From The Conversation: Books and Ideas, 10th July, 2026, written by Hind Elhinnawy, Senior Lecturer, School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University
The death of the Iranian novelist and feminist writer at the age of 80 marks the loss of one of the most courageous and original voices in modern Persian literature. For more than five decades, Parsipur wrote women into spaces from which they had often been excluded: history, politics, spirituality and even storytelling.
Imprisoned under both the shah and the Islamic Republic, censored, banned and eventually exiled, she remained committed to a simple but radical idea: women deserve to be the authors of their own lives.
The death of the Iranian novelist and feminist writer at the age of 80 marks the loss of one of the most courageous and original voices in modern Persian literature. For more than five decades, Parsipur wrote women into spaces from which they had often been excluded: history, politics, spirituality and even storytelling.
Imprisoned under both the shah and the Islamic Republic, censored, banned and eventually exiled, she remained committed to a simple but radical idea: women deserve to be the authors of their own lives.
Born in Tehran in 1946, Parsipur entered Iranian literature at a time when female writers occupied only a small corner of the literary landscape. After studying sociology at the University of Tehran in the late 1960s, she emerged as part of a generation of female writers who transformed the modern Persian literary landscape.
After the pioneering work of academic and writer Simin Daneshvar, Parsipur came to be recognised as a distinctive voice in a wave of female authors who expanded the possibilities of modern Persian fiction. After publishing short stories and novellas throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Parsipur published The Dog and the Long Winter in 1976, further establishing a literary career that would eventually make her one of the most influential voices in modern Persian literature.
Parsipur’s commitment to speaking openly about power and injustice came at a heavy personal cost.
In the 1970s, while working as a producer and editor for Iranian National Television, she resigned in protest after the execution of two poets by Savak, the shah’s secret police. Her opposition to repression led to her first imprisonment.
Rather than silencing her, those years deepened her determination to write. Soon after her release, she published Touba and the Meaning of Night, the novel that brought her widespread recognition among Iranian readers. She later documented her experiences of incarceration in Prison Memoir and Kissing the Sword). International recognition followed, including in 1994 the Lillian Hellman–Dashiell Hammett Award for writers persecuted for exercising their freedom of expression.
What distinguishes Parsipur from many political writers is that she never reduced literature to ideology. Instead, she used imagination to expose systems of power. Her novels are filled with women searching, not simply for rights or equality, but for meaning, autonomy and selfhood.
In Touba and the Meaning of Night, Parsipur followed a woman’s search for spiritual meaning against the backdrop of 20th-century Iran’s political upheavals, placing female experience at the centre of the nation’s history. Women Without Men further developed this through imagining entirely new possibilities for women’s lives. First published in 1989 and later banned in Iran because of its frank engagement with female sexuality and social taboos, Women Without Men went on to become Parsipur’s most widely read and celebrated work.
Part fable and part political allegory, the novella follows five women searching for freedom beyond the limits imposed by family, convention and authority. Through magical and often surreal encounters – including a woman who becomes a tree – the novel envisions new worlds of possibility for women.
Censorship only amplified the novel’s impact. Banned in Iran and circulated informally for years, Women Without Men became an underground classic.
In March 2026, its first full English-language translation introduced Parsipur to a new international readership and earned a place on the International Booker prize longlist. More than three decades after its original publication, the novel’s questions about women’s freedom remained as urgent as ever.
Parsipur spent a lifetime asking what might happen if women stopped seeking permission to be free.
In 1994, Parsipur left Iran for California. Exile gave her safety, but it never gave her distance. Iran remained the backdrop to her writing, her politics and her hopes for the future, even after decades abroad.
Even in her final public interventions, Parsipur remained fiercely independent. During the recent military conflict involving Iran, she opposed foreign military intervention, arguing that “freedom cannot be given to Iran from outside” and that “the people of Iran themselves must win their own freedom”. Her position was entirely consistent with a life spent resisting all forms of domination – whether exercised by monarchs, religious authorities or foreign powers.
Shahrnush Parsipur leaves behind a body of work that transformed Persian literature, but also something less tangible and perhaps more lasting: a powerful example of how to speak, write and live without surrendering to fear.
Throughout her life, Parsipur refused to accept the limits imposed upon her – as a writer, as a woman or as a citizen. That refusal became the defining force of both her life and her work.
A recent read completed at the end of June was another instalment of the Black Inc short history series – ‘The Shortest History of Scotland’ by Murray Pittock, published in 2026, of 205 pages.
While this book was of specific interest to me [because of family ancestry], I did find it difficult to read at times amongst various distractions, etc over a period of weeks. However, with persistence, it provided an excellent summary of historical Scottish and English kings, with a few discrepancies compared to the listing in my recently completed family history publication. With the proliferation of ancient kings, tribes, family allegiances, etc, it was difficult at times to keep a track of who and what aspect of their history and relationships with each other was being covered by the author, although I guess that is not unusual when trying to establish an accurate history of pre-1000 AD times! As noted on the book cover, ‘The Shortest History of Scotland argues that its very ambiguity is what has made the nation a central part of the global story’, a nation described as one of the oldest nations in Europe whose territory has remained [with some minor adjustments] fundamentally unchanged since the fifteenth century!
So Pittock takes us from the very beginning – Scotland before Scotland, a tribal society closely connected by sea to Ireland, and later becoming a place defined by its being beyond the Roman wall [with the Romans in the latter part of the first century AD, not venturing much beyond the confines of ‘England’ as it then was]. Although if the DNA research undertaken in my family lines are any indication, there was some degree of interaction with the Scots beyond the ‘wall’ – that research indication that my ancestral family lines qyuite likely arose from a single Thracian cavalryman as part of the Thracian Cohorts in England at the time the Romans were having a bit of strife from the locals. It was at this time that Hadrian’s wall was being built and the 20th Legion was part of the construction team before moving north to construct the Antonine wall. Interestingly, though not confirmed as a precise connection, reference [page 163], in discussing the work of the Scot explorer and missionary, David Livingstone [1813-73], mention is made of Livingstone’s companion at the time ‘Sir John Kirk [who] ‘played a role in the treaty between Great Britain and Zanzibar for the suppression of the slave trade in 1873’.
Anyway, putting that aside! Supporting my comment above, of the occasional difficulty of following the historical trends depicted, one reviewer [a Rowan MacDonald] noted that ‘Murray Pittock traces the history from stone circles and Romans through to modern day and the likes of Brexit. His writing is clear and to the point – even though there was still content over my head…..The book sometimes resembled a bunch of names and dates that were confusing to remember, but the fast pacing ensured any tedious sections flew by. Discussions of religious histories and politics reminded me of school textbooks, though I quickly re-engaged during strong sections on recent Scottish independence talks and Brexit’. My thoughts precisely!
Certainly, the book also provided a clearer understanding of the many conflicts both within Scotland itself and against English Kings and their forces. There was certainly no shortage of wars and conflicts in Scotland’s history and the book provided for this reader understanding of such occurrences as Bannockburn and Culloden [with as far as I can ascertain, events in which my ancestors were likely involved]. The latter actually received, along with other occasions of the time, an interesting coverage in the recent TV series ‘The Outlander’!
I also agreed with MacDonald’s comment that ‘I particularly enjoyed reading about Robert the Bruce, William Wallace, Robbie Burns, Sir Walter Scott and the origins of Scots language, bagpipes and tartan. Away from battles and royalty, it was interesting to learn how ordinary people lived during the times [and about] the extent of deep ties and alliances with France’ [another aspect brought to life in ‘Outlander’].
In this year’s July edition of the Australian Book Review, Gordon Pentland notes that ‘The overall narrative of the Shortest History is shaped by Scotland’s wider connections, and the focus is on its multiple ethnicities and languages, both as it became a nation up to the fourteenth century and as it has been refashioned in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At the same time, there is also a reassuringly old-fashioned emphasis on battles and risings, a maps-and-chaps style rendering of national turning points. Pittock is one of the experts on the 1746 Battle of Culloden, and so we naturally get an authoritative few pages on the battle and its consequences. But other battles receive similar treatment. The 1314 Battle of Bannockburn gets three pages and maps visualising days one and two of the conflict. Some readers will find this refreshing and appealing, especially those in search of a straightforward zoom through the highs and lows of Scotland’s history.
