by Andrew Croome
Allen & Unwin
Document Z is last year’s Australian / Vogel Literary Prize winner. Written by Andrew Croome, it is a political tale of espionage, intrigue and betrayal. It tells the story of the defection of the Petrovs, Vladimir and Evdokia, from Soviet Russia to
The story is a documented part of Australian history. It was covered extensively in the media at the time. However, in Document Z, the author converts ASIO documents, first-hand accounts and 1950s and 60s media hysteria into a cohesive whole. The novel was written over three years as part of a PhD. Andrew Croome’s exhaustive research is combined with a keen sense of literary intuition. The story is interesting enough in its own right but Croome’s ability to get right inside the minds of the main players on both sides and those on the sidelines adds a whole other dimension to the reader’s experience. The story moves along at a steady pace; a well-structured plot peppered with stop-and-think insights into the mental states of various characters and sharp observations that confirm in the author that all-important writer’s quality of Empathy. While much of the novel’s subject matter is born of research, it is the imagined and the embellished in it that both successfully announces Croome’s arrival on the literary scene and brings out the humanity behind a story that without this treatment could so easily have been consigned to mere factual records, transcripts and the dusty pages of history. In Document Z, the Petrovs and their story are very much alive. Croome even gives an ASIO agent a pulse. Who knew? Brilliant from start to finish!
Signed Copies of Document Z are available at the counter.
This is a review from The Weekend Australian
More reviews available here.
by Simon
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by Sonia OrchardSonia Orchard’s debut novel is inspired by the life of Noel Mewton-Wood, an Australian-born pianist and a prodigy of Sir Thomas Beecham. He first rose to fame in London during the Blitz in World War Two, performing concerts with Beecham and recitals which continued through bombing raids and which helped to galvanize the spirits of Londoners during the darkest days of the war. Sadly Mewton-Wood committed suicide in 1953 at the age of 31 after the death of a lover. The narrator of the novel is a young musician who himself is enthralled by Mewton-Wood’s youthful expertise and beauty. The young man’s longing and obsession for the charismatic Noel are sadly one-sided; the reader is left to endure the narrator’s inevitable decline into melancholy. Sonia Orchard writes beautifully about music, which is at the centre of the novel, and about the hazardous nature of homosexual love in the England of World War Two and the more difficult, puritanical, post-war years when the police were active in the prosecution of such activity. The writing is absorbing; Sonia Orchard reveals the musical and emotional life of a young Australian musician of great promise. Anyone with an interest in music will find the book an absolute joy.
by Chris
by Katherine JohnsonBased in part on the true story of the pursuit of a Uruguayan fishing boat by an Australian vessel in the Southern Ocean in 2003, Pescador’s Wake recounts on one level the chase through some of the world’s most dangerous waters and on another it describes the emotional impact on the families left behind in both in Uruguay and Australia. Desperate to escape enslavement to the unscrupulous Spanish owner of the Pescador, the ship’s captain chooses to risk the lives of his crew in order to land his illegally-caught catch. The captain of the Australian vessel, who is struggling to come to terms with the death of his son, is ordered to follow ‘in hot pursuit’. The text has an immediacy which both puts you the reader in danger with the seamen in the middle of the raging oceans and also gives you insight into this hazardous occupation and the fragile life of the families left at home. Katherine Johnson’s writing describes vibrantly the sprawling southern oceans and the extreme weather conditions endured by those who work there. She is also able to portray the searing impact of family loss and deprivation on the women left behind on shore. Excellent.
by Chris
by Malla Nunn
Steven Carroll’s The Lost Life follows the successful Miles Franklin Award-winning The Time We Have Taken. In this new novel Carroll leaves behind the familiar setting of
Catherine and Daniel are young lovers from a town north of
While in the gardens, the lovers witness a very private ‘ceremony’ between Miss Emily Hale, an American woman whose rented cottage Catherine has been hired to clean and the famous poet T.S. Eliot. The ceremony ends with the burial of a metal box in the flowerbed. The older lovers depart leaving Catherine and Daniel hidden in the bushes wondering at the import of what they have witnessed. Before Catherine can stop him, Daniel, known in the village for his mischievous pranks, leaps out of the bushes and digs up the metal tin. He does so for ‘a lark’ and as a sort of gift to Catherine. She is unimpressed despite her curiosity and orders him to return it to the flowerbed. However Daniel fails to do so before Miss Hale and Eliot return to find the ground disturbed and the box missing. Eliot immediately suspects his estranged wife of having a hand in the disappearance of the box (she is unwilling to admit the failure of her marriage and has taken to stalking him). The poet is furious and inconsolable and the incident leads him to depart from the village days later.
Read the rest of Simon's review here.
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