Heat Wave in Berlin (1961), by Dymphna Cusack

April 14, 2026April 14, 2026 / Lisa Hill / 5 Comments

Hard on the heels of a contemporary novel about resurgent post-war Nazism in the 1950s, (The Watchmaker’s War (2026) by Danny Ben-Moshe, see my review), came the utterly unexpected same theme in a novel I read for the #1961 Club. This is the book description, from my 1962 edition:

Heat Wave in Berlin is a powerful and topical novel based on a strong, simple plot. After ten years of happy marriage, Joy Miller, a young Australian woman, overcomes the reluctance of her German-born husband to return to his native land. With their small daughter, she and Stephen (formerly Stefan von Muhler) go to visit his family in West Berlin.

The Von Muhlers amaze Joy: they prove to be a rich, immensely influential and close-knit family, playing a strong part in West Germany’s post-war recovery. For a time, Joy is fascinated by the glittering new life they offer her, so exotically different from her own.

But — slowly at first, then swiftly and brutally — disillusionment and fear strike at her happiness as dark secrets are revealed. They are the secrets which, she learns, drove Stephen out of Germany in the first place, and have made him loathe his German kin, except his wonderful mother, all these years…

With the benefit of 21st century hindsight which readers of 1961 obviously did not have, I was expecting from this description that the ‘dark secrets’ of this novel would be about a wife’s shocked discovery that her husband’s family had been Nazi industrialists, perhaps profiteering from the manufacture of munitions, and perhaps employing slave labour. These may well have been ‘dark secrets’ for readers of the Sun-Herald Readers Club in 1961, especially for those too young to have watched the cinema newsreels from the immediate aftermath of WW2. By 1961, West Germany was normalised as part of the Cold War anti-communist west: it had been welcomed into NATO in 1955, and was allowed rearmament against the Soviet Bloc.

BEWARE: SPOILERS

If this had been a contemporary novel, I might not have been so surprised by its revelations. But reading this novel from 1961 I was not expecting that when the penny dropped for this naïve and somewhat complacent character, Joy would discover that the Von Muhlers were still enthusiastic Nazis anticipating and actively working towards a resurgence of the Third Reich. Having conned Stephen ‘home’ with false warnings about his beloved mother’s health, they were demanding that he stay to help with their plans and they had the connections to prevent his departure. I was also not expecting that their sick child would be treated by a doctor (probably modelled on Herta Oberheuser) who was convicted of medical experimentation on women and children at the Ravensbrück concentration camp but released after only five years of a 20 year sentence. And I was certainly not expecting that Joy’s husband, an otherwise kind and decent man, had as a youth participated himself in atrocities.

I was intrigued, and troubled: what was the impetus for this story by an Australian author? How authoritative was it, and what were Cusack’s research sources? It’s commonplace now for books to include an Author’s Note that provides such information, but that was not so in 1961 when readers had to take a story on trust.

And what was the novel’s reception in 1961? What on earth did readers think, at a time when they believed that Nasizm had been soundly defeated and its perpetrators dealt with at Nuremburg? Cold War rhetoric encouraged them to think of West Germany as an ally against the Communists. Wikipedia quotes an un-named, unhelpful review:

A reviewer in The Canberra Times was not impressed with the novel: “Dymphna Cusack’s new documentary novel, Heatwave in Berlin, has the pace, the excitement and something of the basic hollowness of a thriller…What it makes as a novel, however, is something which cannot be taken very seriously. The characters have the larger-than-life quality of figures in a melodrama, and they speak with something of the same staginess.

I dug out the review at Trove and found that the entry at WP has been somewhat selective… Dymphna Cusack was a progressive Leftie, in a relationship with Norman Randolph Freehill, chief-of-staff of the Communist Party of Australia’s newspaper, the Tribune. Although not as blatantly hostile as the WP snippet suggests, the review was clearly intended to discourage any potential readers.

Because I’m so interested in the reception of this novel in 1961, I think it’s worth quoting the review in full, letting the reviewer speak for himself (and make what you will of his suggestion that a musical education should have given Joy the ability to detect Stephen’s decade of lies yet conclude that he has ‘basic integrity’.):

THEME THAT LACKS CONVICTION

Dymphna Cusack’s new documentary novel, Heatwave in Berlin, has the pace, the excitement and something of the basic hollowness of a thriller.

It no doubt will be widely discussed, and in some quarters enthusiastically praised, because it deals vividly with the situation in present-day Berlin, dramatising a state of affairs where ex-war criminals are reinstated in positions of power, where industrialists live richly on the profits from factories run in wartime on slave labour, where an undercurrent of spying, international intrigue, Jew-baiting and the resurgence of neo Nazi organisations lies beneath the surface of a prosperous city.

What the facts are I am in no way qualified to say. What it makes as a novel, however, is something which cannot be taken very seriously. The characters have the larger-than-life quality of figures in a melodrama, and they speak with something of the same staginess.

The Australian heroine, Joy, married to a German who migrated to Australia after the war, returns with him and with one of her children to visit his family. She finds herself in a mansion dominated by the powerful industrialist father and her husband’s massive, strong-minded and mildly sinister sister. One can almost hear the sound of the villain’s music as this heavy-jowled pair take the stage. They do not approve of the outspokenness of an Australian child. They keep a household given to an almost feudal formality and rule there like despots.

Joy’s gradual discovery of the facts which support the luxurious edifice which these people inhabit provides the book with its theme. In chapter after chapter her own exploration of Berlin and her contacts with people outside the family — with an American scientist’s wife, a journalist, an old professor who, as a refugee of an earlier period, had trained her as a pianist — give Miss Cusack the opportunity to “lift the lid off” various facets of a corrupt society. It moves swiftly and with considerable power, so that one is driven on at an uncritical pace.

Even so, however, the heroine seems extraordinarily obtuse. For a young woman trained as a musician she seems to lack fine perception — indeed, the psychological interest of the novel centres round her inability to decide how far her husband shares the Nazi sympathies of his family. One might perhaps manage to live with a man for 10 years and know nothing of his politics; but one would have expected that 10 years of happy and fruitful marriage would have revealed something of his basic integrity. Stephen, however, never becomes more than a lay figure, and the revelations about his sympathies have a detective-story interest, but never seriously stir us. The other characters exist on much the same level of reality.

This book deals with serious matters. Some at least of the documentary material it is at pains to present has truth in it; and it does no harm to be reminded of what happened at Auschwitz and Buchenwald and of the depths to which human degradation can descend. But there was a human spirit which survived these experiences and lived to tell the tale in Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. Miss Cusack finds no depth of perception to match this.

Her book appears, rather, as a fast-moving , “tract for the times”, with very little conviction on the human level, and a great deal of fairly shoddy writing. It is a shame that a theme of such seriousness could not be treated in way that was genuinely moving. -M.P. (Canberra Times 13 May 1961, at Trove edited to improve the paragraphing.)

*deep breath* Cusack criticised for not matching the depth of perception in Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man?? She was sounding an alarm against trusting Germany not to lapse back into Nazism!

So what was the inspiration for the novel and were her sources authoritative? I don’t (yet) have a biography of Dymphna Cusack*, but I found an answer at the ADB:

In the winter of 1958-59, en route to London from Peking, Cusack happened to witness a Nazi SS officers’ reunion and the beginnings of the neo-Nazi cult in Germany. The result was Heatwave in Berlin (1961), also widely published and translated.

Indeed it was. Wikipedia tells us that the European reception looks to have transcended the negativity of the Australian review:

The novel was also translated into Norwegian, French, Danish, Dutch, and German in 1961; Hungarian and Russian in 1962; Bulgarian in 1963; Romanian and Estonian in 1964; Albanian in 1965; Latvian in 1966; and Uzbek in 1971.

You can read Perry Middlemiss’s more sophisticated contemporary review of Heat Wave in Berlin here. I agree with his conclusion: A forgotten book by a forgotten writer, both of which should receive greater recognition.

I read this book at this time for the #1961 Club, hosted by Kaggsy’s Booksh Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book. Other Australian novels from 1961 include Solo for Several Players by Barbara Jefferis on my TBR, and those that I’ve read include

The Dyehouse by Mena Calthorpe
Wake in Fright by Kenneth Cook, read before starting this blog
The Fringe Dwellers by Nene Gare
Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White.

*I’ve ordered a copy of Dymphna (Thomas Nelson, 19785) by Norman Freehill. The seller’s description was irresistible:

This compelling biography chronicles the remarkable life of the acclaimed Australian author Dymphna Cusack. Dymphna uncovers her significant contributions to literature and her passionate advocacy for social justice throughout the 20th century. The narrative presents a vivid portrait of a woman who defied conventions, illustrating her struggles and triumphs with insightful detail. Readers will gain a profound understanding of the forces that shaped her writing and her unwavering commitment to humanitarian causes. This work stands as a testament to her enduring legacy, offering an intimate look into the mind of a literary giant.

Update, later the same day: I have since discovered a doctoral dissertation called The Cold War Author & Humanist Dymphna Cusack: The first Doctoral Dissertation on this Australian cultural phenomenon by Adjunct Prof. Dr. Tania Peitzker (who seems to have ventured since into other non-literary fields.) There’s extensive information about the genesis and research for Heat Wave in Berlin, its reception in Germany and propaganda usage in the USSR, and a claim that what was common knowledge in West Germany was not published in the West though the media knew about it. More about that when I finish reading it…

Author: Dymphna Cusack
Title: heat wave in Berlin
Publisher: Readers Book Club (Herald -Sun), 1962, first published by Heinemann, Melbourne 1961
Jacket design by Vern Hayles
ISBN: none, hbk, 252 pages
Source: personal library, probably purchased via AbeBooks.

The Watchmaker’s War (2026), by Danny Ben-Moshe

April 13, 2026 / Lisa Hill / 7 Comments

Like most people my age, I suppose, I grew up thinking that the Nazis and their loathsome ideology were vanquished. I thought they had been eliminated and that post-war de-Nazification during the Allied Occupation had removed the threat of any resurgence, except for a few ageing die-hards who had escaped to South America. It certainly did not occur to me that the waves of post-war migration to Australia brought Nazis with it.

So you can imagine my reaction to seeing a man wearing Nazi insignia outside my local library a short time ago. I felt physically sick. I had only ever seen Nazi symbols in films, documentaries and books, never in real life, never in my quiet Melbourne suburb. I walked away and sat down until I gathered my wits, and then I rang the local police. The officer I spoke to explained that it wasn’t illegal (at that time, it is now) but he would have a talk with the offender. I had a restorative coffee and then went back to the library. The man was gone. But the memory lingers. What seemed unthinkable until recently is now not so improbable. I am well-read in Holocaust literature, and I know how this story starts and ends.