Finally a reflection from Norrie Sanders writing for the Queensland Reviewers Collective. In the history of Scotland, the ‘Early Roman and Viking incursions never achieved dominance. That honour was left to Scotland’s most persistent foe – the English. Battles over the border lands have been common and Scotland for many centuries was allied to France – with strong military and economic ties to Europe that are reflected to this day. The Anglo-Scottish relationship has been a roller coaster since a unified Scotland emerged around 900. After centuries of skirmishes, the Scottish/English border was finally settled in 1237. England took over (at least in the South) in 1298, yet the efforts of Robert the Bruce delivered independence just 30 years later. The balance fluctuated for several centuries, with periods of autonomy coming with strings attached: Effectively Scotland was being treated as a foreign state, but not permitted to act like one [p120]. Since the Act of Union in 1707, Scotland has been the subordinate, with fluctuating levels of self-governance and quasi-independence into modern times.
The challenge of writing in the Shortest History series is to weave a coherent narrative from 10,000 years of human habitation, without resorting to a dumbed down version that rehashes well-known material.
Murray Pittock succeeds in this challenge – he draws several threads through the complex tribal and ethnic history of ancient Scotland, that are largely unbroken throughout history. Some of the most famous events such as the battle of Culloden and the highland clearances are briefly mentioned within the context of the wider circumstances that frame them. A second thread is the strong relationship to Europe, which links to the long-established immigration from surrounding countries, balanced by the emigration of Scots seeking their fortune.
So while this book is essentially directed towards history buffs and those with a specific interest in Scotland, it adds significantly to the current series of short histories, which now I believe total 23 books, of which this page, in addition to Scotland, has commented on the Short Histories of Scandinavia, France and Music
This contribution relates to a novel of Australian historical fiction [a mixture of fact, fiction and biography] relating to the wife of an English convict, Francis Greenway, who was transported to Australia for 14 years in 1812, and whose architectural talents earned him the favour of the then governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie, who served in that role from 1810-1821, while Mrs Greenway, became an unexpected friend, of Macquaries’ wife, Elizabeth.
‘The Talented Mrs Greenway’ by Tea Cooper [published in 2023, of 357 pages. The story of the generally unheralded wife of Sydney convict/architect, Francis Greenway. As the author herself describes the book ‘this is ‘a fictional account of Mary Greenway’s life, as there is so little information about her life recorded in history. As with most of her books, ‘The Talented Mrs Greenway’ is a mixture of fact and fiction, another of my favoured ‘historical novels’ set in the early convict era of Australia, and again, dealing essentially with the life of an heroic but generally unrecognised woman of those times.
Set mainly in 1814 Sydney town, this novel brings to life the story of an enigmatic figure, wife to feted colonial architect Francis Greenway, and asks, whose hand really shaped Sydney? Who is the talented Mrs Greenway?. Once again, as noted in the Sydney Morning Herald at the time of publication – Another overlooked woman has been rescued by Tea Cooper from between the lines of history, this one with a famous husband [as] convict-era Sydney comes to life in all its squalor and savagery and tumultuous promise.’ Or as another reviewer noted – Tea Cooper has delivered once again! … yet another engaging and masterfully crafted story. Not only does [it] provide a truly engaging story about the early days of colonial Sydney but she melds fact and fiction to present yet another strong female character from history.’
I’ve commented on books about many such women over the last couple of years, and so often, they have persons who previously were not given much credence tom but thanks to mainly Australian novelists, we are given the opportunity to become aware of them.
A summary of the novel from Tea Coopers website reveals the following synopsis.
When Mary Greenway, freshly arrived from the old country, steps into the maelstrom of Sydney Town with three children at her skirts, she has high hopes of a new beginning, despite having little money and a husband in irons. After all, the sudden death of her sadistic first husband has meant freedom from her gilded cage and Francis Greenway is an architect of some promise, recommended by none other than Admiral Phillip himself. Mary is a woman of great resources and an even greater creative passion, a passion that will surely burn through anything that the filthy, burgeoning, vitality of colonial Sydney can throw at her. Soon ensconced in a tiny cottage in George Street, Mary sets about moulding a life for her family from the unpromising clay of Sydney Town, with a determination fired in equal parts by guilt for her disastrous past action and a desire to realise her true calling. When she is befriended by Elizabeth Macquarie it seems that fate is smiling on them and the promise of a better life is within her grasp. But fate is a difficult mistress and she has past secrets to keep, current betrayals on the brink of discovery and the stakes are higher than ever. With Mary’s grip on this new life slipping, will the past come back to haunt her?
As for Mary’s more heralded husband, Francis – if you are not familiar with him – and this novel suggests or imagines that many of his architectural designs were often the brain-child of his wife – Francis Greenway (20 November 1777 – September 1837) was an English-Australian convict and colonial architect. After being convicted of forgery in England and subsequently transported to New South Wales, Australia (known then as New Holland) at age 37, Greenway was appointed the colony’s official architect by Governor Lachlan Macquarie despite his convict status. Over the next two decades, Greenway designed the General Hospital (commonly known as the Rum Hospital), St James’ Church, and the Macquarie Lighthouse. His designs incorporated neoclassical architectural principles and responded to the practical needs of the developing colony. Prior to been transported to Australia, in 1812 he pleaded guilty to forging a financial document [which Cooper’s novel actually intimates that it was Mary herself who forged the document but Francis took the blame for it]. While initially sentenced to death, it was commuted to 14 years’ transportation. Whilst awaiting deportation to Sydney, Greenway spent time in Newgate Prison, Bristol, where he painted scenes of prison life.
In actual fact, Greenway far more buildings than indicated above. Between 1816 and 1818, while still a convict, Greenway was responsible for the design and construction of the Macquarie Lighthouse on the South Head 2 km from the entrance to Port Jackson. After the success of this project, he was emancipated by the governor Lachlan Macquarie on 16 December 1817 at the Lighthouse. In the role of Acting Civil Architect and Assistant Engineer responsible to Captain J. M. Gill, Inspector of Public Works, he went on to build many buildings in the new colony. Greenway’s works include Hyde Park Barracks, extensions to First Government House, the stables for a projected new Government House (condemned for their ‘useless magnificence’ by a visiting British official, the building is now home to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music), and St James’ Church, Sydney, which was chosen as one of Australia’s only two man-made ‘treasures’ by Dan Cruickshank in the BBC series Around the World in 80 Treasures. He submitted designs for the first Catholic church in Sydney, St Mary’s but they did not match the ambitious scale envisaged by the priest Fr Therry, and were not proceeded with.
Greenway was dismissed by the next Governor, Thomas Brisbane, in 1822.
Greenway died of typhoid near Newcastle, New South Wales in 1837, aged 59. The exact date of his death is not known. He is believed to have been buried in the Glebe burial ground at East Maitland on 25 September 1837, but his grave is unmarked.
Mary, the subject of the book, died 5 years before her husband. Earlier, as described in the novel, Mary, seeing the need for a school, not simply run by men or the church, and available generally for the higher echelons of the female population in the early 1820’s, decided to open a school herself, and do the teaching, as she didn’t want a male tutor for her daughter! As Cooper put it – “I intend to start my own school. Most of the schools in town are run by the churches and the tutors are all men. I want something different for my own daughters and all the other young girls in the colony. A real education, not one that revolves around the feminine arts – embroidery, painting, music and flower arranging. They should learn mathematics, geography, and science…and architecture perhaps…..I don’t intend a school for only the wealthy free settles. I intend a mix of emancipists and exclusives’
She must have achieved some success in that venture. Recorded in the Sydney Monitor, Saturday, 28th April, 1832. ‘DIED: On Wednesday night, at her Residence in George-street, after a lingering illness, MRS GREENWAY, deeply regretted by her friends. Mrs Greenway, having educated a great number of ladies of the Colony, now at the head of families, was generally known, and as universally beloved. Her accomplishments were considerable but they were equalled, if not excelled, by her fine sentiment and excellent principles, which rendered her society an acquisition to all who had the opportunity of enjoying it’.
