The story of a story: ‘Always Home, Always Homesick’ by Hannah Kent
Are you fascinated by how stories are created? Where does a writer, filmmaker, or songwriter get that first spark, the idea that grabs them and insists tell this story.
It’s something I have always been interested in. I love learning about how a movie goes from storyboard to opening night, or how a lick of a guitar riff becomes a hit song.
I pored over Kate Grenville’s In Search of the Secret River in which she details the research and other preparation that went into the writing of her best-selling historical novel The Secret River. Likewise her more recent Unsettled, a memoir of coming to terms with uncomfortable truths in our personal, family and national history, also relevant to that ground-breaking earlier work.
So I was delighted to pick up a copy of Hannah Kent’s latest work, Always Home, Always Homesick.
In a way, it’s the story of how she wrote her best-known story to date, Burial Rites, first published in 2013. This historical novel was based on the tragic real-life character of Agnes Magnusdottir who was tried for her role in the brutal murder of two men on a remote farm in Iceland in the 1800s. Agnes was found guilty and was the last woman to be executed in Iceland.
Hannah learned of Agnes and her fate while she was a young student in Iceland on a year’s Rotary Exchange program. If the novel’s subject matter had not already interested me, the circumstances of its beginnings certainly did, because decades before Hannah set off on her exchange adventure, I had done likewise – to the USA, not Iceland – but like Hannah, leaving family and home behind for a year to live with several different families in the town to which I was sent.
I was intrigued that this young woman was so captivated by a story from her host country that after her return to Australia, Agnes’s fate stayed in her mind. Hannah returned to Iceland several times, including to conduct research in Icelandic archives and museums but also in the places Agnes lived, worked and eventually died. All of these experiences went into the book that quickly became a global best-seller and launched the author’s literary career.
Always Home, Always Homesick is, at its core, a ‘love letter’ to the country that changed her life. She writes about the moment she decided to apply for the Rotary exchange program and why, that This is the thing that will lead me further into life, that will allow me to breathe lung-deep of it. (ebook p54)
Then the excitement and trepidation of preparing for her year away, trying to learn about Iceland and its language at a time when there was not the ready access to such information as we now have. Donning the rather ghastly Rotary exchange student uniform (the green blazer with its Australiana pins obviously not changed much since my time in the late 1970s…) and hoping that the Rotary contact meeting her at the airport is on time and will recognise her as the exchange student. Getting on that plane takes courage and hope.
I remember all those feelings!
Then the confusion of arriving in a foreign land where customs and behaviours can be so different. And for Hannah, trying to quickly pick up an entirely new language from scratch. Starting school almost immediately on arrival – a daunting proposition. Loneliness and feeling isolated to start with, until breaking through with a warm, friendly family who welcome her as one of their own. Again, there were some echoes of my own time on exchange here.
She experiences the full gamut of Iceland’s seasonal changes and its stark, dramatic beauty, and begins to channel her feelings about it into writing:
I am falling in love with Iceland, and I need to articulate the hold it has over me. My writing, once a balm for solitude and lonliness, takes on a euphoric urgency. Writing now feels like prayer.
Always Home, Always Homesick ebook p192
When her exchange year is over and she returns to Australia, she studies creative writing and works seriously on her craft. But Agnes’s story is always in her mind so it is inevitable that when she returns to the embrace of her new-found family and friends, the research becomes another focus for her time there.
This was also of great interest to me: having trailed around historic sites in Australia and England in search of places of significance in stories I wanted to tell, I loved reading about this aspect of her writing. The hours spent in Icelandic archives, painstakingly examining census documents for a glimpse of Agnes or her family. Translating old documents into English. Taking hundreds of photos in museums. Reading, listening and watching archival and modern-day accounts of Agnes’s life, crime, trial and execution.
All the things that go into the story of a story.
Always Home, Always Homesick was published by Picador in 2025.