But it was a different matter altogether in 1951, for a Jewish migrant who had escaped the Holocaust by Shooting that took place in Lithuania in 1941. For him, the sight of a Nazi symbol at the Bonegilla Migrant Hostel in north-eastern Victoria — a place he had thought safe — was an existential threat. That insignia evoked the recent, painful past in which he had lost his entire family and witnessed the near extermination of the entire population of Lithuanian Jews. In a fictionalised version of these real-life events, Danny Ben-Moshe’s novel evokes his character’s terror well.

In the novel Berel does what I did, he went to the authorities at the camp. But though he gets a sympathetic hearing from one of the staff, he isn’t believed.

Berel raced ahead and turned and stopped against the rear wall of the library.

‘There’s no charge for walking on the main path,’ Rogers teased.

‘I must hide,’ Berel said. ‘I can’t be seen.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Shh.’ Berel put his finger to his lips. ‘They are Nazis. There are Nazis here.’

‘Who are?’

‘The Lithuanians, from my hut.’

‘Rogers looked at him, perplexed. ‘Are you all right?’

‘They are Nazis,’ Berel insisted. ‘If they find me, they will kill me.’

‘Listen, I’m no doctor, but what you’ve been through can affect your mind, Rogers said. ‘I’ve seen it happen to my mates from Changi. Some of them have all sorts of problems, trouble sleeping, nightmares, hallucinations. It’s not the same, but I do have some idea what it’s like. Let’s go and have a cup of tea in the mess hall, and when you’ve calmed down we can have a chat about it.’

‘No!’ Berel burst out, surprising himself with his assertiveness. ‘It’s too risky, they could kill me.’

‘All right, Rogers said, speaking quietly, ‘Tell me who is going to kill you.’

In an urgent whisper, Berel relayed what he’d heard last night in the hut. ‘They spoke about all the Jews they killed, all the death pits they filled, burning people alive in a synagogue.’

Rogers tried in vain to assure him that was not possible. ‘Anyone who had served with the Germans or their allies is barred from entry into Australia.’

‘I know what I heard,’ insisted Berel. (p.154)

He flees to Melbourne to seek help from his friend Yakov, who he’d met on board the ship bringing European migrants to Australia. And that sets in train a chilling story that would be unbelievable — except that it’s based on a true story.

For Lithuanian Boris Green (née Greineman) — the real-life inspiration for Danny Ben-Moshe’s novel The Watchmaker’s War — seeing the evidence of a Nazi past, meant seeing that the man responsible for the mass murder of his family and thousands of other Jews, Poles and Soviet citizens, was alive and well and living in Australia. The film-maker Danny Ben-Moshe has brought this shocking story to life, revealing not only the lax screening processes that enabled Nazi migration, but also the government agency behind the intentional importation of Nazi operatives to spy out communist sympathisers in the community.

This is the book description:

When Yakov Holtzman arrives in Melbourne – about as far away as he can possibly get from the graveyard that is Europe – he puts behind him the years he spent in the forests of Lithuania as a leader of the resistance, fighting the Nazis. He has come to join his brother – his only surviving family member – and start a new life as the watchmaker he once was.

Yakov looks for solace – and love – in the fragile, traumatised community of Jewish refugees taking root in a new land. But when swastikas, threats and, most frightening of all, the faces of old enemies appear on the streets of suburban St Kilda, his new-found peace is shattered.

Fierce instincts are reawakened in Yakov, and he knows he must act. But how can justice – or revenge – best be served? And will Yakov’s drive to destroy his enemies overtake him too, and leave his new life in ruins?

Based on a true story, The Watchmaker’s War is a gripping, high-stakes tale of Nazi hunters in Australia and the war criminals they pursued — killers with links to the highest levels of Australia’s spy agency. It offers profound insights into the lingering trauma of genocide, posing difficult questions about competing desires for peace and vengeance, and how far a victim should go in the pursuit of justice when the authorities fail to act.

The Watchmaker’s War is carefully structured to reveal the ethical tensions surrounding justice and revenge, reminding me of other novels on the same theme, most recently The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (2024, see my review.) Needless to say, I don’t agree with vengeance; I don’t even approve of capital punishment. I think that diplomacy, dialogue and negotiations are better ways to resolve conflict, and that the justice system, flawed as it might be, is better than revenge. But I am not naïve. I concede that there are intransigent problems where one side refuses to engage in efforts to resolve conflict; where one side persists with violence; where there is an evil that is implacably resistant to change, and where there are terrorists who murder innocent people in pursuit of their agenda. And as in real life, The Watchmaker’s War deals with mass murderers who evaded justice, and the characters had the opportunity and capacity to exact revenge.

Brothers Yakov and Benny hold opposing views. As with their real-life counterparts, both had been partisans in the fight against the Nazis, and had joined forces with the Russian partisans in the Baltic forests of Belarus, but Benny was the more experienced having gone to fight from the outset whereas Benny thought it was possible to survive and did not join until his family was killed. Still grieving his loss, Benny just wants to suppress his feelings by focussing on establishing a livelihood through his business. Among his arguments to dissuade Benny, is that Yakov has found love again, so his marriage to another fragile survivor would be at risk if he got involved as a vigilante.

Though the violence is always offstage and never made explicit, I don’t know which I found creepier: that the entire premise of this novel is based on documentary evidence, some of which is reproduced in Notes at the back of the book; that there were Lithuanian Nazi war criminals migrating to my country at the invitation of ASIO and that as a sideline to their work as anti-communist spies, they were planning the murder of Jews here; or that there were refugee vigilantes responsible but not held accountable for the mysterious deaths of Nazis in postwar Melbourne and Sydney.

For those reasons, The Watchmaker’s War is compelling reading. It invites reflection about the amoral skulduggery of our security services and the politicians who directed them; about the weakness of our justice system over time in failing to convict Nazi war criminals, and most importantly, about an ethical response to the failures of the justice system when the guilty walk free.

Author: Danny Ben-Moshe
Title: The Watchmaker’s War
Publisher: Harper Collins, 2026
Cover design by Darren Holt
ISBN: 9781460763612, pbk., 404 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Benn’s Books, $34.99

2026 Age Book of the Year shortlists

April 13, 2026April 13, 2026 / Lisa Hill / 4 Comments

The shortlist for the 2026 Age Book of the Year has been announced. I’ve read three of the fiction list. Links on the titles go to the Age (paywalled) review, links to my reviews are after the author’s name.

The fiction books on the shortlist are:

Salvage by Jennifer Mills
Fierceland by Omar Musa
The Immigrants by Moreno Giovannoni
A Piece of Red Cloth by Leonie Norrington, Djawundil Maymuru, Merrkiyawuy, Ganambarr-Stubbs and Djawa Burarrwanga, see my review
Out of the Woods by Gretchen Shirm, my review deleted from my blog at the ‘request’ of the publisher.
You Must Remember This by Sean Wilson, see my review

The non-fiction shortlisted books are:

Blue Poles by Tom McIlroy
Red House by Kate Wild
A Woman’s Eye, Her Art by Drusilla Modjeska, on my wishlist
The Shortest History of Australia by Mark McKenna
Gutsy Girls by Josie McSkimming
Mr and Mrs Gould by Grantlee Kieza

The 45th Age Book of the Year winners each receive $10,000, courtesy of the Copyright Agency’s cultural fund, and the winners will be announced on May 7th.

Department of the Vanishing (2026) by Johanna Bell

April 8, 2026April 8, 2026 / Lisa Hill / 16 Comments

Winner of the University of Tasmania’s Best New Unpublished Work prize in the 2025 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Awards, Joanna Bell’s Department of the Vanishing is a spellbinding, innovative work of eco-fiction with a message about species extinction that can’t be ignored.

Hobart-based author, poet and Churchill Fellow, Johanna Bell has published award-winning children’s books and founded a storytelling studio to elevate voices from regional Australia. Department of the Vanishing is her first book for adults.

The novel is a pastiche and credit must go to Jo Hunt who did the complex internal design. The book consists mainly of pages which purport to be archival materials including photos; records of police interviews (with some redactions); newspaper headlines; emails; and lists of facts. Documents are ‘stamped’ with ‘File Copy’, ‘Restricted’, and the minutiae of archival practice: Accession numbers, Received dates, Date stamps, Not for Loan etc. These are supplemented by narratives of free verse and a typed record of a confused mother’s ramblings and the daughter’s frustrated response in handwriting. This extraordinary collage comes together to tell the story of mass bird extinctions in the very near future and an archivist’s struggle to protect the documentary record. In a silent environment where birdsong has vanished, Ava Wilde is also seeking an explanation for her ornithologist father’s disappearance some years ago, and negotiating her own relationship with a man called Luke.

Yesterday, I spotted a tiny bird ducking into the jasmine vine just outside my library window. It’s an elusive bird: though sometimes I find an empty nest when I prune the vine, it moves so quickly that I never see it for long enough to be sure what it is. It’s smaller than a sparrow, and light brown so it could be a brown thornbill but it could also be a silvereye. We also see honeyeaters, magpies and magpie-larks, galahs (which eat our apples), and the occasional eastern rosella, but this dear little bird is my favourite of the visitors to our garden.

Whichever my little bird is, it’s not an endangered species, but neither were lyrebirds until the 2019–2020 Australian bushfire season.

The vanished birds in Department of the Vanishing include many examples of Australia’s unique birdlife: lyrebirds, magpies, albatross, honeyeaters, rosellas, cockatoos and pelicans. The book begins with a photo of dead birds, neatly tagged in the kind of specimen tray that museums use, and on the facing pace, a quotation from D H Lawrence:

In the beginning, it was not a word, but a chirrup. (p. 1)

Then there is a double page of birdcalls approximated phonetically , so many that they tumble over each other, everything from the ‘coo-coo’ of a pigeon to the ‘tonk’ of a cockatoo. And then another quotation, this time from an ornithologist at Charles Darwin University, by name of Stephen Garnett:

After a few days of fourty [sic] degrees plus, the country’s just silent. (p.5)

And then there’s the first of a number of chilling Orwellian interviews where the archivist Ava Wilde is interviewed by the police.

It is only page 7 and words have been few but already the reader is drawn into a scenario that seems only too possible.

Department of the Vanishing is a remarkable book. Highly recommended.

Other reviews:

Author: Johanna Bell
Title: Department of the Vanishing
Publisher: Transit Lounge, 2026
Cover and internal design: Jo Hunt
ISBN: 9781923023550, pbk., 311 pages
Source: Bayside Library

PS You can see footage of Albert’s lyrebird at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyrebird# where you can also hear the lyrebird’s song.