Governor Lachlan Macquarie wrote about Mary in his papers “as a pleasant respectable woman whose earnest entreaty encouraged him to grant Francis Greenway an absolute pardon.”
Francis Greenway himself in the Sydney Gazette described Mary as “the mild, unobtrusive but talented Mrs. Greenway.”
As Tea Cooper notes in her historical notes about the novel, there are few references to Mary, but those that did exist, she incorporated into the book. Although Francis Greenway’s life she considered fascinating and well documented, it was his wife who captured her imagination, specifically because of the lack of references to her. To all intents and purposes, she didn’t exist until she met Francis. Her first marriage saw her forcibly homebound. She had been born Mary Moore in about 1779, and while she adored her late father, he ‘bequeathed’ her in marriage to a James Tripp [Cooper gives James’ fictional name as Fripp because of uncertainty over the Thripp name – there is a record of the marriage of a Mary Moore to a James Tripp who passed away in 1808 but whether that was the Mary in this novel was apparently not provable).
James was a cruel and domineering man who prior to his sudden death in 1808, lost most of the fortune his father-in-law had left to him, basically leaving Mary destitute and without a home, prior to meeting Francis.
Mary Moore had two children to her first husband, born before she married Francis Howard Greenway, on 27 April 1809 at St Michael’s, Bristol, Gloucestershire, England. They were George Greenway born July 1807 and William Greenway born October 1808. Their Baptisms took place on the 12 November 1811 and are listed as Greenway.
Mary Greenway gives birth to a son called Francis John Greenway (Frankie) born December 1813. She had intended to travel to Australia on the same ‘convict ship’ as her husband, but with the impending birth of their first child, it was decided it was safer to wait until after the birth. So eventually, Mary Greenway with her three sons emigrated to Australia as a Free Settler aboard the Ship “Broxbornebury” in 1814, all listed on the Manifest.
Mary and Francis would have four more children born in George Street, Sydney. They were: Caroline Ann Greenway born 2 February 1816; Charles Capel Greenway born 13 March 1818; Henry John Valentine Greenway born 15 February 1820; and, Marian Kezia Jane Agnes Greenway born 21 June 1824.
A book, described in one manner as ‘Breathes brilliant life into a fascinating woman and questions whose hand really shaped early Sydney’, Mary Greenway or her credited husband, Francis.
SBS television in Australia is currently showing a series Chernobyl: Inside The Meltdown, following on I believe from an earlier documentary titled Chernobyl: Days that Shocked the World.
In the lead-up to the 40th anniversary of this catastrophic event, this TV series tells the full story – from reactor meltdown – to the present-day war in Ukraine, that turned a nuclear exclusion zone into a war zone.
In today’s edition of The Conversation: Books & Ideas, a Senior Lecturer in Humanities, and the Professor of English Literature from the University of Southern Queensland have joined forces to write an essay on the subject titled ‘Chernobyl at 40: the lies, the loss and why we can’t let go’. For the interest of my readers, I present a copy of that Essay below.
Chernobyl at 40: the lies, the loss and why we can’t let go
By Kate Cantrell, Senior Lecturer in Humanities, University of Southern Queensland and Jessica Gildersleeve Professor of English Literature, University of Southern Queensland
Some historical events are so catastrophic they resist comprehension. And yet they compel us to try to understand them, again and again.
Chernobyl is one of them.
On April 26, 1986, at 1:23am, Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded, releasing a cloud of radioactive material that drifted across Europe and contaminated land inhabited by around five million people in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.
Although it is impossible to calculate the total number of deaths attributable to the explosion and its after-effects, 31 people were killed immediately or died due to Acute Radiation Syndrome in the following months, while deaths in the years since could be as high as 10,000. Around 116,000 people were evacuated from the 30-kilometre exclusion zone in the two weeks following the accident.
As the radioactive dust settled on forests and rivers, poisoning water and food supplies, flora and fauna, it also embedded itself, indelibly, in the cultural imagination.
Forty years on, we are still working out what happened – and what it means.
An explosion that never ends
Countless books, documentaries and television dramas, as well as artworks, plays, video games and comics, grapple with the causes of the disaster and its aftermath. They seek to make visible what was invisible at the time: not just radiation and its effects on the human body, but the Soviet government’s attempts to cover up the accident.
This week, Ukrainian writer and illustrator Yevgenia Nayberg published her graphic memoir, Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters – a künstlerroman (artist’s novel) charting her coming-of-age as an artist under Chernobyl’s long shadow. Born and raised in Kyiv, Nayberg was 11 years old and preparing for art school when she heard on the radio that “one of the nuclear reactors was damaged”, but “the situation [was] under control”.
In a recent interview, Nayberg reflected that “the most difficult part” of writing the book was “trying to forget that I know the future”.
In her memoir, she insists on the accuracy of her memories and the truth of her lived experience, set in stark contrast to the secrecy and obfuscation that marked the Soviet government’s response.
“They are just repeating the same thing over and over again,” the young Nayberg declares. “That means they’re hiding something.” Her parents and grandparents arrive at the same conclusion. “They used to pretend that they trusted the news,” she observes. “Not anymore.”
A 1986 aerial view of the Chernobyl Power Plant, with damage from the explosion in Reactor 4. Volodymyr Repik/AAP
In his 2006 essay Turning Point at Chernobyl, former president of the USSR – and the last Soviet leader – Mikhail Gorbachev argued “the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl […] was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later”. “There was the era before the disaster,” Gorbachev wrote, “and there is the very different era that has followed.”
Yet it was not the meltdown itself that led to “the collapse”, but what it revealed: the extent to which the Soviet government would lie to its own people and to the world. Gorbachev said nothing to the rest of the world until a full week later, when he assured a concerned global audience “the worst is behind us”. At the same time, he denounced the “mountain of lies” purportedly being spread by Western media.
It is hardly surprising, then, that a preoccupation with truth and deception drives almost every cultural retelling of the disaster. In the collective memory, Chernobyl is not an isolated event confined to the past, but a contagion that continues to mutate and spread.
While these books differ in theme, focus, and narrative style, they all ultimately grapple with a crisis of representation: how do we express through language what defies comprehension?
Plokhy, a Harvard professor who grew up downstream from the destroyed reactor and whose thyroid was damaged by radiation exposure, concludes his haunting history of the disaster with a warning: “The world has already been overwhelmed by one Chernobyl and one exclusion zone. It cannot afford any more.”
‘This is how radioactivity looks’
The first documentary about Chernobyl was filmed three days after the explosion.
Directed by Soviet filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko, Chernobyl: Chronicle of Difficult Weeks (1986) documents the cleanup operations undertaken by Ukrainian workers and volunteers, many of whom would later die from the high levels of radiation they were exposed to.
The 54-minute film, the product of three months of continuous shooting, opens with an aerial shot of the destroyed reactor before cutting to grainy footage of a televised speech by Gorbachev on May 14, 1986. “We have been struck by disaster,” he announces, “we have been confronted by danger: atomic energy which has become uncontrollable”.
The documentary deflects the threat to an unknown enemy, clinging to the language of war. The exclusion zone is the frontline, the liquidators are “soldiers performing a great feat” and the deserters who “abandoned their comrades” are “cowards” whose names would be made public “regardless of rank or position”. “Deserters were not executed,” the film assures, “but the people’s contempt would serve as eternal punishment.”
The ruined control room inside Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Power Plant. Efrem Lukatsky/AAP
This vain attempt to reaffirm the Soviet myth of heroism – the faultless ability to overcome catastrophe – reveals the state’s attempt to absorb Chernobyl into its own mythology: to make it, in the end, a story about what the Soviet people could endure.
But what we witness, from a safe distance and with the vantage of hindsight, is something far more sinister: the radiation saturating the camera and, by extension, the hand holding it. The on-screen flashes of light, white and crackling, were initially mistaken by Shevchenko and his team for a problem with the film. “We thought this film was defective,” he explains. “But we were mistaken. This is how radioactivity looks.”