Strangers on a train: ‘The Paris Express’ by Emma Donoghue
Brilliant historical fiction, The Paris Express invites readers to join a group of disparate strangers as they ride the Paris Express train through Normandy on an October day in 1895.
Based on a real event, and peopled with fully-drawn characters (many of whom were on the actual train on that day) the novel takes us into their worlds: among others, a wealthy man and his family, a Black American artist, a young woman performer in a Parisian cabaret, a boy travelling alone for the first time, a female student of physiology, a young pregnant woman, and many of the crew and staff of the train and the French railway company that operated it.
Among the hundred or so passengers is also a young, fiercely political woman who has vowed to strike a blow against an unfair world that treats the poor like expendable commodities. She has it within her power to destroy the train and its passengers as they hurtle towards their destination.
The story is well paced: the tension ratchets up as the journey proceeds, and we learn more about the people on board and their interactions with each other. What will happen to these strangers? Will they survive this journey?
The brilliance of the novel lies in the author’s ability to capture a moment in time: late-century French culture, commerce and politics under the microscope of this one journey. Vivid details of the way the train crew operate this complicated piece of machinery and the conditions under which they work. The worlds of art, literature and theatre of the late 1800s. References to empire and the government. The early technologies of photography and a nascent ‘moving pictures’ industry. Developments in transportation: motor cars; and the seed of an idea that would eventually become the underground Paris Metro. Women taking up study and work in areas such as medicine and science.
The turbulence of the time is brought to life through the characters: deeply held political convictions; the fear engendered by violent acts carried out by anarchists in major European cities such as Paris; the growing feminist and suffrage movements; a sense of the old world disappearing as the nineteenth century draws to a close.
This book is a thriller because it is very hard not to care about the characters and their fates as the train continues on its high-speed way to Paris. It is brilliant historical fiction because the real is blended so skillfully with the imagined, that we can’t tell the difference and don’t really care, as the story is so engrossing. The author’s note at the end helpfully sorts out which was which and adds some poignant epilogues to the real-life historical figures.
I listened to the audiobook version, beautifully read by Justin Avoth, who inhabits the characters’ voices with great aplomb.
If you enjoy historical fiction, you are sure to love The Paris Express.
The Paris Express was published by Picador in March 2025. The audio recording published by McMillan Digital Audio in 2025.
It’s complicated: ‘Germania’ by Simon Winder
This is not a new book: first published in 2010 and one of a trilogy of books about Central Europe, Germania is described as a personal history of Germans ancient and modern.
Why did I pick up a fourteen-year-old book about Germany?
Because, in my investigations into my family tree, there is one individual about whom I know very little: my mother’s 3 x great-grandfather, Christian Uebel.
In a tree made up of mainly English and Irish branches, Christian Uebel is an outlier, on a branch of his own. He emigrated from the Rhineland region of the country we now know as Germany, arriving in Australia in the 1860s. I realised that I knew so much more about British history and culture and almost nothing about Germany, so Germania was my first step to correcting this.
I quickly realised that the history of central Europe is much more complicated than I had imagined. I knew that the German nation did not exist until the unification in 1871, and in the centuries leading up to that, there were endless squabbles between and about the many, many small and large states that made up the German-speaking parts of Europe.
Germania traverses the history of this region from the days of the ancient tribes in the forests, all the way up to 1933, when the Nazis took power. I wondered about this timeframe until I realised it was for an entirely sensible reason. The dark shadows of WWII have so dominated German history, that apart from the first World War, many people know very little about what came before it.
This is not simply a book about history, although of course that is an important theme. It’s also a travelogue of a particular kind; one where the author indulges his pet loves – and hates – about a country and culture, and describes these in a very amusing – even humorously disrespectful – way.
Here’s an example: in discussing the appearance of a particular abbey, which gives a sense of an ancient and brilliant culture, but whose main interior unfortunately looks as though something has gone horribly wrong involving a collision with several trucks filled with icing sugar, having had an extreme rococo makeover to mark its seven-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary. (p65)
There are plenty of gems like this, along with more serious discussions of the ups and downs of German history. On this, we are told that there were three points at which it was the worst time to be alive in central Europe’s past: the 1340s (famine and plague), the 1630s (the Thirty Years War) and the 1940s.