Audition (2025), by Katie Kitamura

April 6, 2026April 6, 2026 / Lisa Hill / 26 Comments

BEWARE: SPOILERS

… the truth was I had almost no idea of what she was talking about, it was all a way of talking rather than talking itself. The sensation of dread increased. Max was looking at me but when I stared back her face closed down a little, as if she had been confronted, and I knew then that she had no idea what she had written, no idea of how it would work in the play, how it would bridge the two versions of the character, the scene she had written was no more than a placeholder. She had grown bored of [sic] the character in the midst of writing, I realised, and wanted to write a different character, and so had created this impossible scene to segue between not two versions of the same character, but two different characters altogether. I could see it now, I could see it all over the writing. (p.87-8)

By the time you reach this ah-ha! moment on page 87, having waded through all the overthinking and the deliberately confusing elements of Katie Kitamura’s (2025) Women’s Prize longlisted Audition, you will either think this is brilliant, or that this is an author describing exactly what has happened during the writing of this novel and that the really creative aspect of it is the elaborate aura Kitamura has manufactured to explain it to a mystified audience. You then re-read the preceding page…

She made a little grimace, as if she had a bad or bitter taste in her mouth, she seemed to feel a certain amount of contempt toward the very character she had created and centred her story around, <snip> I saw in the flicker of her eye that even if I was correct, even if this was the character as she had conceived of it, she not only held her and her grief in some disdain, she was also—and this was perhaps worse—a little bored by her. (p.86)

How many times have we seen or heard authors talking about investing time in a new novel, only to find that it’s just not working, and they put it aside with a mixture of relief and regret? But what if they don’t? What if they continue with it, without a segue, adding a Part II with all kinds of ensuing contradictions, improbabilities and impossibilities and submit it to a publisher as a postmodern text? The reader then has to do what the unnamed actor/narrator does, invent that segue and come up with an explanation for the disconnected halves. Perhaps either Part I or Part II represents the illusions of a woman not coping with grief, but which part, eh? Are we reading an actor inhabiting two different roles from plays she performs in?

Perhaps not.

Audition reminds me of the infamous Ern Malley hoax. In 1943, a pair of writers by name of James McAuley and Harold Stewart, despised modernism and wanted to discredit ‘Angry Penguins’, the literary journal of its Australian champions, the Australian poet Max Harris and art patron John Reed. McAuley and Stewart created sixteen poems in the modernist style they deplored, and in the guise of the poet’s sister Ethel, submitted them to the journal as the work of ‘Ern Malley’.

The poems were hailed a work of genius and took on a life of their own. When the hoax was revealed, modernist poetry got a very bad press, and the journal folded. Wikipedia, however, says that:

Since the 1970s, however, the Ern Malley poems, though known to be a hoax, became celebrated as a successful example of surrealist poetry in their own right, lauded by poets and critics such as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Robert Hughes. The poems of Ern Malley are now more widely read than those of his creators,

The hoax has inspired various novels including most recently Stephen Orr’s Sincerely, Ethel Malley (2021, see my review.)

For a different take on Kitamura’s novel, there are multiple enthusiastic reviews everywhere, but see also

Kim’s more ambivalent review at Reading Matters;
Rachel’s at Yarra Book Club, where she writes of puzzlement;
Brona at This Reading Life, who landed on the same ah-ha! moment as me but interprets it very differently; and
Kate’s at Books are My Favourite and Best who felt disorientated.

PS At the Women’s Prize reading guide, Rachel Cusk’s Second Place is suggested as another author one might like. Cusk has legions of fans but I’ve never been tempted to read her, and Audition has cemented my suspicions.

Author: Katie Kitamura
Title: Audition
Publisher: Fern Press (Penguin Random House), 2025
ISBN: 9781911717324, hbk., 197 pages
Source: Bayside Library

Six Degrees of Separation, from The Correspondent…

April 5, 2026 / Lisa Hill / 19 Comments

This month’s starter book for #6Degrees hosted by Kate at Books are My Favourite and Best is an epistolary novel called The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. (See Kate’s review). I’ve had it on reserve at the library for ages, uncertain about whether I might like it, because it’s described at Penguin as Charing Cross Road meets A Man Called Ove.

A Man Called Ove doesn’t appeal but I loved Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road (1970). I read it long before it was made into a film, and I loved it, of course, because it was about booklovers.

But it was not the first novel I’d ever read that was written in the form of letters. That was Jean Webster’s Daddy Long Legs which I read when I was about twelve, and I still have my very battered copy of it. It has lost its spine because it was on the bottom shelf of the bookshelf and Amber disgraced herself in puppyhood and chewed it off.

One of the earliest epistolary novels I’ve read is Dostoyevsky’s Poor Folk (1848, English translation 1894). The letter writers are not separated by an ocean… but merely by a road. To quote from my own review:

The couple whose letters form this epistolary novel, write from their rooms in miserable tenements across the road from each other. They are cold and hungry and they get sick from their privations. They can’t even have an in-person relationship because they can’t afford to marry and her reputation would be ruined by gossip if he were to visit her.

A Descant for Gossip (1960, see my review) is a powerful indictment of small town gossip. Again, from my own review…

When Thea Astley (1925-2004) wrote this marvellous book way back in 1960, she would not have dreamed of today’s sordid celebrity culture and its spiteful gossip, justified by its readers as harmless fun because they think its victims are rich, offstage, and ‘asked for it’ anyway by becoming famous. What Astley did know, and has depicted in her trademark incisive style in A Descant for Gossips, is the viciousness of small-town gossip.

This reminded me of Tell (2024, see my review), by Jonathan Buckley (which won the Novel Prize). It featured narration by a garrulous, gossipy, self-righteous woman and the author withholds the identity of her audience until almost the end of the story. Tell’s narrator reveals more than she intends to because she can’t help herself.

Tell reminds me of the most recent winner of the Novel Prize, Anna (2025) see my review by Angus Gaunt. It’s a story of dogged survival to a fragile re-emergence of self after imprisonment and there’s a universality to the tale because there are people in camps and detention centres all over the world. The Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize is a terrific prize for novella-length works and has brought us some beaut books since its inception.

Next month (May 2, 2026), we start with a book that is longlisted on the Women’s Prize and the Stella – Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy. By then, we’ll know if it’s been shortlisted.

The Best of Everything (2025), by Kit de Waal

April 4, 2026April 4, 2026 / Lisa Hill / 17 Comments

I’ve had the wrong kind of life to be sentimental, and Kit de Waal’s The Best of Everything is a bit too sentimental for me. But the novel has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize and has many admirers, so I stuck with it and found that it has insights that I hadn’t predicted from the first third of the story.

Set in 1970s Britain, The Best of Everything is the story of a West Indian woman called Paulette, foolishly committing her future to a man she should have known was married and then bearing a child to his friend Garfield while both are grieving his loss. When finally she realises that she doesn’t love Garfield and never will (because *sigh* she’s still in love with Denton despite the betrayal), the child ‘Bird’ becomes the mainstay of her life.

Although somewhat idealised, the positive portrayal of a single mother is refreshing. Paulette supports her child with her work as a nursing auxiliary which gives her both job satisfaction and security. Though she would have liked to realise her dreams of home and family with Denton and a couple of daughters, her child with Garfield becomes her entire life and he brings her great joy. (He’s an easy, placid baby who grows into a good-natured boy.)

As Bird grows, she plays with him endlessly, not ever too tired after her day at work; not ever exhausted by the responsibilities that come with being a single parent. Within her means she gives Bird ‘the best of everything’ that she can afford. However, she lets some of her friendships fall by the wayside, (along with any potential suitors) which puts her at risk of a worse-than-usual ’empty nest syndrome’. As if in defiance of the blurb which says she likes ‘to map out the future’, she doesn’t look too far ahead. It will be a long time, she thinks, as she ponders her ambitious plans for him, before he finishes university and leaves home.

One of the ways Paulette expresses her love is by cooking the West Indian cuisine that she learned from her grandmother in St Kitts, and her pantry and fridge are always well stocked for impromptu visitors. However, De Waal’s poignant portrayal of the way Paulette has ‘all her eggs in one basket’ is revealed by her dependence on Bird’s presence in her life. Garfield had developed a strong and loving relationship with Bird before Paulette sent him on his way, and he insists on maintaining contact with financial support and regular access visits. There are long, lonely times when Garfield takes Bird away for these access visits which expand to overnight and then weekends, and then Those Special Days when everyone else is celebrating with family and she is alone. It is loneliness that makes her take refuge in drinking.

BEWARE: SPOILERS

The novel bears an epigram from J M Barrie’s Peter Pan: ‘Try to be a little kinder than is necessary’ and it’s dedicated to ‘all the people that have shown me kindness’. But The Best of Everything is not just about how Paulette’s genuine kindness leads her to take on some of the mothering of Cornelius a.k.a. Nellie, the forlorn grandchild of Frank, the very man whose careless driving killed Denton.

Paulette privately calls Frank ‘Shirt &Tie’ because of his quaint English manner that marks him as fallen on hard times and not belonging in her working-class neighbourhood. Although she hates him for ruining her (improbable) dreams of family life with Denton, she pities Cornelius, whose mother died as a result of the same car accident. He bears all the signs of a neglected child, and her heart bypasses her reservations and she brings him into her life.

And so begins the friendship between the two boys, one black, one white. And as time goes by and teenage rebellion enters the plot, De Waal portrays the caution with which People of Colour must live their lives lest they run foul of a prejudiced society. Inverting the stereotypical trajectory, it is ‘Bird’ a.k.a. Curtis with the guidance of his West Indian parents who does well at school and with the help of his ambitious father Garfield (who recovers quickly from Paulette’s rejection and has a new family) is soon on the path to success and respectability. It is Cornelius whose life runs off the rails, making the point that it’s nurture not nature that matters, and the life Cornelius has with his very troubled grandfather is bleak.

The novel also portrays the considered forbearance which makes Paulette able to negotiate the crises in her life. Apart from a couple of incidents when she is pushed beyond endurance, she mostly holds her tongue and keeps her temper, her interior thoughts the only sign to the reader that she has not forgiven an offence, but has decided on a prudent response instead. She models this behaviour to her son, offering strategic silence as a tactic to negotiate life as a Person of Colour in a society that can be unpredictably racist.

One of the things I liked about this novel was that De Waal doesn’t stereotype the white characters as racist. Realistically, some are, especially when judgements are made about wrongdoing of some kind e.g. at school or when the police are involved. But some aren’t, e.g. Maggie the staunch Irish friend and neighbour and also Sister Mackenzie (Paulette’s supervisor at the hospital, who goes out of her way to help Paulette through her difficulties). But it’s clear that People of Colour can’t make assumptions about whether they will be treated equitably or not. In Paulette and Garfield’s world, it’s prudent to teach their children to keep out of trouble because they may be held to account for their behaviour with more stringent standards than other children.

Will The Best of Everything be shortlisted for the Women’s Prize? I haven’t read enough of the longlist to have a fair overview of it, but I don’t think it’s in the same league as The Benefactors, Flashlight or A Guardian and a Thief. We’ll find out later this month when the shortlist is revealed.

PS Via Library Thing, I discovered that this novel has also been published as Sweet Pea.