Shevchenko himself died from acute radiation sickness less than a year later. His film, suppressed by Soviet authorities and released only posthumously, is sometimes described as the most dangerous film in the world.
For a story so many were determined to silence, there is a surprising wealth of footage. As the recent documentary Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes (2022) explains, “the Soviets […] documented everything believing they would show the world a heroic victory.” In time, the truth would assert itself.
Chernobyl’s children
One year after the incident, in 1987, The Bell of Chernobyl, “an unusually frank work that plainly suggests the Soviets were wholly unprepared for the disaster”, mysteriously failed to arrive in time for its scheduled screening at the Berlin International Film Festival.
The festival’s official journal noted “there are forces in the Soviet Union – and they are not new ones – who would prefer not to have the film screened”.
These nuclear documentaries, according to film studies scholar Helen Hughes, reveal the difficult art of filming a toxic ghost – a danger that cannot be seen, heard or touched, yet whose presence can be “felt in the teeth”.
Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Pripyat (1996), made ten years after the disaster, marked one of the first occasions when an international film crew was granted access into the 30-kilometre exclusion zone. Shot entirely in black and white, the camera lingers on stunning irradiated landscapes – frozen forests and overgrown streets – depicting a world that is the same, yet different.
At its centre, however, are the human stories of those who live and work there. Like the lab technician who, upon returning to her former flat in Pripyat, learns her possessions have been stolen by looters. And the safety officer who works at the power plant: “I keep this power plant running,” he jokes. “I am one of the guarantees that nothing will happen.”
When the film was first screened in 1996, audiences were surprised to learn Chernobyl was still operating.
In the 2000s, popular documentaries about the disaster turned to the human cost of Chernobyl, including the so-called generations of Chernobyl children whose lives were stolen from them.
he deserted city of Pripyat, near the Chernobyl Power Plant, ten years ago – 30 years after the disaster. Roman Pilipey/AAP
Of these, none proved more confronting than Chernobyl Heart (2003), a 40-minute documentary short directed by Maryann De Leo. It follows Irish humanitarian Adi Roche and her team of aid workers as they travel through Belarus and Ukraine, visiting thyroid cancer wards, overcrowded children’s homes and maternity hospitals where, according to one doctor, only 15-20% of babies are born healthy.
In the Novinki Mental Asylum north of Minsk, we meet Julia, a girl born with her brain outside her skull. Another child, aged four, is the size of a four-month-old. Some children with cerebral palsy spend their entire lives in cots.
“I suppose I’m relieved to see she’s still alive,” Roche says of one child, “but I’m not sure that’s the best thing for her.” Gesturing at another group of children, she says, “we don’t know what’s wrong with them.”
The film, which won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short, was criticised for its explicit depiction of children’s damaged and deformed bodies. At the time, the suffering of Chernobyl’s children was typically rendered symbolically – through a broken toy or an abandoned doll – rather than shown directly.
Often, the children themselves were not told what was wrong with them. In one quietly devastating scene, a teenage girl – born three weeks before the explosion – tells the camera she has “some problems” in her neck. As we leave her, the attending doctor reveals she has thyroid cancer. “Of course we don’t tell the children,” he says.
“It was the hardest film I’ve ever made,” De Leo later said. During filming, she was hospitalised for radiation poisoning.
The experience did not deter her. Five years later, her follow-up film, White Horse (2008), shadowed a Ukrainian man as he returned home to Pripyat for the first time in 20 years.
Secrets, lies and untold stories
The most influential retelling is undoubtedly Craig Mazin’s five-part HBO miniseries, Chernobyl (2019), which garnered 19 Emmy nominations and inspired a companion podcast.
The series stars Jared Harris as senior nuclear scientist Valery Legasov: the man tasked with containing the disaster, who took his own life on April 27, 1988 – exactly two years and one day after the explosion.
Reconstructing the timeline of events (before, during and after the explosion), the series is sharply critical of the power wielded by the Soviet government, its nuclear industry and their affiliated forces. It raises enduring questions about nuclear safety, especially emergency preparedness and response, and risk communication.
The series draws in part from Alexievich’s acclaimed book, Chernobyl Prayer, a polyphony of poetic first-person testimonies collected over a ten-year period with more than 500 eyewitnesses, including doctors, soldiers, scientists, helicopter pilots, miners, former party bureaucrats, and ordinary citizens.
As its title suggests, the book gives voice to the individuals who lived through the disaster. Compared to the series, it is a more nuanced and reflective account of the slow forms of violence that persisted long after the reactor was sealed and the cameras left.
One young father who volunteered as a liquidator recalls:
We got home. I took everything off, all the stuff I’d been wearing there, and threw the lot down the rubbish chute. I gave the cap to my little son as a present. He kept asking for it. He wore it non-stop. Two years later, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour. You can write the rest yourself. I don’t want to say any more.
Both Chernobyl Prayer and Chernobyl portray the processes that rob people of their human status – forcing them to exist beyond the threshold of human experience. The radioactive particles both inhabit them and haunt them: “Chernobyl, for those who were there, did not end in Chernobyl. They were returning not from war, but almost from another world.”
Ukrainians light candles at a memorial to the liquidators – the workers who gave their lives to contain the Chernobyl disaster. Sergey Dolzhenko/AAP
For this reason, Chernobyl is not just a story of horror. It is also, for instance, a love story: between Vasily, a firefighter exposed to a lethal dose of radiation, and his pregnant wife, Lyudmila, instructed to protect their unborn child from his “scorched” body.
In Alexievich’s book, the nurses tell her, “You mustn’t forget this isn’t your husband, it isn’t the man you love. It’s a highly contaminated radioactive object.” But Lyudmila remains by Vasily’s side – changing his sheets, wiping him down, at one point removing “pieces of lung and lumps of his liver […] coming up through his mouth.”
Alexievich writes that since Chernobyl:
Love has changed. And death, too. Everything has changed, except us.
Like Yevgenia Nayberg, Ukrainian cultural historian Maria Tumarkin was 11 when Chernobyl happened. She turns to Alexievich when it feels impossible to answer the question: “How does a society witness itself? Witness itself failing at its most fundamental duty?”
The most enduring texts about Chernobyl move beyond the disaster as event and attend to it as warning – not sensationalist, but willing to listen to what it still tells us: about power, about the “cost of lies” (as the HBO series puts it), and about the slow violence of catastrophe that does not announce itself – and does not end.
Some of what Chernobyl cost us cannot be measured. It can only be carried. This is why Chernobyl remains a story worth telling. And why it will keep being told, again and again.
I just completed reading ‘The Kelly Hunters’ by Grantlee Kieza [published in 2022] of 327 pages. A different approach to the Ned Kelly story, we look at the other side, the story of the 20-month manhunt for Ned Kelly, and his three associates who lead the police and authorities through parts of north-east Victoria, and southern NSW., thwarting their pursuers at every turn. A chase marred by incompetence, costly and professional jealousies and conflicts amongst the police and a variety of trackers, together with the opposition and obstacles created by many in the local population providing support to the gang, and constantly sending the police on a ‘wild goose’ chase.
The general promo blurb of the story reads as follows.
When Ned Kelly and his band of young tearaways ambushed and killed three brave policemen in a remote mountain camp in 1878, they sparked the biggest and most expensive manhunt Australia had seen. The desperate search would end when Kelly and his gang, wearing suits of armour, tried to derail a train before waging their final bloody gun battle with police in the small Victorian town of Glenrowan.
In the 20 months between those shootouts and aided by a network of informers, hundreds of lawmen, soldiers, undercover agents and a team of Aboriginal trackers combed rugged mountains in freezing conditions in search of the outlaws. The police officers were brave, poorly paid and often ailing, some nearing retirement and others young with small children, but they risked death and illness in the hope of finding the men who had killed their comrades.
The hunt for the Kelly gang became a fierce battle of egos between senior police as they prepared for the final shootout with Australia’s most infamous bushrangers, a gun battle that etched Ned Kelly’s physical toughness and defiance of authority into Australian folklore. By the author of the critically acclaimed Mrs Kelly, as well as other bestsellers such as Banks, Monash and Banjo, The Kelly Hunters is a fascinating and compelling account of the other side of the legendary Kelly story.
