seems that this quiet, ‘plain’ little woman rose to the occasion magnificently, smoothing what must have been a fraught and humilating situation for all concerned. She built a bridge between herself and Ann, between her husband, his existing children and those she went on to have with him. She took responsibility for the education of his children with Ann (to Ann’s credit also, as this meant losing her children yet again for a time).
And in doing all this, Anna Josepha was Gidley King’s right hand in his role as administrator and as Governor, acting as informal secretary, First Lady, diplomat, helping to sooth fractious tempers and care for her husband when illness took its toll.
An old story, isn’t it? And depressingly common: the faithful, loyal wife or mistress, supporting, helping, building up their menfolk. And then being forgotten in the annals of history.
So it’s wonderful to see their stories being told, both in more recent non-fiction and through the lens of fiction as in this novel.
The Governor, His Wife and His Mistress is published by Allen & Unwin in Janurary 2025.
My thanks to the publishers and to NetGalley for an advanced reading copy to review.
Scholar & mystic: ‘Rapture’ by Emily Maguire
Australian Emily Maguire’s new novel takes us straight to central Europe in the ninth century. I was interested in reading this once I heard that it was set in Mainz, in the Rhineland region of what (many hundreds of years later) became Germany.
Why? Because my German ancestor was born and lived near this city. Once a Roman fort, in medieaval times it was part of an area known as Francia, ruled by King Charles (Charlemagne) and his heirs.
Rapture’s protagonist is Agnes, only child of an English priest, brought up by her father to read, to know languages and to listen to the many theological and philosophical debates around his table with learned men of the city and its abbey.
As she approaches marriagable age, however, this begins to change. Agnes understands that a life of learning and scholarship is not for the likes of her. After witnessing the horrific death of a woman in childbirth, she begins to wonder how she can escape the bloody service required of girls. (p34)
She meets a visitor to her father’s house, a monk named Randulph, who speaks to her as if she, too, has a brain and likes to use it. He is to play an important role as circumstances change for Agnes when tragedy strikes, simultaneously opening a door to other life possibilities.
With his help, she dons the identity and clothing of a Benedictine monk, and as a literate scholar and scribe, finds a place amongst the men of Fulda Abbey.
Here the author’s research and imagination allows readers to enter a world long gone: the hard physical labour, the monotony, cold and hunger of monastic life, the requirement of absolute obedience, the painstaking process of making parchment and inks on which she then transcribes works of classical and religious literature. It is a fascinating glimpse into the past.
Agnes spends years there; but when war, famine and pestilence transform the land – including the abbey- she needs to move on.
Next she reinvents herself as a mystic religious man, and travels to Athens, dealing with threats from bandits, wolves and the feared Northmen on the way. She becomes celebrated for her learning and her discourse and teaching; but celebration brings its own set of dangers. To counter the threat of discovery of her real identity, she retreats into a spartan life as a hermit, forcing her body and her mind to submit to deprivation and isolation.
Agnes does all these things, not simply to avoid the life of servitude and childbearing that she would otherwise face, but because she truly wishes to learn about and fully serve God. She has a deep and genuine faith and her actions stem from a belief that a religious life of scripture and study is what she is called to.
What she observes and discovers never challenge that belief, but she does question the interpretations of men, who hold the power in both religious and secular worlds.
This culminates in her final journey to Rome where she begins to teach, but ends up surrounded by the corruption of ninth-century Vatican politics and intruige. Here the author has drawn on the legend of Pope Joan; an almost certainly mythical figure, reputed to have been the first and only female pope.
The story does not have a ‘happy’ ending, but that is actually beside the point. Agnes’ life is one of struggle, searching for her own path through a troubled and turbulent world. Her joys and hardships are very human, as she strives for a life of scholarship and religious devotion.
I consumed this novel in two days. I was entranced by Agnes, her intellect and her faith and the risks she takes to be true to both. The medieaval worlds of central Europe and the Mediterranean are brought brilliantly to life in Rapture.
Rapture is published by Allen & Unwin in October 2024.
Familiar place, familiar crime: ‘Pheasant’s Nest’ by Louise Milligan
Louise Milligan will be known to many Australians as an award winning investigative journalist and author of non-fiction books; Pheasant’s Nest is her debut novel. It opens on a stretch of road very familiar to me, and I’m sure to others who have driven the Hume Highway from Sydney to Canberra, or further south to Melbourne.