Author: Kit de Waal
Title: The Best of Everything
Publisher: Tinder Press, (Headline, Hachette), 2025
Cover design: Emma Ewbank
ISBN: 09781035404803, pbk., 303 pages
Source: Bayside Library

Sea Green (1974, reissued 2025), by Barbara Hanrahan

April 3, 2026 / Lisa Hill / 18 Comments

1st edition

First published in 1974 by UK publishers Chatto & Windus, and now reissued by SA publisher Pink Shorts Press, Sea Green was Barbara Hanrahan‘s second novel, following an impressive debut with The Scent of Eucalyptus (1973, on my TBR). Born in 1939, she was 35 when this autofiction was published. It depicts her journey of self-discovery when she escapes from teaching in Adelaide to take up a career as an artist in London.

This is the book description:

Virginia is on a ship bound for London, lured by her creative dreams, leaving behind her weeping mother and father in Adelaide. On the cocoon-like journey she is struck by the messiness of relationships and her uncontrollable body. But things on the other side of the world are no neater, as she is pulled between her conservative expectations and her magnetic internal life.

In innovative poetic prose, artist and author Barbara Hanrahan plunges us into the possibility-filled London of her youth while reflecting the all-but-unchanged experience of finding independence as a creative woman. Originally published in 1974, Sea Green was inspired by Hanrahan’s experiences but has a life and immediacy all its own.

The novel begins at sea, where Virginia is among other young women with inchoate ambitions. They are off to see the world, but Virginia has saved up her money to attend the Central School of Art in London. (Barbara Hanrahan is listed among the alumni of this school of art, now one of the colleges of the University of Arts in London.) But first there is the long, slow voyage, which turns out to be more tedious than she had expected, except for a shipboard romance, which culminates, as most of them as did, in disappointment. What makes this first part of the novel a delight to read is Hanrahan’s sharp wit and innovative writing style. It’s narrated in singular and plural first person and third person points of view, transitioning from one to another with only a line break as a guide:

I left Adelaide with only my hopes, a couple of mock-leather cases, a cardboard folder. Now, in a strange climate, on a steely ship, the hopes have turned dull, been smothered by the present’s grip and the sentimental stranglehold of what’s past. Without the mediocrities I spurned I am adrift on more than an ocean. The only solution seems to keep on moving, try to outpace both present and past, abandon the needs of an identity I can no longer serve.

But I can’t do it by myself. And the one I wait for doesn’t come.

In the end darkness made her afraid. She climbed down to the glassy lounge where bodies danced to music she couldn’t hear. People stared from deck chairs; judged as they promenaded beside the rail. Romance was mocked by a showy trail of foam.

On the deck, though the tropics drew near, it was cold. Breezes swooped, but Virginia burned. Disappointment, the shame induced by waiting, the burden beneath her arm, had set her on fire. Tears stung her eyes; she blundered on.

Yet even in the descent to the cabin she couldn’t succeed, couldn’t find the way; lost herself in a maze of identical antiseptic corridors, wastes of tapestry weave lounges. She passed through rooms where flagging pens embroidered yesterday’s memories on flimsy pages; where women forgot they were wives in the queue for an ironing board, the evening’s crumpled dreams of glamour over their arms. (p.45)

Sea Green would have been a salutary tale for Australian readers planning the same escape with hopes of an expat lifestyle like Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes and Clive James.

At times, the novella is almost unbearably poignant. Anticipation derailed by disappointment, over and over again. The voyage, her companions, the shipboard romance, the reality of cheap digs in London, the discovery that people she mixes with are not the icons of good taste and progressive politics that she had anticipated. Britain is depicted as the stratified and class-conscious society that you’d expect, and some of it rubs off on her. Though she knows her very self is altered, she falters in its snare:

Once I was secure. I had lecture notes and paint brushes, etching needles and timetables. My life was ordered; hedged behind tidy lanes of habit, apportioned neatly between the portmanteaus and holdalls of my compartmented life. I was artist and teacher and daughter; I was even myself. I was fragmented, it was safer that way. Dangerous passions were reserved for my art, love was only a game; I mocked it on the pillion of motorbike, with a lily in my hand, in a station wagon before the sea.

My world was self-enclosed, a formal garden that never knew aphis or mildew, canker or thrip or gall. At night I slept soundly, chastely, in a room scented in little bags, roses in a cut-glass vase.

I crossed the sea in a ship. And on the ship I lost something. Hands that were cold ripped something precious away. And now, in another city as snow flies at the window and icicles hang from pipes, I falter — snared. (p.140)

Despite her sharp observations about her encounters, Virginia’s naiveté about people in general and men in particular makes for a steep learning curve. Because it’s set in the 1960s (i.e. before The Pill when ‘nice’ girls ‘saved themselves’ for marriage — and that was the expected trajectory for a woman’s life) her ignorance about her own body is disastrous, and her lack of confidence leads to awful betrayal. The Dannie referred to in this passage is a nasty piece of work and most readers will be hoping to see the back of him.

Yesterday I went to Smith’s in Kingsway to get another of the books on anatomy. Then I felt quite sick and faint because I thought I saw Dannie by the Panther books. At least his haircut and stance — legs apart, leaning forward slightly. Sometimes after staring at the zinc [used in etching at the art school] my eyes are weak and I see things blurred, so I wasn’t sure. But it looked like him, and I went over to the Penguins where there is a mirror, wondering if I looked good enough to speak to him. (p. 139)

That passage took my breath away: a young adult worrying about looking good enough to speak to him…

4ZZZ has reviewed this book too, at Goodreads.

Author: Barbara Hanrahan (1939-1991)
Title: Sea Green
Introduction by Laura Elizabeth Woollett
Publisher: Pink Shorts Press, 2025 , first published by Chatto & Windus, 1974
Cover art: ‘The necklace of water drops’, screenprint by Barbara Hanrahan, 1982
ISBN: 9781763554108, pbk., 187 pages
Review copy courtesy of Pink Shorts Press

Image credit: 1974 Chatto & Windus 1st edition, cropped from Good wood Books: https://www.goodwoodbooks.com.au/product/sea-green-by-barbara-hanrahan/377

A Shipwreck in Fiji (2025, Akal Singh #2), by Nilima Rao

April 2, 2026April 5, 2026 / Lisa Hill / 7 Comments

A Shipwreck in Fiji is second in a detective series featuring a Sikh policeman called Akal Singh. Attracted by the cover art, I bought it because the blurb says that it has…

…all the charm and sparkle of the first book, offering fascinating historical insights into the realities of life in Fiji at the start of the twentieth century.

I’ve never been to Fiji. and while I read very little detective fiction, I do like it when it’s blended with historical fiction to offer insights into unfamiliar cultures. I was fascinated by Swazi-Australian author Malla Nunn‘s Detective Emmanuel Cooper series, when I discovered the first book in the series, set in the 1950s near the Mozambique border with Apartheid South Africa. To quote my own review :

A Beautiful Place to Die is much more than genre fiction. It reminded me of the best of Graham Greene in the way that the novel explores how context and culture impact on crime and justice, and how survival in an intransigently corrupt society involves an existential struggle between integrity and resignation to the inevitable.

Nilima Rao’s novel is set in 20th century colonial Fiji just as WW1 broke out. And, having just observed that Steven Carroll was very selective about which of the ‘ 10 Essential Elements of a Mystery Story’ he chose to use in The Afterlife of Harry Playford (2026, see my review), I read this novel with one eye on these ‘essential elements’ to if Rao’s novel conformed to the ‘rules’ or not, and if so, if it avoided clichés.

1. The ‘hook’ that invites the reader to try to solve the crime is the dilemma in which Sergeant Akal Singh finds himself. He has fallen foul of the racist conventions which govern life in colonial Hong Kong, and been exiled to Suva in Fiji where he is given menial investigations offering little hope of redemption. How, in that society and in that era, can Singh’s reputation and career prospects be restored? Oh yes, there’s also a couple of murders and some enemy aliens as well.

2. Our sleuth’s back story begins in India. He is not the clichéd world-weary chain-smoking cop who’s given up on relationships. He is a dutiful son supporting parents back home, but he has a penchant for love-interests across the colour bar. That, of course, ought not to matter. But in colonial outposts of the 20th century, it’s a complication.

3 & 4. Clues abound, including a Very Big Red Herring i.e. the possible presence of enemy aliens on the small Melanesian island of Ovalau, a very long way from the battlefields of WW1 but not so far from German colonial possessions New Guinea, Samoa, and the Marshall Islands.

5. Tropical islands marketed as holiday destinations make it difficult to portray an atmospheric setting but the mountainous jungle terrain itself is perilous for police pursuits. Not only that but there is also a tense chain-of-command situation because the local Fijian chief isn’t reconciled to colonial law and justice and the heir apparent who is part of the police contingent is conflicted about which rules to obey. Add to that a complication even more remote from local custom: if they find the suspicious strangers, and if they are German, then they will POWs, with a whole ‘nother set of rules about their treatment.

6. The crime that launches the investigation is brutal. But the victim is a most unpopular person which affects the willingness of villagers to help. This enables the European characters to contribute skills to deal with some intriguing clues. It was good to see that the author didn’t fall into the trap of casting all the Europeans as racist.

7. #NoSpoilers about The Villain except to say that the second murder is especially wicked.

8. The cat-and-mouse plot has a Keystone Cops tone when the spear-wielding locals join forces with the police team of three to form a posse.

9. Foreshadowing is achieved through the interior voice of Sergeant Singh. But his thoughts are not always about the crime/s.

10 A satisfactory ending is achieved, but in a most delicate way, involving diplomacy, fairness and hope.

A Shipwreck in Fiji is an entertaining novel, which was perfect bedtime reading to balance my daytime reading of Department of the Vanishing by Johanna Bell. It was the winner of the 2025 Tasmanian Literary Awards, and it’s an amazing pastiche of all sorts of texts that demand a reader’s full attention. More about that later.

You can find out more about Nilima Rao at her website.

NB The cover design is misleading. The designer has failed to note on p.154 that the vessel was a long, open boat, with a single mast, giving the false impression of a vessel from the Age of Sail, which was well over by the time this novel is set.

Author: Nilima Rao
Title: A Shipwreck in Fiji (Akal Singh #2)
Publisher: Echo Publishing, 2025
Cover design by Lisa White
ISBN: 9781786585363, pbk., 274 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Benn’s Books Bentleigh< $32.99

The Afterlife of Harry Playford (2026, Stephen Minter #2), by Steven Carroll

March 29, 2026March 29, 2026 / Lisa Hill / 19 Comments

Like its predecessor Death of a Foreign Gentleman (2024, Stephen Minter#1, see my review), Steven Carroll’s The Afterlife of Harry Playford masquerades as detective fiction. Part One brings us the disappearance of an Australian politician called Harry Playford, and D S Stephen Minter, now resident in the coastal town of Queenscliff, is on the scene to take up the case. The only clue is a pile of neatly folded, expensive clothes left on the beach, and a witness by the lighthouse who while preoccupied by his painting of The Rip, sees a man enter the waves and, later on, a woman on a motorboat steering towards that treacherous waterway between Port Phillip Bay and Bass Strait.