In addition to the main story, Kieza concludes with a substantial series of Notes arising from each of the book’s 20 chapters; closing descriptions of the subsequent lives of the various characters [on both sides of the hunt]; a full listing of each of the subsequent recipients of the 8,000 Pound reward money which had being offered for information of action leading to the capture of the Kelly Gang, which sum was divided eventually amongst 66 individuals; a list of the names of all of the police who were present at Ned Kelly’s last stand at Glenrowan, include their method and time of arrival; and a concise bibliography of written material and internet sources relating to the Kelly families.
Throughout the book, there are references from time of the massacres of Indigenous people in Queensland, often by their own people employed as trackers by the local police and/or settlers – Queensland was a colony where the lives of Indigenous people were often given less value than that of the profits from sheep and cattle – one such group of black trackers led by a notorious Irish-born Sub-Inspector Stanhope O’Connor were recruited down to Victoria to assist in the manhunt for the Kelly gang, and while they were relatively unsuccessful, they were one group of pursuers that gave the greatest fear to Ned. This group, as with the Native Police in general throughout Queensland, were used as a paramilitary force by Queensland’s colonial government to provide protection to the settlers, but also to subdue, chase away or massacre their own people, under the direction of white men. Kieza suggests that the estimates of the number of Indigenous people killed on their raids over a 40-year span rany7ged from 20,000 to more than 41,000.
As noted in the blurb above, there was regular conflict and ego concerns between many of the police parties, and in particular with O’Connor and his trackers. Additionally, groups of police or individuals over much of the 20 months in question, had to endure severe climatic conditions in their attempts to track down the Kellys. One of the principal characters involved in the chase from time to time [and also in many disputes of authority etc] was Superintendent Frank Hare, the following description of whom gives some indication of the conditions under which the police and other searchers had to cope with.
From page 171: “Standish trusted Hare more than any of the other Kelly hunters. The big man was willing to endure all manner of privations in pursuit of the gang, setting off into the wilds with his men and packhorses at rhe vaguest of rumours for eight or ten days at a time. Hare was almost 50, but his bones ached like he was 100. ‘Our life was a very hard one ,’ Hare recalled, ‘sleeping in the open without tent or fire, living on potted beef, and biscuit, and sardines. Bushman think nothing of camping out for months but ask any of them in the winter months to camp out without a fire and see how long they will stand it’. [Of course the ‘no fire’ policy was aimed at preventing the Kelly gang from knowing the police were close].
Though not all thought highly of Hare.
From pages 176-177, Charles Nicolson, when he joined the pursuing forces, had a different approach to that of Hare – ‘he hardly ever sent out search parties, preferring to court spies and make deals with anyone likely to have the ear of the Kellys or their friends, especially Aaron Sherritt’ [who would be murdered as a traitor by one of the gang, a couple of days prior to the Glenrowan siege]l and from page 178 Nicholson ‘said Hare had been hunting the Kellys, with the largest body of police that ever was in the districts and with the artillery force at his command’, yet he said, ‘the whole colony was sneering at their efforts’.
The following is a brief selection of reviews of Kieza’s book, which are generally positive, with readers such as myself appreciating the book’s engaging narrative and style of reading, and while its aim to portray principally the Kelly pursuers, Kieza also provides a nuanced portrayal of the Kelly gang, and their 20 months on the run. I have to agree with each of the points made below, and for those interested, an easily read and followed historical depiction’
The Australian: Praised for its engaging writing and detailed portrayal of the Kelly gang, this review highlights Kieza’s ability to bring the characters to life;
Daily Telegraph: Described s vivid, detailed ad well-written, this review emphasises the book’s ability to capture the essence of the Kelly story;
Betterreading.com.au: Calls it a staggering accomplishment, this review suggests that the book is a must-read for history buffs and story lovers alike;
John Howard: Acknowledges Kieza’s clear and accessible writing style, which is well-crafted and extensively documented;
Weekend Australian: Praised for its clear and accessible writing, this review suggests that Kieza has added hugely to the depth of knowledge about the Kelly gang.
Grantlee Kieza OAM has held senior editorial positions at The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Courier-Mail for many years and was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for his writing.
The following two articles, which appeared in the online newsletter ‘The Conversation: Books & Ideas’ on the 3rd April, past, I considered worthy of sharing with interested readers. They both submit a modern perspective on two children’s stories, one an Australian classic ‘The Magic Pudding’ [written & illustrated in 1918 by Norman Lindsay], and the second, an ancient fairy-tale, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ [written by Hans Christian Anderson in 1837]. I have copied them below as they appeared in the said publication.
[1] How Norman Lindsay wrote The Magic Pudding to critique ‘Australian values’ – inspired by Nietzsche [essay by John Uhr, Emeritus Professor of Politics, Australian National University………………………………]The federal parliamentary seat of Lindsay, west of Sydney, was formed in 1984, honouring the great Australian illustrator and writer Norman Lindsay (1879-1969). The seat has been held since 2019 by the Liberal member, Melissa McIntosh.
When McIntosh’s colleague Angus Taylor was elected leader of the opposition in February, he immediately framed his political strategy around “Australian values”. He distanced himself from the government’s multiculturalism, called for a reduction to immigration and claimed to be in favour of “social inclusion” based on support for the “Australian way of life”.
Lindsay’s classic children’s book The Magic Pudding, first published in 1918, is an interesting commentary on those “Australian values”.
His story about a bad-tempered pudding, which never diminishes no matter how much you eat it, has been widely interpreted as defending our “way of life”. For a century, critics have praised Lindsay’s beautifully illustrated text as showcasing the “Australian dream” and the national character. The book has been celebrated for its depiction of the norm of blokey larrikinism and our love of mateship, at least among males.
In fact, The Magic Pudding is a clever critique. The wily Lindsay was warning readers that Australian culture and civic morality were dangerously shallow.
His tale was inspired by his reading of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Lindsay was one of Australia’s first enthusiasts for Nietzsche, whose political philosophy was about transforming democratic culture, moving it away from what he called “slave morality” and towards a new world of the “master morality” of elite artists.
Lindsay treasured works by Nietzsche, such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra, with its message that “God is dead”. He feared that the crass philistinism of contemporary Australian democracy was tainted by “slave morality” and saw himself as a champion of “free spirits”.
The Magic Pudding was his attempt to tell that tale in a comic form.
‘Owners’ and ‘thieves’
The crafty depths of Lindsay’s critique can escape many first-time readers. But if they take a careful second look, many highly regarded “Australian values” emerge as second rate.
What many critics have fondly called the Australian dream is actually a grim picture of three self-declared “owners” monopolising control over a magically replenishing resource: Albert, the mean-spirited but endlessly edible pudding.
If Albert is the treasure of the story, then the koala Bunyip Bluegum is the hero. Bluegum initially appears as a young lad out to “see the world”. He might even be a potential artistic “free spirt”, having been coached by the unusual poet Egbert Rumpus Bumpus (who is also a koala).
But Bunyip Bluegum falls into company with Bill Barnacle and his sidekick, a penguin named Sam Sawnoff, the so-called “owners” of Albert. There follows a funny story about two gangs – pudding “owners” and pudding “thieves” – using their fists to fight for control of Albert.
But is it really true that, as critic Eleanor Whitcombe commented, Lindsay “created the ultimate ocker” in Albert the pudding? It might well be true that the book is “a true guide to the Australian national character” – but is Lindsay supporting or opposing this version of it?
In fact, Albert the pudding is an alien. He was “invented” out at sea by a non-Australian ship’s cook called Curry and Rice, whose sole ownership of the pudding caused Bill and Sam to become “justly enraged”.
The pair effectively drown Curry and Rice when they seize Albert, who never stops complaining about the malicious intervention of his new “owners”. The two “pudding thieves” see no legitimacy in the claims to ownership or the “the way of life” celebrated by Albert’s captors, who manage Albert as an alien slave.