In this opening scene, the protagonist Kate Delaney is tied up on the back seat of a man’s car heading north from Melbourne. The man has committed a violent sexual assault and kidnapping and is now on the run with his victim.
The rest of the novel plays out as the clock ticks down: will it end with Kate’s murder or with rescue?
The narrative zips between Kate’s thoughts as she lies helpless and afraid in the car, to the panic and fear of her devoted boyfriend Liam and her best friend Sylvia, and to the two detectives in charge of the investigation.
I appreciated this aspect of the novel very much. Hearing what is in Kate’s head allows readers to see her as a person with a career (journalism, unsuprisingly), friends, family and a full, largely happy life. Of course she is terrified, too, because having covered plenty of crime cases as a journalist, she knows there is limited time for police to track down her assailant. Her fear feels very real.
What we also hear are her less serious thoughts: her reflections on her past, her career and colleagues, her lover and her friends. Some of these are actually very funny – unexpectedly in a crime novel like this. I particularly enjoyed the quite pointed but hilarious descriptions of the evangelical church ‘JoyChurch’ located in Sydney’s northwest ‘aspirational affluence belt,’ and the completely fake and probably corrupt couple at its centre.
The PTSD suffered by the NSW detective who has seen too many crimes and too many acts of self destruction also ring very true. He has held onto his compassion despite it all, but at great personal cost. His character speaks to the hard job we give police officers and their need for greater resourcing and personal support.
The other characters are also quite special; Liam and Sylvia as they head north to NSW to be closer to Kate (even though no one is sure exactly where she is) are beautifully drawn, as are some of the minor characters.
It’s a well paced and unfortunately very believable novel. We see too many headlines about women being attacked either by an intimate partner, a casual date, or a random person, to think that the crime at the centre of this story is not all-too-familiar in real life.
The author describes the stretch of road through the Southern Highlands of NSW in all its creepy detail. Anyone who followed the Ivan Milat serial killing cases in the Belanglo Forest there, or is aware of how many suicides have occured at the eponymous Pheasant’s Nest Bridge, will recognise the sensation of vague threat that driving through here can evoke.
Pheasant’s Nest is crime fiction with something important to say. It will be enjoyed by readers who don’t like too much gruesome detail but who appreciate familiar and believable characters and places in their fiction. It is published by Allen & Unwin in 2024.
Revelatory: ‘Reaching Through Time – Finding my Family’s Stories’ by Shauna Bostock
The photograph on the cover of Shauna Bostock’s story of researching her ancestors is indicative of the book itself: compelling.
I am going to begin my discussion of the book with this: if you are a family historian or at all interested in Australian history, this book is a must-read.
The author, a Bundjalung woman who began researching her family story for a PhD in Aboriginal history, has skillfully woven together various strands of her exploratory processes in archives, libraries, and interviews, with the stories of her forebears. In doing so, she has created a vivid and multi-layered picture of Australian history, especially the experiences of First Nations Australians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
There is so much in this book that made me stop, turn pages back and forth to the meticulous referencing, to the photographs, or to previous pages. As someone passionate about uncovering my own family stories from the past, there were many moments of recognition in Ms Bostock’s research journey: the thrill of discovering a previously unknown fact; the way that serendipity or fate so often plays a part in the process; the coincidences of meeting someone or stumbling upon a document that hold the key to the very nugget of information you are seeking. The indescribable feeling of viewing an archival document from the past that tells you something about your ancestor, or an old photo that brings them to life.
As any family historian will tell you: family history research requires patience AND perseverance.
Especially so in this case, as Ms Bostock found when she experienced road blocks to accessing important archival information, and evidence of the mind-numbing level of bureaucracy that Aboriginal people have endured since colonisation.
The book begins with the shocking revelation that the non-indigenous ancestors in her family tree were descended from English slave traders – a huge irony given that one of them arrived in Australia as a convict, having been arrested on slavery charges in the late 1700’s.
From there, the narrative traverses key parts of the colonisation experience for First Nations: frontier violence and killings; theft of land, livelihood, spiritual and cultural connections; the precarious nature of life on Aboriginal reserves; the deceit and hypocrisy of the various government bodies set up to ‘protect’ and control Aboriginal people and the enduring damages inflicted through practices such as the forced removal of children from their homes and families.
rural and urban Also looming large are the ugliness of apartheid-like segregation and racism within communities; indenture of young children into service of white families or farms (often akin to slavery); increasing control and surveillance of every aspect of Aboriginal lives.