Complying with the expectations of readers of detective fiction, Carroll sends Minter to interview The Witness, The Wife, and The Mistress… and gets nowhere. Harry Playford is apparently missing, but (as in Death of a Foreign Gentleman), there’s no certainty that there has been a crime. It’s not even certain that there’s been a death, accidental or otherwise.

Readers of a certain age will remember somewhat similar aspects in the 1967 disappearance of Prime Minister Harold Holt and the crazy conspiracy theories that emerged afterwards. Carroll has set his novel in 1951, with vague hints of Cold War implications through the work of Minter’s wife Brigid who is doing something secret at a facility nearby. Some records in Canberra hint at a shady past in pre-war Germany — information that no Australian politician would want in the post-war public domain. But the public isn’t aware of this, nor do they know about the odd reactions of the women in Playford’s life that bother Minter, because he keeps Schtum.

So when the hordes turn up out of idle curiosity or to get a journalistic scoop, the disappearance is front page news for a while, and then it fizzles out when there’s no body, an extensive search is inconclusive and the police remain tight-lipped… because there’s nothing to say. It is a mystery, but Carroll has been selective about which elements of a mystery story to incorporate into this intriguing novel.

From Masterclass.com I learned that the ’10 Essential Elements of a Mystery Story’ are: a strong hook that invites the reader to try to solve the crime; an atmospheric setting with an ominous mood; a crime to launch the investigation; a sleuth with a back story and a motive to solve the mystery; and a villain i.e. the culprit whodunit. There should be narrative momentum with a cat-and-mouse plot; a trail of clues including red herrings, plus some foreshadowing… leading to a satisfying conclusion.

Readers who are looking for that kind of story will be disappointed, but The Afterlife of Harry Playford is not intended to follow the rules. Part One has some of those elements, but through the character of Playford’s wife, the novel becomes more of a meditation on the human heart. Reminiscent of the luminous passages in The Eliot Quartet, her thoughts about first love and how it can be crushed by a partner’s ambition transmute into poignant yearning at war with a cynical and hardened heart. Carroll shows us what it’s like to be married to a womaniser in an era when there were so many constraints on a woman’s choices that she often had no choice at all. I found myself thinking of the brave faces of women humiliated in that way: Zara Holt; Jackie Kennedy; and even more recently Hillary Clinton.

Carroll also explores that much maligned group of Australian migrants, the post-war ‘Ten Pound Poms’. After the loss of both his parents in an internment camp for ‘enemy aliens’ because they were German — albeit Jews who’d fled Nazism — Stephen Minter has nothing left to hold him in England, and his wife Brigid Delaney is Irish. Lured by a poster advertising sunny Australia as a migration opportunity, they made their way to the exact same place advertised in the poster.

Of course, neither of them ever took the poster for real. It clearly wasn’t. It wasn’t selling the truth; it was selling dreams. And like a salesman falling for another salesman’s pitch, they bought the thing knowingly. (p.13)

Because as with every other migrant dissatisfied with where they were, there’s always hope.

Hoping that with time you can improve upon the lie and turn it into something that, if not wholly true, is true enough. A bit like falling in love with love before the rose colour fades from your vision and you realise that you’re not in love at all, but stay on anyway. Like two lovers settling for second best, something they can live with well enough. (p.13)

Brigid is unnerved by the town, it feels unreal, like an imitation toytown, a replica of what they’d left behind. Of the Old World.

And a people desperate for you to like what you see, to like them, desperate for approval. Smiling, accommodating, but all the time the nasty side never far away if you don’t give them what they want. <snip>

That’s when you become whinging Poms, and the welcome turns to a sneer. The smile and the broken bottle. That’s when you’re told that if you don’t like it, you can go back to where you came from. (p.14)

Oh yes, even if you fail the test of loyalty and gratitude by accident or omission, (and even if you paid your own way) you’ll feel the sting. I can vouch for the authenticity of that. What puzzles me is the allusion to ‘the smile and the broken bottle’, and as if he’s reading over my shoulder, Carroll has Brigid wondering about it too:

The smile and the broken bottle. Where did she read that? Someone, a colleague back in London, had given her a book, pressed it on her, saying she ought to read it if she insisted on going off to the other side of the world. She can’t remember the book now, but the phrase came back as soon as they encountered the old man. A smile on his face, yes. But written into that smile, the ability to turn. And in an instant. A smile that said we can be as gentle as lambs, until some bastard crosses us. (p.15)

Can anyone enlighten me as to where that comes from?

Stephen Minter is a well-read philosopher from a middle-class secular Jewish family and there are plentiful allusions to books. His mother in Vienna read Hemingway in English. One of the Mitfords makes an appearance of sorts. Brigid learns editing rules at Faber & Faber; she decides she might write a mystery because, writes Carroll playfully, after all…

…creating this thing we call a self, is a bit like an author creating a character. It doesn’t just happen, but is willed. We are one thing, then another. And another. Not so much one life, as a chain of them. Each of us is the author of ourselves. Our selves a series of drafts, and redrafts, with no final copy. (p.200)

Might write a mystery. She’d said it as a sort of joke, or like someone testing a proposition, just to hear how it sounded when it was spoken — and found that nobody was more surprised than she was to discover that the proposition held. Sounded good. Why not? Might write a mystery. It’s a murky world of murky types and murky mystery. Somebody has to shine a light on it, however feeble the light. (p.201)

Death of a Foreign Gentleman paid playful homage to Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and The Third Man, and in Part Two of The Afterlife of Harry Playford where we see Harry Playford’s disintegration, there’s an allusion to The Third Man when Harry tells an anecdote about meeting Orson Welles. Welles who starred in the 1949 film as Harry Limes, the racketeer, a character with the same first name as Playford.

In his address to an admiring audience in Canberra, Playford claims credit for Welles adding a word to the famous Cuckoo Clock Speech:

And he’s pleased with himself:

They came here for a laugh, and he has given them that laughter. The consummate storyteller, with amusing tales of the famous. I like the hat, Mr Welles. (p.213)

And…

… he also tells his audience that Welles had explained aspects of Greene’s plot…

and…

…we readers deduce that might be a catalyst for Playford’s actions.

Very clever!

Author: Steven Carroll
Title: The Afterlife of Harry Playford (Stephen Minter #2)
Publisher: Fourth Estate (Harper Collins) 2026
Cover design and Illustration by Louisa Maggio
ISBN: 9781460764596, pbk., 293 pages
Source: personal library, purchased from Benn’s Books $34.99

Image credit:

map of The Rip: By Nick Carson at English Wikipedia – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17960815

Smile, the War is Over (1983), by Robin Sheiner

March 28, 2026March 29, 2026 / Lisa Hill / 9 Comments

I bet this novel caused a furore when it was first published in 1983. WA author Robin Sheiner’s Smile, the War is Over is about the breakdown of established standards of morality and respectability in Perth during WW2 when US servicemen were stationed there.

I first heard of the novel when I read and reviewed Donna Coates’ Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend, Australian Women’s War Fictions (2023, Sydney University Press) and I bought a copy. Analysing the novel from a 21st century feminist perspective, Coates writes extensively about how it’s an example of war fiction about the home front, and how the absence of Australian men led to changes in employment opportunities and more freedom for women, including enjoying their sexuality with American sailors and pilots. She notes that Sheiner…

…highlights the kinds of problems that arose wherever the Americans were stationed in Australia. Because of the cash jingling in the pockets of these submariners and pilots (paid even better than the ordinary GIs), as well as their “smooth-talking ways,” the Yanks readily monopolise taxis, booze, and women. Disgruntled Australian men retaliate by charging the Yanks five times the going rate for food, drink and taxis, and instigate brawls whenever the GIs boast they have come to “save” Australians. (p. 264, Kindle Edition.)

…Some of these young Australian women were still teenagers, and many of them would, and not just by today’s standards, be considered too drunk to give consent, but Coates ascribes agency to them anyway.

Here, sixteen-year-olds to society matrons are openly licentious, but their profligacy should not be construed as a result of the oft-repeated phrase that Australia is a land where “the flowers have no fragrance, the birds no melody and the women no virtue”, but as a result of women’s acknowledgement of their own sexual desires. According to Marilyn Lake, by the 1940s, young Australian women were not being “seduced into sexual relations,” but actively initiating them. (ibid, p. 267).

I don’t think Sheiner was simply writing historical fiction. I think she was also making a point about the different implications of sexual freedom for men and women. She was writing in the 1980s, when the flaws of 1970s libertarianism were causing many women to re-evaluate those freedoms because (even with The Pill) the consequences were so different for men and women. Sheiner’s book doesn’t glamorise the sexual revolution that took place in Perth during the American sojourn there.

Anyway…

According to an article by WA author Robert Drewe in the Western Australian (30/11/2020), this phenomenon was not uncommon in other places where US servicemen were based but while the shine had worn off in the eastern states, the women of WA retained their ‘enthusiasm’ to the end of the war.

Such histories as John Hammond Moore’s Over-Sexed, Over-Paid, and Over Here (1981) as well as novels as varied as Xavier Herbert’s Soldiers’ Women (1961) and Robin Sheiner’s Smile, the War is Over have dobbed in many of the mothers and grandmothers of West Australians born since — and during — the war. The literature and media of the time described how the Americans were welcomed throughout the country by both sexes as heroic saviours. By war’s end, however, their novelty had long waned in the Eastern States, soured by the constant brawling of Allied soldiers and the string of Melbourne murders committed by US Private Edward Leonski.

As usual, attitudes were different in the west, Perth women went ape over the Yanks, and stayed ape. As Anthony Barker and Lisa Jackson pointed out in Fleeting Attraction: A Social History of American Servicemen in Western Australia During the Second World War, former Pennsylvania factory hands, Depression flotsam and Arkansas farm boys still struggling with their Navy primers on how to read and write suddenly found themselves regarded as urbane and romantic Hollywood heroes.

Events of this era were within living memory at the time of the novel’s publication, but I can find only one contemporary review at Trove, in the Australian Jewish News from 13 May 1983. The critic, with the by-line L.M., notes that the novel is historically accurate and that…

The book will revive memories for Australians who lived through these times, and will also tell the younger generation a great deal about their parents’ earlier years.

Indeed. Imagine being a 40-something Perth war baby and learning from this novel about the way Australian women lavished their ‘devotion’ on the sailors. ‘Tell us about your war, mum’?

Acknowledgements at the front of the book state that the novel draws on historical facts, and that some minor characters are based on (deceased) people that the author knew in her childhood. Her research sources included the US Department of the Navy, the Australian Department of Defence, the Australian Archives and the Battye Library in Perth. There’s also an Historical Note to give context for the novel, which explains that the US sailors retreating from the unstoppable Japanese in SE Asia, arrived to a city whose men, responding to the growing fear of a Japanese invasion of Australia, had just departed to join the fight.