Eventually, the two warring gangs end up in court, where Lindsay displays his most un-nationalistic portrait of the waywardness of Australian law and order. The mayor is ridiculous in his endless appetite for free bananas. The police officer is awkward and fearful of Albert’s rebellious distemper. The court usher is servile, treating the judge to repeated games of cards and plying him with glasses of port.
The hero Bunyip Bluegum beats the legal system with a clever lie that “Albert has been poisoned”. This so upsets the court that the “owners” are able to flee with their captive.
The tale ends with what many critics describe as an ideal conclusion: three “owners” high up in their tree, with the ever-miserable Albert secured in “a little Puddin’ paddock”.
Food and fighting
The Magic Pudding can be read as Lindsay’s black-humoured portrait of the primitive nature of a culture of “food and fighting”. The Australian way of life displayed in The Magic Pudding revolves around the life of the belly, not the life of the mind.
In a 1916 letter to publisher George Robertson, Lindsay describes Bunyip Bluegum as “the hero” of a story written against the background of “the brutal reality of war” – a story intended “to stiffen the younger generation to a more decent frame of mind”. Lindsay later wrote that his hope for “this generation” is “to see life clearly, and without the false equation of sentimentality”.
My conclusion is that Lindsay is not promoting civic pride in Australian nationality, but attempting to stimulate interest in alternative sources of national pride.
The Magic Pudding says nothing explicitly about Nietzsche, but it illustrates Lindsay’s deeply personal attempt to move beyond the ethos of military struggle at the end of the great war, in which he lost a younger brother in France at the end of 1916.
Nietzsche’s concept of the “higher man” sought to break free from the doctrine of social equality favoured by democratic movements.
What Lindsay learned from Nietzsche was that the military victory Australia earned in 1918 had merely protected a barbaric public culture.
In his book Creative Effort: An Essay in Affirmation, published not long after The Magic Pudding in 1920, Lindsay proposed that artistic “great souls” could use their talent for comedy to undermine the conventional “spirit of gravity” nurturing modern democracy, symbolised by the pre-eminence of “bellies” and lesser beasts like the “grunting pig”.
The aristocratic few, according to Lindsay, despise most ordinary citizens, who are “no more than a walking belly”. He observed sadly that “it is for the belly alone that half the energy of society is exerted”. The mind of the many fails to reach the higher levels of artistic spirit because it “is almost wholly concerned with the belly.”
The fate of Bunyip Bluegum, who is not given to fisticuffs, might be viewed in this sense as something of a cautionary tale. He is at his finest when he confronts the pudding-thieves and recites a long poem about the immorality of stealing, which moves the thieves to renounce “their evil courses”.
This is Lindsay’s most challenging test of Bunyip’s contribution to the society of pudding-owners: to try to use his poetic powers to turn the pudding thieves towards virtue.
Lindsay’s story is very much about Bunyip Bluegum rounding out the forceful skill-set of Bill and Sam – who clearly emerge as the very first pudding thieves, determined never to yield Albert to any competitor.
Gifted with poetic knowledge, Bunyip discovers that he has everything – “except food”. He uses his cleverness to help Bill and Sam, and is rewarded with a version of the high life, savoured by an endless supply of Albert’s hearty pudding.
But once he has access to Albert as a useful food slave, Bunyip loses interest in everything that might make his life more poetically noble.
Lindsay’s book warns readers that the humdrum complacency of Australian public culture needs the artistic excellence of “free spirits” as a cultural corrective to its misplaced dreaming. The Magic Pudding provides a belly full of laughs for children, but it is also a reminder of the importance of the life of the mind for adults uncomfortable with many practices of the “Australian way of life”.
Inspired by Nietzsche, Lindsay was hoping to provoke Australian readers to dream of something grander than a full belly.
[Comment: I retained a beautiful copy of this book as a gift for a future grandchild, but I fear that in 2026, it will probably hold little of interest for the members of that generation! I’d like to think I’m wrong!! – Bill]
[2] The Emperor’s New Clothes, by Hans Christian Anderson – a fairy tale for our times?
[essay by Nicola Welsh-Burke, Sessional Academic in Literary and Cultural Studies, Western Sydney University].
In mid-March, an activist group in Rutland County, Vermont, held its usual weekly rally protesting the actions of US president Donald Trump. One protester, Marsha Cassel, led the crowd, dressed as a naked Trump wearing a crown and holding a staff. Cassel was followed by another protester holding a sign proclaiming “THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES!”.
This is not the first time Trump has been compared to Hans Christian Andersen’s bumbling emperor, who marched naked through the streets while claiming to be dressed in finery – a fiction many of his subjects willingly indulged.
Who was Andersen, what aspects of his life informed this particular story and why might this be useful to know in the age of Trump?
Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark, in 1805. While his grandfather supposedly claimed noble origins for the family, Andersen’s father was a cobbler and his mother an illiterate washerwoman.
Top: book illustration.
Bottom: Illustration by Edmund Dulac from Stories from Hans Andersen, published 1938. Universal Images Group via Getty Images
After his father died, Andersen moved to Copenhagen for work, where he found a patron, theatre director Jonas Collin, who paid for his education. Andersen started writing after graduating from university, becoming well known for his fairy tales, which he began publishing in the 1830s.
The Emperor’s New Clothes is in his 1837 work, Fairy Tales Told for Children, which featured other memorable tales such as The Steadfast Tin Soldier and The Little Mermaid.
The story follows a vain and clothes-obsessed emperor who commissions clothing from two travelling conmen. These men, posing as weavers, visit his court to show off a new kind of material, which is supposedly rendered invisible to a man “unfit for the office he held”, or “extraordinarily simple in character”.
Afraid to reveal that he cannot see the material, the emperor sends in several aides to review the process, who all lie about being able to see the clothes being made.
Once the “outfit” is finished, the emperor dons it and parades naked through the town. The townsfolk compliment the garments, until a small child bursts the bubble, yelling out that the emperor has no clothes.
Unable to admit this, the emperor continues on his way. But the townsfolk now laugh.
This simple tale powerfully criticises rulers who tell untruths, performing intelligence and leadership, as well as those who uncritically allow this.
An outsider looking in
Like many fairy tales, the origins of this one stretch back centuries. Older versions date to medieval times. All feature people in power being duped by conmen who play on their vanities about their own intelligence. Literary scholar Hollis Robbins suggests Andersen’s version reflects a newly-emerging working class culture where “professional competence” was “quickly overtaking legitimacy and heritage as a source of aristocratic anxiety”.
In his book The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films, fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes claims Andersen was “embarrassed by his proletarian background” and “rarely mingled with the lower classes” once he found success as a writer.
Andersen never married and more recently, has been understood as a bisexual man. He had infatuations with both men and women, including Edvard Collin (the son of his patron Jonas) and Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind. After a fall in 1872, from which he never recovered, he died in 1875.
Andersen’s lower class background, argues Zipes, meant he was particularly well suited to biting cultural commentary about the difficult path for those escaping poverty.
In one translation of The Emperor’s New Clothes, the child who proclaims the nudity of the emperor is called “the voice of innocence” by his father. This voice spreads through the crowd, leading to the comical image of the naked emperor’s aides striving to lift the invisible train of his outfit even higher.
Regardless of one’s position in life, this story suggests you cannot escape “suffering, humiliation, and torture,” writes Zipes.
Indeed, many of Andersen’s tales feature characters (often frail, young women) who suffer immensely before dying nobly. The Emperor’s New Clothes, with its child character as the voice of reason, has an ending that, while not “happily ever after”, is as light-hearted as Andersen gets.
The power of fairy tales
The fairy tale is one of the most recognisable literary genres. We hear them from such a young age it is almost like we were born knowing them. Beginning as oral folktales, many of the tales we know today were first written down in 16th and 17th century France, Italy and Germany as social commentary and educational stories.
It is difficult to identify the “originals” of many tales, given their folkloric origins. Still, while it is almost stereotypical now to note that the “original fairy tales” (before contemporary Disney adaptations) were surprisingly dark Andersen’s are noticeably, and notably, bleak.
The Emperor’s New Clothes has been retold many times, with print, screen and musical adaptations. As Donald Trump, in the words of one pundit, continues to “construct a narrative, declare it to be true and relentlessly force the world to submit to it”, the story resonates today.