I could go on.
What distinguishes this book is the author’s research and how she has woven together the experiences of the colonisers and the colonised – including of course her own family members:
To use a photographic analogy…I felt like a photographer adjusting the focus of the lens. I have ‘zoomed in’ with a microcosmic focus on the individuals and the reserve/mission space – and then I have ‘zoomed out’ to capture the macrocosmic bureaucracy of the Australian Government’s Aborigines Protection Board.
Reaching through History p174There are stories of defiance and resistance as well, which the author rightly points out are important for all generations of Aboriginal people to know about.
I enjoyed the later chapters where she outlines the many creative and artistic ways in which her family members have expressed defiance and worked for change.
On a personal note, I had a little thrill to realise that several of the author’s close family members were instrumental in producing the excellent documentary film Lousy Little Sixpence, in which elders discussed their experiences as stolen children, in the homes set up supposedly to ‘care’ for Aboriginal children, or working as domestic servants or rural labourers for white people in the first half of the twentieth century. I used this film as a resource many times in my teaching during the 1990’s and early 2000’s, and I now see that it was one of the earliest publicly accessible resources telling the stories of the Stolen Generations.
There is so much to think about in this book. Please buy a copy or borrow it from your local library. It is such a rich resource on our nation’s history. And for family historians, surely we must all resonate to the author’s final words:
The history of Aboriginal people in this country is also a ‘living wound under a patchwork of scars’ but the process of truth-telling creates healing. By reaching through time and pulling our ancestors’ files out of the archives we restore their humanity…
Reaching through Time p319
Ruminating on the slavery theme, I wondered if family history research was the key to emancipation, because researching my ancestors’ lives has spiritually unshackled them.Reaching Through Time is published by Allen & Unwin in July 2023.
‘The Hidden Book’ by Kirsty Manning
The sixth novel by Australian author Kirsty Manning explores the legacy of WWII trauma and loss over several generations.
It was inspired by the true story of an album of photographs smuggled out of Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. The graphic and shocking photographs were taken by an inmate of the camp under instructions from the camp commander, who wanted five albums made to present to his superior officers – itself a rather sickening act, I think.
The photographer risked all to create a sixth copy of each photo, which he kept hidden, until they could be smuggled out and kept in safety by a local villager. After the war, the photos were used by prosecutors during the Nuremberg war crimes trials. The album was brought to Australia in the 1970’s and today is kept at the Sydney Jewish Museum.
From these historical events, the author has woven a tale of courage and heartbreak, the pain that memories can inflict and the importance of truth telling. She has imagined how the album got to be in Australia, creating a cast of fictional characters and relationships that are entirely believable and compelling.
Hannah is a teenager in 1980’s rural Australia with her mum, who emigrated from then-Yugoslavia and married an Australian man. Hannah’s father has died and she has a difficult and complicated relationship with her mother, Roza; but she adores her grandfather Nico, who visits every few years.
On his last visit he leaves a mysterious book, wrapped in an ordinary calico bag. Roza refuses to allow Hannah to see it and hides the book, but Hannah later finds it. What she sees are confronting images, bewildering to her young eyes. Over the years, she learns about the war, the Holocaust and the camps, and longs to see the album again, to make better sense of it and to understand the legacy Nico’s experiences have left for her family. She studies history at university and decides to undertake an honours thesis, on aspects of WWII camps related to her grandfather’s experiences:
You couldn’t rewrite history, but you could explore different ways to study it and bring it into the present political and cultural domain…the whole of Mauthausen, inside and outside the camp, needed to be treated with reverence and remembrance. The question of how to present and tell stories of the past could perhaps be one of the backbones of her thesis.
The Hidden Book, ebook location 123 of 221Alternating with Hannah’s contemporary story are those of Nico during his long years at Mauthausen camp; Santiago, a young Spanish boy who helps the photographer Mateo in the darkroom; and Lena, a young woman in the village who is entrusted with the care of the photos. All of these characters risk punishment and likely death if their activities are discovered.
The novel is a tale of incredible courage and endurance, and of completing a journey that began decades earlier for Nico, Roza and Hannah.
It is a moving story about war and its aftermath. Readers who enjoy historical fiction with a foot firmly in real historic events, will love The Hidden Book.
It is published by Allen & Unwin in August 2023.
My thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for a review copy.