The novel follows the fortunes of different types and classes of women and the relationships they had with the Americans. They began as dancing partners grateful for the generosity of well-paid young men, and depending on circumstances and personalities, they progressed to becoming good-time girls or forming relationships that were sincerely thought, by one if perhaps not by both, to be more long-term. Inevitably there were pregnancies and abortions and heartbreak. There were promises of marriage, some genuine, and some conveniently made without mention of a wife and children back home in the states.

Sheiner goes on to explore some of the hasty engagements that led to the phenomenon of US war-brides. The officers in charge made some effort to sift out the more obvious problems, but a girl of good character with no diseases could, after an exhaustive process, find herself dockside bidding farewell to a family she would most likely never see again and setting off for a great adventure. They were not able to travel with their fiancés, and not all of them were met stateside at the docks. Sometimes this was because wartime security meant that sailing dates and routes were kept secret and a sailor was waiting at the wrong port. Sometimes it was because he changed his mind and vanished without a trace.

And sometimes of course, dreams of a glamorous life crashed into the dull reality of life as the wife of a travelling salesman or farmer.

BTW, Coates in Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend (2023) claims that Smile, the War is Over is the only novel that tells stories of the approximately 7,000 (the figures vary widely) Australian women who married Yanks and moved to the United States. Perhaps she hadn’t come across The Passengers (2018) by Eleanor Limprecht.

Sheiner’s novel is not entirely coherent — it could have done with better editing. There are too many undifferentiated characters, and Sheiner has a tendency to use all her research at the expense of maintaining a narrative flow. At times it seemed more like reading non-fiction than a novel, and I had to remind myself that it was fiction, and possibly even exaggerated to make a more salacious novel of it. Nevertheless there are acute observations about race and class. Without being judgemental about her characters, she shows how lack of education and opportunity made some young women more vulnerable than others. The most vulnerable of all her characters are those brought up in orphanages, and the Aboriginal women.

Sheiner knew about their lives because she had Aboriginal relatives and she understood the impact of the loss of family life for the Stolen Generations.

The most poignant moment comes near the end when an African-American sailor writes to Pearl, his illiterate Aboriginal girl, via an officer who will read it to her. Despite segregation in the American services, he has seen something of the world and in civvy street he has had the opportunity to begin training as a lawyer. It troubles him that there is no sign of a civil rights movement in Australia.

It has worried me more than some to know that all you blacks who are our brothers have not thought to get together to find some kind of justice. You are treated bad out there, worse than slavery, and instead of fighting you have gone into a dream where nothing matters least of all your pride. Things are going to change. I’m going to send money. Get the officer to send me another address that will always reach you, perhaps the vineyard. If I have a son I want him educated. You will have to be strong. Make sure he goes to school and don’t listen if they say he can’t. Everyone in the world has that right. I’ll teach him too in letters. About the law. About what his rights are and how he should go about getting them for his brothers. <snip>

The first thing the white people must be taught is that we’re human too and if we can only do that through their system, then that’s the way it’s got to be. After that will be the time to go back to our ways with pride. (p.201)

Sheiner’s choice to deliver that message through an African American who was only briefly in Perth makes it even more powerful. He does not have the whole picture; he doesn’t know about initiatives on the east coast, and he has no inkling about the powerful role that Aboriginal women have played in Australian Aboriginal politics and society. He just knows that the racism he sees is wrong.

According to the AustLit database, journalist, novelist and short story writer Robin Sheiner (b.1940) …

…is a fifth generation Australian descended from one of Western Australia’s pioneer families. She also has many aboriginal relatives. Sheiner left school at fourteen and travelled widely, working at a variety of jobs.

She attended Perth College and the University of Western Australia. Sheiner worked as a journalist on the West Australian and later at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children. After graduating in 1961 she gained a midwifery certificate, topping the year at King George V Hospital in Sydney. Sheiner began writing in 1980 after partially completing an arts degree. She married into an immigrant family. Her short stories have been read on radio and published in The Bulletin literary supplement.

As well as the novels Smile, the War Is Over : A Novel, (Macmillan 1983) and Beyond the Pale, (Pascoe Publishing 1989), she also published short stories.

In a review at the Australian Jewish News, I learned that Sheiner was a well-known member of the Western Australian Jewish community, and that she was the first WA female writer to be published by Macmillan.

Author: Robin Sheiner
Title: Smile, the War is Over
Publisher: Macmillan, 1983
Jacket design by Julie Gross, jacket photos from the Battye Library WA

ISBN: 0333338987, 1st edition hbk., 212 pages

Source: personal library, purchased from Abebooks.

2026 Indie Book Awards winners

March 24, 2026March 24, 2026 / Lisa Hill / 17 Comments

The Winners for the Indie Book Awards 2026 have been announced.

BOOK OF THE YEAR

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (Penguin Australia), on reserve at the library, I’m no 18 of 26 and they have 5 copies. I thought I’d be cunning by reserving the Large Print edition, assuming there would be fewer requests but I might have been better off to reserve the other print edition. They have 89 requests but 20 copies of it!

(I could buy it, of course, but I’m not sure that I’m going to like a dystopian thriller.)

FICTION

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (Penguin Australia)

NON-FICTION

Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent (Picador Australia)

DEBUT FICTION

When Sleeping Women Wake by Emma Pei Yin (Hachette Australia), see my review

ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION

Wild by Design by Tim Pilgrim (Murdoch Books)

CHILDREN’S

Silverborn: The Mystery of Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend (Lothian Children’s Books)

YOUNG ADULT

Eleanor Jones is Playing with Fire by Amy Doak (Penguin Australia)

You can view the shortlists here and the longlists here.

The Indie Book Awards are sponsored (respectively as above) by HarperCollins Publishers; Allen & Unwin; Melbourne University Press; Pan Macmillan Australia; Thames & Hudson; Hachette Australia; and by Penguin Random House.

A Beautiful Loan (2026), by Mary Costello

March 23, 2026March 29, 2026 / Lisa Hill / 24 Comments

If anything in this review raises issues for you,
help is available at Relationships Australia.

Irish author Mary Costello has had a presence on this blog since guest reviewer Karenlee Thompson (whose novel Notes From the White Room is to be published in 2027) penned a review of The China Factory (2012). In 2019, I read her second novel The River Capture which featured a character who identifies with characters from Ulysses, paying homage to my favourite Irish author James Joyce. Now in 2016, A Beautiful Loan is similarly ‘literary’ in the sense that there are plentiful allusions to books and authors and its protagonist identifies with Albert Camus.

And although I haven’t read Academy Street (2014), this review at The Guardian suggests a similar preoccupation with a character who hovers in the wings rather than be at the centre of her own life. Anna is a needy soul who craves certainty in an uncertain world, and she also yearns to know why her husband behaves the way he does. The reality is that most of us aren’t always clear about our destructive patterns of behaviour, and she isn’t clear about her own motives either. Especially not when she substitutes submission to a vengeful conception of God for submission to a domineering husband.

Another theme that resurfaces in this book is the animal cruelty thread: Anna’s abhorrence for eating meat precipitates a row with her Muslim lover Karim. His demands that her little dog Boo be forbidden the house where he’s been cherished all his life — because he is ‘haram’ — shows the extent of her submission to his interpretation of Islamic practices.

This is the book description from the Text Publishing website:

In Dublin in 1985, nineteen-year-old Anna Hughes is in thrall to Peter Gallagher, an older, worldly man. Anna is introverted and naïve, and Peter’s experience, wide circle of friends and thirst for adventure captivate her. Her obsessive yearning for him leads to marriage and, eventually, a crushing betrayal.

When Anna meets a kind-hearted Algerian man, she quickly falls in love with him. Life with Karim offers stability and renewed hope and Anna begins to uncover deeper layers of herself.

Unfolding over twenty-five years, this is a profound novel about the loss of innocence, the price of love, and the risks of seeking salvation in others. A Beautiful Loan tells a powerful story about longing, survival and the unpredictable road to discovery of the self.

At the author talk I went to last week, Brigid Carrick made an interesting comment about how the Catholic Church in Ireland maintained its dominance over women by enlisting women to control other women, i.e. to pass on the same restrictive conservative beliefs to their daughters. So, in a sense, women in thrall to the church were doing it to themselves, and it took the courage of the few to lead the movement for liberation. In Costello’s novel, we see how the protagonist Anna is subjected to coercive control in the two most significant relationships of her life, and how she substitutes one religion that controls women’s life and relationships, for another that is only superficially different because the men interpreting it do the same, including threatening eternal damnation.

It takes therapy for Anna to recognise that she’s always been a follower and susceptible to the numinous. Typically, she blames herself :

—My problem, I say, or one of my problems is that I’m easily swayed by other people’s ideas and opinions, believing them to be superior to my own. It even happens in school, with my colleagues. I’m not even conscious when it’s happening… but somehow I’m frequently unable to keep myself separate — I’m liable to fuse with anyone or anything. (p.189)

But with guidance from a Jungian cousellor, Anna learns to be honest with herself about her need to take responsibility for her own behaviour because that’s the first step to recovery. On her way to middle age, she needs to stop making excuses for herself. She needs to recognise that her inertia about ending relationships is based on a fear of hurting the very person who is hurting her, and failing to recognise that relationships break down all the time. Grown men are more than capable of getting on with their own lives when a relationship ends! Plus she needs to stop taking Islamic threats of divine retribution literally so that she is haunted by the thought of Judgement Day because she’s broken religious prohibitions imposed by the man in her life.

Her counsellor tells her that she is a…

God-minded person and idealistic in nature, and wanting to live a life of submission and humility is what people have been attracted to down through the ages — the call to religious life. (p.195)

But Islam like all religions is flawed and full of dogma and rigid, man-made rules which have been depriving her of the things she loves: her little dog Boo, cast outside as ‘haram’, and art, literature and music, all forbidden by Karim. His rules have compromised her relationships with her family too, because she isn’t ‘allowed’ to visit her parents at Christmas. Unlike Peter Ho Davies’ The Fortunes (2016) which I read recently, A Beautiful Loan is not about negotiating relationships complicated by differences in race, religion and culture; it’s about differentiating between those issues and how they can be manipulated to achieve coercive control.

At times I felt that this novel when interrogating Anna’s spiritual beliefs was a bit too mystical — too fey — for me, especially when her dreams foreshadow events that subsequently take place. I felt even more dubious when she takes up Islamic beliefs and practices. I’m also #understatement not enthusiastic about narcissistic characters from the twenty-something age group beloved of Sally Rooney’s fans. But the beauty of Costello’s writing kept me going and these doubts faded as I began to engage with the bigger picture Costello portrays. Through Anna’s self-absorption, we see the way in which she gave too much precedence to her own inner life at the expense of her relationships, and maybe that’s why she chose men who did not share her interests and were ‘unavailable’ to her so that she could ring-fence her solitude.