Indeed, literary academic Naomi Wood has argued that in a post 9/11 world, a “terrifying possibility” emerges in readings of the tale.
The truth of the fairy tale is not its glorification of the voice of innocence, free from corruption and untruth. Rather, it is that adults will continue to believe their own lies, even when they are clearly revealed. As a result, we allow the parade to continue, even while knowing it is farcical.
Some more reading material attended to over recent weeks, including three 2025 novels, and a Blainey classic.
Legacy by Chris Hammer [pub 2025];
The Tyranny of Distance by Geoffrey Blainey [pub 1966];
The Endless Sky by Di Morrissey [pub.2025];
Pilbara by Judy Nunn [pub. 2025]
A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles [pub. 2016].
25th February
A 2025 publication titled ‘Legacy’ by Chris Hammer, of 479 pages – this was the first of Hammer’s books I have read, with at least seven other novels having preceded this one, and if the mystery and fast-moving action of Legacy are a sample of his style, I have a bit of catching up to do!!
A novelist of detective fiction it seems and stories of crime and mystery essentially set in the Australian outback regions and/or the small town environment [the town main here has only 12 permanent residents] which are generally of a relatively isolated nature.
I was warned ‘after’ reading that Scammer often has a sequence book, and this one was apparently the 4th featuring the fictional investigative journalist Martin Scarsden – not to worry, it has come over as a stand-alone story in any case.
In basic outline – ‘Someone is targeting Martin Scarsden. They bomb his book launch and shoot up his hometown. Fleeing for his life, he learns that nowhere is safe, not even the outback. The killers are closing in, and it’s all he can do to survive. But who wants to kill him and why? Can he discover their deadly motives and turn the tables? In a dramatic finale, Martin finds his fate linked to the disgraced ex-wife of a football icon, a fugitive wanted for a decades-old murder, and two nineteenth-century explorers from a legendary expedition. According to Goodreads, this is Martin Scarsden’s most perilous, challenging and intriguing assignment yet.
Anyway, it didn’t take this reader very long to get through the 479 pages of mysterious twists, scenarios, and unanswered questions, most of which are not released as in all good mysteries until near the end, and even then, we find a further unexpected and surprising turn of events.
With the novel set in the Australian outback, and with vivid descriptions of harsh drought conditions, the damaging effects of floodwaters from rains further north, even a frightening dust storm introduced at one stage – it not difficult to agree with the perception of one reviewer that ’I’m yet to find another author who paints the Australian landscape for the reader in such vivid, glorious detail. Hammer has a way with words that other authors can only dream of’ [Ann Cleeves from damppebbles.com].
Rod McLary, reviewing the book for the Queensland Reviewers Collective last year, has some interest reflections of the storyline, and I share his views here.
Chris Hammer is one of Australia’s finest – and one the most successful – crime writers. The setting for most of his novels is the Australian outback – a setting as harsh and unforgiving as the crimes which lie at the heart of his novels placing them securely within the sub-genre ‘outback noir’.
It is a feature of Chris Hammer’s novels that the outback and its terrain are so well described by him that their presence is a palpable one. The following is just one example: There is nothing green, not yet, but I can sense the promise. The air still smells of dust, but a new note has joined the outback fragrance. The reader is immediately transported 1000km to outback New South Wales to breathe the outback air. – The chief protagonist in Legacy is Martin Scarsden an investigative journalist and author who is now about to launch his latest book – a true-crime exposé entitled Melbourne Mobster: The Vivid Life and Violent Death of Enzo Marelli. When he is about to be introduced at the book launch in his hometown Port Silver, Scarsden and all the guests are ordered to immediately evacuate the building because of a bomb threat. Within minutes of the building emptying, there is an explosion and then a second one with ‘flames roaring and smoke pouring skywards’ And then two shots aimed at Martin. Clearly, he has offended a powerful person – perhaps the Mafia with whom Enzo Marelli had strong links.
What follows is a complex and entwined game of cat-and-mouse as Scarsden – with the support of his friend and ASIO officer Jack Goffing – attempts to remain at least one step ahead of his pursuers. Running alongside the primary narrative is a second one involving Ekaterina Boland – or Ecco – who has been engaged by a local grazier Clayborne Carmichael to ghostwrite his biography [biography because his name will not appear as author]. Carmichael and his adult children Vincent and Chloe figure significantly in the narrative as do Merriman Stanton and his son Roman. There is a longstanding feud between the Carmichaels and the Stantons over water rights which persists into this narrative as well as influencing the narrative.
Add to the mix sub-plots involving two members of the ill-fated Ludwig Leichhardt expedition, the possibility of a hidden goldmine, the fate of Carmichael’s daughter who has been missing for twenty years, and the role of the local hotelkeeper in these events, and you have an intriguing and captivating crime novel which is as good as any Chris Hammer has written to date.
The characters are engaging and three-dimensional and the backstories of the new characters are gradually revealed to the reader adding an element of personal interest to the core narrative of ‘who wants Martin Scarsden killed?’ To leaven the tension and Machiavellian intrigue is the emergence of a slow-burning romance between two of the characters which comes to fruition only when the dust is settled and the mysteries are solved.
As Ann Cleeves, mentioned above notes – Ironically, water is exactly what creates a lot of tension and bad feeling between the characters. The desperately dry, sun-baked outback. The graziers whose livelihood depends on the precious incoming flood to restore and feed their stock for the coming months. And the lengths those graziers will go to ensure they, and their land, get what they need’.
That environmental setting and the mix of historical relationships and the mysteries surrounding those relationships between the various characters, and ‘a number of well-penned twists and turns’, a make for a great piece of fast-moving detective reading.
6th March 2026
A book I had intended to read many years ago, but only just came across a copy earlier this year – ‘The Tyranny of Distance’ by Geoffrey Blainey, published back in 1966, of 365 pages, a Sun Book paperback.
First published in 1966, the book examines how Australia‘s geographical remoteness, particularly from Great Britain, has been central to shaping the country’s history and identity and will continue to shape its future. The long distance between Australia and the centre of the British Empire, along with the United States, made Australians unsure of their future economic prosperity. Blainey writes about how the tyranny had been mostly surmounted and may have even worked in Australia’s favour in some ways.
In one of the book’s early chapters, Blainey challenges the notion that Australia was colonised by the British in the 18th century solely to serve as a place of exile for convicts. Blainey’s assertion that broader strategic and commercial factors also influenced Britain’s decision to establish a penal settlement in New South Wales led to significant debate among Australian historians. The expression “the tyranny of distance” from the book’s title has become common parlance in Australia. Although Blainey is widely credited with coining the term in his 1966 work, the term appeared five years previously in the geographic research of William Bunge, who uses the term in quotation marks, indicating that the phrase may have had earlier usage.
Reflecting on the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication, historian Graeme Davison stated: “The Tyranny of Distance changed our map of the Australian past. It was a bestseller and a mind-changer… Few books on Australia have been as popular and influential.”. More recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a news article in the conservative magazine Quadrant cited the book in relation to how Australia’s relative isolation from China’s viral epicentre may have been favourable in containing the virus within Australia.
Rather than attempt to ‘reinvent the wheel’ so to speak, I’m quoting below from some of the various commentaries providing specific views of both Blainey and his book, which have been generally been sourced from Wikipedia and associated articles. I have read many books published over the decades attempting to interpret the history of Australia – I found this of particular interest because it approached the topic from an angle not generally covered in any particular detail by other authors who were perhaps attempting to provide a more broad-based view of the country’s development. As the book title suggests, Blainey approaches from a precise area of influence.
Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance is among the most important books ever written about Australia. Through the lens of distance—distance to and distances within Australia—it explains much about our origins, our economy and society, as well as our triumphs and failures.Blainey is a brilliant historian and writer of rare talent who rewards the reader with insightful analysis and conclusions which overturn the conventional wisdom.
Sending ships half-way around the world was hardly the cheapest way to dispose of England’s convict burden. Blainey offers the view that the final push to settle New South Wales came as the Royal Navy saw in nearby Norfolk Island the means to diversity its source of pine (for masts) and flax (for sailcloth and cables).