No prizes for guessing why that last one is on the list.
I was grateful for the map of Germany and its neighbours in central Europe at the front of the book, flipping frequently back and forth in my quest to learn more about this fascinating and (to me anyway) somewhat bewildering region.
Winder’s analysis of the themes and movements, great and small, of European history is thoughtful and thought-provoking:
But, as with so many aspects of Central European history, there is such an amazing spread of unintended consequences that only a form of political paralysis can substitute for the actual kaleidoscope of decisions which generate the oddness of European history – a small, bitter and crowded landscape somehow incapable of (indeed allergic to) the broad-ranging uniformity of the Chinese Empire or the United States. It is unfortunate that what seems in many lights so fascinating about Europe should also, as a spin-off, be the basis for so much rage and death.
Germania p273
Germania was published by Picador in 2010.
Searing: ‘Prima Facie’ by Suzie Miller
Prima Facie reads like the best kind of courtroom drama, where as readers we are invested in the characters and the outcome. Fans of the British series Silks starring the wonderful Maxine Peake will no doubt enjoy this novel by English-Australian author Suzie Miller. In fact, the character at the centre of the book, Tessa, is reminiscent of Silks’ Martha Costello: a scholarship student from England’s north and a working class background, who has had to fight to achieve her goal of a career in the law.
However, the crime at the centre of the Prima Facie case is one that is all-too-familiar to women and girls – one in three, in fact – that of sexual assault.
Tessa loves her career, her flat in London and the life she has carved out there. Despite always feeling like an outsider among her colleagues with impeccable family backgrounds in law and legal studies, she is ambitious and passionate about her chosen profession as a criminal defence barrister.
Indeed, the law is something she strongly believes in and she also believes it has a role protecting those who can too easily (and at times unfairly) become targets of police and prosecutors.
She is very good at her job. She has refined her techniques of cross-examination with the belief that her role is to ‘test the case, just test it, and test it over and over. Find the inconsistencies. And when the police leave themselves wide open, it is all instinct and practice that lets you bring it home, lets you land that plane.’ p63
Then the unthinkable happens and she is raped. Now she must decide if she wants to test the system, to see if it will work for her, knowing full well the dismal statistics on the number of sexual assaults that occur, compared to those that are reported, prosecuted, and – most dismal of all – actually result in a conviction.
Legal instinct tells me that this is a losing case. But I must do something. I can’t not. I have to believe that the system I have given my life to will do the right thing. The legal system gave me the life I have, gave me a chance to rise to the top. I have to rely on it.
Prima Facie p172The novel is written is first-person present-tense, and as sometimes happens for me, I found the present-tense occasionally jarring. On the upside it allows the reader to feel we are inside Tessa’s head and privy to her thoughts and emotions, and it’s possibly one of the most searing reflections of the experiences of a survivor of sexual assault that I’ve ever read. It feels very real.
The other aspect that is believable is the description of the world of a London barrister. The author’s own training and work in the legal profession allows her to open the door to readers for us to step inside.
There is so much that this book highlights: the risks taken by a victim of sexual assault when deciding whether to report the crime; the ongoing trauma of investigation and court hearings; the impact on family, friends and colleagues; how ‘consent’ is defined and tested; the way the law has traditionally dealt with such cases in the courts.
The law of sexual assault spins on the wrong axis. A woman’s experience of sexual assault does not fit the male-defined system of truth, so it cannot be truth, and therefore there can be no justice.
Prima Facie p332Because of its subject matter, this is not an easy book to read, nor is it ‘enjoyable’ in the usual sense. It is a gripping, dramatic and engrossing story that had me turning pages compulsively, and left me with much to think about.
Prima Facie was published by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Australia, in September 2023.