The cover art by Alex de Marcos captures Anna’s quiet doubts and her melancholy about the direction her life is taking, but it also hints at a steely determination to sort herself out.

I read this book at this time for #ReadingIrelandMonth hosted by Cathy at 746 Books.

Author: Mary Costello
Title: A Beautiful Loan
Publisher: Text Publishing, 2026
Cover design by Imogen Stubbs
Cover artwork by Alex de Marcos
ISBN: 9781923058286, pbk., 213 pages
Review copy courtesy of Text Publishing

Star Gazers (2025), by Duncan Sarkies

March 22, 2026March 29, 2026 / Lisa Hill / 11 Comments

There’s an educational maxim that applies to discipline policy in schools: the discipline system has to work for the weakest teachers, not just the ones who can quell a riot by lifting an eyebrow. That’s true of democracies too: they have to work for the weakest societies and the weak people within them. Democracies need free and fair elections with robust procedures, accountability and transparency. Star Gazers, by NZ author Duncan Sarkies, is an eloquent allegory of everything that can go wrong when these processes fail.

And it stars Alpacas!

This is the book description:

The alpacas are nervous. Accusations are flying about a rigged election, a mysterious illness is spreading, the Alpaca News is being censored by higher powers, and skullduggery is threatening the Breeders Showcase.

Amidst a mass of self-interested parties, a forthright vet and a diplomatic engineer strive to protect the herds and restore democracy.

By turns vital, farcical, heartbreaking and chilling, the much-anticipated alpaca novel by award-winning writer Duncan Sarkies is a wild and tender leap – or, more accurately, pronk – into the heart of alpaca breeding, and a snapshot of a world at a crossroads.

For the uninitiated, this is pronking:

As the battle between the Breeders Party and the Reformers plays out, Star Gazers is a brilliant exposé of characteristics we’ve all seen in politicians. Shona Tisdall is the villain: powered by ambition and avarice she has diversified into producing ‘health biscuits’ which have unexpected effects on the alpacas. This conflict of interest brings her into conflict with the vet Willemijn, who has science on her side. But Shona has the numbers because her protégé Caroline has interfered with the vote count in the recent election…

Shona has a compliant (weak) husband and a daughter, Alyssa, desperate to please her forceful mother by breeding a champion — and goes to extraordinary lengths to try to achieve it. The President of ABONZ is also compliant but Daph and Pat, the editors of Alpaca News try to resist the pressure to suppress Willemijn’s warning about the biscuits. Shona fights back by appointing her niece as ‘social media manager’ — offering one of many moments of sly humour in this novel:

Bianca thinks that Pat spends too long on each article. Bianca demonstrated how to get ChatGPT to write the first drafts and then how, with a few quick adjustments to make it seem more human, this method speeds up the process so they can make more content, post more frequently. Bianca knows how to create feel-good clickbait that leads to feedback loops to keep a constant flow going. Pat thinks it is a constant flow of diarrhoea, but for Bianca, quantity beats quality every time. (p.239-40)

This frees Bianca to play with an AI website that makes paintings following prompts…

… instead of working, she sits at her computer typing in phrases like ‘Weightlifting Octopus’ or ‘Sudoku Baboon’ or ‘Sudoku Albatross’ or ‘Sudoku Zebra Sitting in a Jacuzzi Riding to the Moon on a Flying Carpet.’ (p.240)

(Pat knows this is aerodynamically impossible, but Bianca seems to have no interest in reality, in particular the reality of making the Alpaca News.

Lloyd, who has the courage to covertly share the unredacted report of the Kings Counsel appointed to investigate the rigged election, but not to courage to confront anybody over it, fancies Pat. At the Breeders Showcase orchestrated to suit Shona by The (bemused) Wedding Planner, he has been wrangling the Hornets Rugby Club who have been roped in as security to keep ‘troublemakers’ out of the Special General Meeting.

Lloyd wishes he was at the Auction Gala, celebrating with more elite company, especially given Pat has knitted a scarf for the auction. He was very much hoping to make a winning bid as a way of showing off his financial stability to her, but this is a task that takes precedence. (p.312)

Alas for Lloyd. He is weak, just as Caleb is weak. The only strong men in this novel are the Hornets, but that’s the wrong kind of strong.

Underlying the political intrigue and the sly humour, is the importance of animal welfare when money is involved. A win for Willemijn the vet means protecting the alpacas from a contaminated product, but protecting animals from contaminating each other usually means a very painful process for all that care for them.

It is better if the protections of democracy never fail in the first place.

Star Gazers was longlisted for the the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. I don’t understand why it wasn’t shortlisted, it is a marvellous book, utterly absorbing, droll and poignant in equal measure, and crafted to deliver questions of relevance around the world.

Author: Duncan Sarkies
Title: Star Gazers
Publisher: Victoria University Press, 2025
Cover design by Todd Atticus
ISBN: 9781776922239, pbk., 401 pages
Source: personal library, purchased from Fishpond

Spell the Month in Books March 2026

March 20, 2026 / Lisa Hill / 7 Comments

Spell 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, running late. This month, the theme is ‘Pi Day’, ‘March Madnes’s or ‘Green Covers’.

Hmm. I have read a couple of books starring mathematical characters, but not five of them, and not beginning with the right letters. Green Covers is Just Too Hard: even a cursory look at the books on my shelves showed that I have barely any with green spines, except for the Viragos and they don’t have the right letters either. So, with misgivings because the jocular tone of ‘March Madness’ suggests Alice in Wonderland and other light-hearted ideas, I decided to use mental illness as my connecting theme.

M

Mural, (2024) by Stephen Downes

Reading Mural puts the reader inside the head of a psychopath. The reader soon knows that he is a horrible creature, and yet…

Downes’ cunning narrative is completely beguiling. D is intelligent, thoughtful, observant, and chatty. His monologue about his obsessions, memories, and fascination with art is wholly absorbing… until, that is, he addresses his psychiatrist and the reader suddenly remembers who this charming narrator is. He is writing this narrative because he is a very dangerous man.

A

The Architect (2000), by Jillian Watkinson

This fine book subverts the romance genre with a couple who are both at breaking point because of a motorcycle accident that has left Jules dependant on his wife Donna who has had to leave her job and become his carer. She is a burnt-out nurse, anguished that she has become inured to the pain she witnesses in the burns unit where she works; Jules can’t draw because of his newly acquired disability and he is struggling with the impact this has had on his identity.

R

Ravenous Girls (2023) by Rebecca Burton

Rebecca Burton’s award-winning Ravenous Girls is about the impact of anorexia on other members of the family, especially a teenage sibling. As a nuanced portrait of the secondary effects of mental illness, Ravenous Girls shows Frankie gradually realising that the growing distance between them is because Justine is sucking all the emotional space out of their family.

It’s a reminder us that support for mental illness should also mean support for family members who are impacted by it.

C

Cure (2025), by Katherine Brabon

Cure tackles the difficult issue of bad parenting causing problems for a child with a chronic illness causing disability. The prevailing narrative is of heroic parents doing their utmost, but in this novel Thea’s parents are conflicted about her treatment. While her father is convinced that conventional medicine is the best option, her mother has been seduced into believing a lot of nonsense from the ‘Wellness’ industry and her obsessive behaviour is a challenge for a young woman to negotiate.

H

The Octopus and I (2020), by Erin Hortle

‘H’ was a challenge. I was about to give up when I remembered Erin Hortle’s debut novel featuring a young woman struggling with her body image after radical surgery for cancer forms a semi-symbiotic relationship with an octopus…

This obsession is triggered by her emotional response to radical surgery for breast cancer and the empathy with which Erin Hortle writes about this is not merely sensitive, it is educative as well.

Thinking about the depiction of mental illness in the books I’ve read, I still think that the best of them is Isabelle of the Moon and Stars (2014), by S.A. Jones.

The novel was written out of dissatisfaction with the way that mental illness is portrayed as a quirky idiosyncrasy in contemporary culture. Think Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project and Toni Jordan’s Addition. These presumably well-intentioned books show that mental illness can be no barrier to finding love. But as I wrote in my review of Isabelle:

…there can be a cruel world of difference between a minor obsessive disorder or high-functioning Asperger’s Syndrome and other much more debilitating mental health conditions and the important thing for everyone to get right is to treat each person as an individual, and to avoid stereotyping.

What I liked about Isabelle of the Moon and Stars is that it doesn’t depict mental illness as merely an exasperating quirk. It shows not just the depth of suffering that comes with a capricious and devastating disability for the person with mental illness, but also the unhappiness that it inflicts on the man who loves her while he tries to negotiate the relationship. At the same time the novel also shows that Isabelle’s condition is only part of her, and it doesn’t define her.

Next month: Easter. That’ll be a challenge too.

Author Talk: Brigid Carrick and her debut novel The Belfast Express

March 19, 2026March 19, 2026 / Lisa Hill / 15 Comments

My knees are still a bit unreliable and my eyes are not great for driving at night, but the Mentone Public Library has reinvented itself as the Kingston Writers Centre, and it’s not far from home. I wasn’t going to miss their first Meet the Author event…

The featured author was Irish-Australian author Brigid Carrick, who has just published her first novel, The Belfast Express. (She has also published short stories under the name Breda Hertaeg, and you can read these at her blog.)

The Belfast Express is an historical novel, set in 1970s Dublin, and it’s a book with a story that had to be hold. Carrick told the audience about how when Ireland became a Republic, the Constitution was written to entrench the power of the Catholic Church and deny women agency over their own lives and bodies. Repressive rules of behaviour entrenched in the Constitution were much more difficult to reform than parliamentary legislation, which is why Ireland had to hold referenda to legalise abortion (2018), divorce (1995) and marriage equality (2015).

In the Author’s Postscript, she writes:

Irish laws also forbade married women from working, tying them to the house. For those who got an education, most girls were taught cooking, cleaning and laundry rather than physics, chemistry and biology. Those subjects might have taught girls about the world and how our bodies function.

This story needed to be told. It’s fictionalised, but was inspired by the women of Ireland who, in 1972, were brave enough to stand up to the Irish government and the Catholic Church by going to Belfast on the ‘Contraceptive Train’. (p.326)

This is the book description from Goodreads:

Dublin, 1971. Free spirited 18-year-old Brianna Robinson defies her Mother’s expectations, her neighbour’s judgment and the authority of the local Parish Priest by enrolling in nursing college in London. But made to stay in Dublin by her father, she befriends fellow nurses Muriel, Iris and Shauna and the four friends are assigned midwifery in the grim slums of Dublin.

Corporation Place was home to large families, cramped spaces, hidden violence, desperate poverty and perpetually pregnant women. The four friends soon learn that it’s not just ”girls with loose morals” who have unwanted pregnancies.

When Brianna is assaulted by her parish priest she finds herself needing to end her own pregnancy. From then on, she finds the strength to champion the rights of Irish women against the Catholic Church. A raucous trip to Northern Ireland gives access to contraception unheard of in the south and The Belfast Express train becomes a regular arrival at Dublin’s Connolly Station.

Brianna finds her power, purpose and love in this heart-warming story of being a young woman in 1970s Ireland.

The story is based on Carrick’s own real-life experiences as a midwife working in the slums of Dublin in the 1960s and 70s. Coming from a comfortable home background, she and her colleagues were exposed not only to brutal poverty for the first time in their lives, but also the danger and drudgery of repeated pregnancies because contraception was against the law. (She told us about delivering a ninth baby to a women who’d had 22 pregnancies — imagine!)

It was a society that was about 90% Catholic, strictly controlled by the Catholic Church. Control covered all kinds of things we might take for granted: movies were censored and books by authors such as Edna O’Brien had to be smuggled in from Northern Ireland which was much more free. To get contraception, or access abortion, women had to take the ferry to England or use the ‘Belfast Express’.

The train known as the ‘Contraceptive Train’ came to prominence in 1971 when women activists travelled from Dublin to Belfast to purchase contraceptives that were legal in Northern Ireland but prohibited by law in the Republic of Ireland. Carrick has used this historical event when the women refused to hand over their ‘contraband’ to Customs. The protest and ensuing publicity was a catalyst for change.

This is actual footage of the protest:

And this BBC program features the voices of women looking back on the day.

This was a most enlightening talk and I’m looking forward to reading the novel.

Thanks to the great team of volunteers who brought us this event!

Update, later the same day: This was a sold-out event, so locals who missed out will be pleased to hear that they are running it again, on Wednesday 8th April. Tickets at https://events.humanitix.com/brigid-carrick-kwc.

Author: Brigid Carrick
Title: The Belfast Express
Publisher: Ventura Press, 2026
Cover design by Deborah Parry Graphics
ISBN: 9781922923325, pbk., 326 pages
Source: purchased from the author on the night.

1985, A Novel (2025) by Dominic Hoey

March 18, 2026March 29, 2026 / Lisa Hill / 6 Comments

Longlisted for the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, 1985, a Novel is Dominic Hoey’s third novel. He’s a poet, author and playwright based in Auckland, and his previous fiction includes Poor People With Money (2022) and the bestseller Iceland (2017) which was also longlisted for the Ockhams.

Although I haven’t read this author before, I think it’s probably safe to say that he writes about the underclass in New Zealand. From the book description on his website, it appears that Iceland was not about the Nordic country, nor was it about the clean and green image of ice-capped mountains that New Zealand projects to tourists. 1985, a Novel is prefaced by an epigram which says

Nostalgia is a gentle madness
the past was like this too
you just don’t remember.

The past which Hoey so masterfully recreates is no idyll. This is the book description:

It’s 1985 and Obi’s on the cusp of teenagehood, after a childhood marked by poverty, dysfunctional family dynamics, (dis)organised crime and violence. His dad’s delusional, his mum’s real sick, the Rainbow Warrior just exploded, and it’s time for Obi to grow up and get out of the spacies parlour.

When he and his best mate Al discover a map leading to unknown riches, Obi wonders if this windfall could be the thing that turns his family’s fortunes around. Instead, he’s thrown into an adventure where the stakes are a lot higher than the games he loves.

An electric novel about life in a multi-cultural, counter-cultural part of Auckland pre-gentrification.

This coming-of-age novel is a vivid picture of intergenerational poverty, but the tone is lightened by the lively and sometimes comedic narration of its eleven-year-old central character, Obi. (His nickname is derived from Obi Wan Kenobi, the wise old man and Jedi Master from the Star Wars franchise). Wise beyond his years but sometimes painfully naïve, Obi knows he has his mother’s love but yearns for connection with his father… He wants more than just learning how to be a skilled shoplifter.

The characterisation of this father is uncomfortable for those of us who’ve taught the children of feckless parents. One can’t know what circumstances have led to them being irresponsible — unemployed and unemployable — but empathy for such parents soon dries up when their children bear the brunt of it. It’s their children who reveal that there’s always money for drugs and drink and ciggies, but not for breakfast or lunch, or shoes and clothing for growing children or for school excursions. Those costs are inevitably borne by the child’s teacher, sometimes with help from charities, and the parents know it and take advantage of it.

What Hoey reveals in this novel is what those parents often don’t seem to know: that their children are watching them and trying to reconcile the discomfort of their judgements and their concern for other members of the family, with their love for the errant parent.

Obi’s father is a gentle soul and a dreamer but he is also spectacularly selfish. With a criminal history of drug-dealing and an unshakeable belief in his role as a poet, this man seems incapable of dealing with reality. He’s deaf to his wife’s pleas that he get a job because they (literally) have no money. The children are often hungry, and they are about to be evicted. Although they’ve never had much, she has held the household together but now she is gravely ill.

She’s also asked him to get his mate Gus out of the house because of the threat of violence that he and his gang represent. Obi believes that his father is devoted to his wife, but on this issue he is more loyal to Gus who’s recently been released from prison and has some associates that would worry any responsible parent or loving husband.

The children, Summer and Obi, don’t know just how serious their mother’s condition is, but they have intuited that their lives are about to be upended. Summer recognises that — as a girl in her later teenage years — it will fall to her to take over her mother’s role and she wants a different future. Her response to the disintegrating situation at home is to act out with some dubious peers: disappearing from home, staying out late and certainly not securing a future through school. For Obi, getting something to eat is either a case of visiting his Pacifica friend Al and joining a family meal generously shared, or shoplifting fish and chips.

A dairy in Devonport, Auckland. (Wikipedia)

Obi’s poignant attempts to be strategic will steal any reader’s heart. He loves playing ‘spacies’ (arcade games) in the local ‘dairy’ i.e. a convenience store, known as a ‘milk bar’ in Australia, a ‘drug store’ in the US, or a ‘corner shop’ in the UK. But he is limited by which games are available to him and by not having enough money to play the coin-operated machines as much as he would like.

Nevertheless, he’s become impressively good at these games. When a competition comes along, he thinks he can win the $500 — a lot of money in 1985, enough to buy the Commodore 64 personal computer that he yearns for. But he wants the prize to save the house, which is the only security he’s ever had. With Al by his side, he hunts down the dairies that have the particular game being promoted by the competition. His efforts are initially sabotaged by being banned from the dairy for some sleight-of-hand with a piece of wire to avoid paying, and by a rival called Rats.

For Obi, tackling the responsibility his father has failed to undertake, getting some money is top priority. So when he stumbles on a hand-drawn map in Gus’s backpack, he links it to adult conversations he’s overheard and — inspired by reading Treasure Island with his mother — he sets out to find the buried treasure. (X marks the spot!) To say this turns out to be a disaster is an understatement.

There’s nothing heavy-handed about Hoey’s allusions to racism, but the reader can see that even eleven-year-olds have learned to be cautious. When they miss the last bus home after a first attempt to dig up the treasure (with a rusty garden trowel), it’s pouring with rain and there’s a very long walk back home. Obi suggests asking to use the phone at one of the houses they’re passing…

We stood in front of a wild hedge growing out onto the footpath. Behind it sat a house made out of mismatched wood and windows from half a dozen different houses. It was the first place we’d walked past that had lights on.

“What if we get raked?’ Al said.

‘What?’

‘Raked. Like what perverts do.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about, I was so tired and wet I didn’t care what happened.

‘Let’s go knock,’ I said, walking down a narrow gravel path. Al waited back by the hedge.

‘What are you doing?’ I said.

‘You go, you’re palagi*. They might call the cops if they see me.’ (p.232)

* ‘Palagi’ is a Pacifica term of Samoan origin, used as ‘pakeha’ is by Māori, to denote white people.

Like Claire Mabey writing at the Spinoff, I’m surprised that 1985, a Novel didn’t make the Ockhams shortlist. Mabey was also surprised that Tracy Farr’s Wonderland and Bryan Walpert’s Empathy didn’t make the cut, and so was I. (See my reviews here and here.) Since I’ve only read one of the shortlisted novels, (Catherine Chidgey’s The Book of Guilt which is of course, brilliant) all I can say is that the other three must be very good indeed to have bested these three books which I recommend as very fine reading if you can get your hands on them.

Author: Dominic Hoey
Title: 1985, a novel
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2025
Cover design (front) by Gabi Lardies
ISBN: 9781776950782, pbk., 282 pages
Source: Kingston Library

Image credit:

Dairy in Devonport, Auckland, June 2012: Wikipedia, by Nick-D – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27673722

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

March 17, 2026March 19, 2026 / 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.

Jessica 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.

Shortlisted 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.

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.

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. Update: The Smithsonian Institute is reporting that a 600-year-old Jewish prayer book stolen by the Nazis and held until recently in an Austrian Library has finally been returned to the heirs, and sold for US $6.4 million. I’m putting its image here so that you can see that Jewish prayer books were every bit as beautiful as other Books of Hours that we have seen.

Rothschild Vienna Mahzor (1415) created by a medieval scribe who identified himself as Moses, son of Menachem.

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:

Opening from the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, c. 1440, with Catherine kneeling before the Virgin and Child, surrounded by her family heraldry. Opposite is the start of Matins in the Little Office, illustrated by the Annunciation to Joachim, as the start of a long cycle of the Life of the Virgin. By Meester van Catharina van Kleef – The Morgan Library & Museum, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3997509
1826 Omer calendar-book from Verona (Italy), in the collection of the Jewish Museum of Switzerland: By LGLou – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=118467299
The Rothschild Vienna Mahzor: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-nazis-stole-this-rare-jewish-prayer-book-decorated-with-dragons-unicorns-and-intricate-floral-patterns-it-just-sold-for-6-4-million-at-auction-180988206/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_term=3172026&utm_content=recent-card&fbclid=IwY2xjawQosEtleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFhR2laYm0ybWF3SUdyNVdEc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHn7TmqB7ee99pOoM6J8oW-X8YxYNSHWz6PkoAl8ZGQmo0DGKV0q1VXXBkpJs_aem_Yl7vh08hEPfFxBFQy3zB2A

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

March 15, 2026March 29, 2026 / Lisa Hill / 16 Comments

Catching 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

March 14, 2026March 29, 2026 / Lisa Hill / 9 Comments

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.

But 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)

This 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:

Harappan seal: the British Museum claims copyright on this image, but I reckon this is world heritage: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1947-0416-1

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ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

For lovers of Australian and New Zealand literary fiction; Ambassador for Australian literature

Heat Wave in Berlin (1961), by Dymphna Cusack

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Spell the Month in Books March 2026

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Author Talk: Brigid Carrick and her debut novel The Belfast Express

1985, A Novel (2025) by Dominic Hoey

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

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

The Shortest History of India (2022) by John Zubrzycki

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