Blainey resurrects the maritime heritage of Australia, which began as a series of ports for supply and safe haven but became an agrarian and urban nation forgetful of the ocean’s role as a conduit for its people, its food, its export markets, and news of the world. The great industry of the early years was whaling, which earned significant foreign exchange, spurred coastal settlements, and was ‘a free man’s calling in a country where most occupations had the taint of the broad arrow’. For one hundred and fifty years, the strong and reliable winds which could take ships out of the UK around the Cape of Good Hope to Australia and then home via Cape Horn shaped our enmeshment with the British Isles; as our largest market, as a source of forced or assisted migrants, and of political and social ideas. Fares from the UK to North America were always a much cheaper option for families, so single working men dominated migration to Australia, and thus was mateship born and eulogised.
Blainey is perceptive and lyrical when evoking and ennobling the life of the common worker, be it sailor, bullocky, farmer or even the convict road-builder displaying his ‘skill with pick and shovel and wheelbarrow’. He is grounded in the challenges of earning a crust on the frontier in an age where failure could mean starvation and death. His economic history is not grand aggregates but rather the sums done by the farmer, the merchant and the trader to ensure they could make a profit and survive. For a very long time the overwhelming consideration was the enormous cost of transporting product and input goods.
Similarly, he provides context for the decisions of early political leaders, shaped as they were by distance. Thus the divergence of railway gauges between states simply was of no importance when the ‘purpose of the railways was not to link the ports but to link each inland area with the nearest port’. On the other hand, the populist trend of colonial governments in the nineteenth century to ‘half-raise the drawbridge across the moat’, pocketing the revenues from land sales previously applied to subsidised immigration, meant nearly a century of slow population growth, societal stagnation, and the dominance of organised labour in political life. Grand development schemes failed for want of sufficient markets and/or local population, while colonial treasuries were burdened with debts that could barely be supported in the depressions of the 1890s and 1930s.
And now a couple of quick-read novels set in rural areas of outback Australia, by two of the country’s most popular female authors.
10th March, 2026
Another easily read over a couple of nights – ‘The Endless Sky’ by Di Morrissey , published in 2025, of 373 pages. Set mainly in the rugged red, rocky outback region of western Queensland, a wonderful depiction of the environment of that area, together with yet another light mystery novel from this prolific Australian author. This is her 31st novel, of which I’m just missing of her earlier stories I’ve not yet caught up with – her 2nd, 4th and 11th novels to be precise! Most of her novels have been inspired by a specific landscape, be that generally, but occasionally overseas. One particular aspect of her novels is so often driven by personal passions which she incorporates into her stories, this one being no exception. She’s described as a tireless and passionate advocate and activist for many causes, speaking out on issues of national and international importance
In ‘The Endless Sky’, the story is based around the search for archaeological evidence of Australia’s early history, in the remote regions of western Queensland, and the problems faced and encountered by such researchers through the development of such corporations, or the international theft of artifacts and their sale to wealthy collectors that museums etc are unable to financially compete against.
A broad general summary reveals that Top-rating TV presenter Nicole and her savvy producer and friend Stacie suddenly find themselves under the rule of a new boss … he’s arrogant, patronising and out to prove he’s in charge. Their challenge? To create a hit show revealing the hidden heart of outback Australia – a place few from the towns and cities have visited and even fewer people understand. What begins as a career-defining adventure quickly spirals into something far more dangerous and unexpected. In a land of craggy rocks and vast plains, whispered stories and a history as old as the dinosaurs, Nicole and Stacie uncover secrets – how other lives are lived, fossil treasures deep in the red earth, a possible murder and a blossoming love story. Beneath the endless sky this land reveals its magic – and its menace – as the two friends find more than they could ever have imagined.
From the Queensland Reviewers Collective, a little professional review by Wendy Lipke
Most people when setting out on a writing career are told to write about what they know and this is certainly true for Di Morrissey AM especially in her latest book, The Endless Sky.
Having had her own morning TV show and appeared in several episodes of the CBS TV series Hawaii Five-O, she is well placed to share with readers what is involved in preparing for and producing a TV show, which is what this book is about.
Di Morrissey is an environmentalist and activist, and all her novels are inspired by landscape with environmental, political and cultural issues woven into mass market popular fiction. Morrissey published her first book, Heart of the Dreaming, in 1991 and has produced one book a year since then except for a couple of occasions.
The Endless Sky, I found to be a little different in its format from most other books I have read recently. The Acknowledgement section is at the front of this novel following a dedication to a friend lost recently to cancer. The storyline is evident right from the start where in other books the reader is introduced to various characters who at first appear to have no connection, although the reader knows that they will all come together in the end.
TV presenter Nicole and producer friend, Stacie, set out to find inspiration for a new TV series. On their way they find the other key characters to this story. Both women are city people and as they head to the heart of Australia, they discover much information which could be used in their show. They just have to find a theme to link what they have found.
Away from the city they discover archaeological digs, laboratories, fabulous caves and the endless sky. However, they also find mysteries. What happened to the man who drove off into the night, and his car was later found smashed into a tree? They hear of a threat to this pristine part of Australia from big overseas corporations and there is also fossil theft.
Do these things all fit together? Can the information they have discovered be part of a TV program viewers would want to watch? Will they have the freedom to create this as they wish, or will personalities and vested interests derail any new programs?
This 388-page hard-covered novel contains much information that may be new to readers, like a textbook, but it is also a story of human feelings, relationships, both good and bad, environmental issues and the lengths some people will go to for riches. The outback, and the wonders it contains, are described in detail. When the women arrive in Brisbane, chasing new information, key landmarks in this city are also highlighted.
The dust jacket on the book depicts the endless sky above the deep orange of the landscape. Words on the back of the dust cover beautifully sum up the contents of this book. Beneath the endless sky this land reveals the magic – and its menace – as the two friends find more than they could ever have imagined.
In May 2017 Morrissey was inducted into the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) Hall of Fame and given the Lloyd O’Neil Award for service to the Australian book industry. She was also made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2019 Queen’s Birthday Honours in recognition of her “significant service to literature as a novelist, and to conservation and the environment”.
This is an engaging storyline as well as a book with interesting information about towns and people away from the big cities. The inner workings of any big organisation also have their egos and jealousies. These are painted realistically within this story.
17 March 2026
Finished reading ‘Pilbara’ by Judy Nunn, published in 2025, of 484 pages. I read this one over a couple of days after deciding to have a break from something more serious [see my next review following]. Set initially in Yorkshire, UK, and then moving on to the late 1800s frontier country of the Pilbara, in Western Australia, this was a wonderful read by this prolific author, and I found myself again neglecting other tasks, rather than put the book down.
As always, I enjoyed the historical [if not fictional] nature of this story, and in particular the sharp contrasts illustrated with regard to society norms and expectations of legality and moral relationships between the two main locations . As the lead character in the book noted ‘Once again, justice has been served in Pilbara fashion, Charles thought. He still didn’t altogether approve, but there were times when he had to admit it really did work out for the best. And who can argue with that’ [page 449].
A brief synopsis, as generally used when promoting the book!
‘The Pilbara, late 1800s: Frontier country, the wild west of Australia – a lawless, violent place where treachery is a way of life.
Widower Charles Burton arrives in this forbidding corner of the world with his three young children. They’ve travelled half the globe, from the lush, rolling hills and dales of Yorkshire, on a mission to save their family’s sheep and cattle property. Rebuilding the fortunes of Burton Station will ask everything of Charles and his children, particularly his daughter, Victoria, who will at times threaten to bring about their downfall.
Here in the oldest landscape on earth, survival has always proved a battle. And when greed takes over, the battle only intensifies. Aboriginal people are robbed of their lands and their very way of life as every new arrival fights for the riches on offer – the grazing territory, the pearls and the gold. Amid all this brutality, the Burtons and their allies must fight to conquer the savagery that surrounds them.
From Yorkshire to Cossack in Western Australia, and London to Tahiti in French Polynesia, Pilbara is the tale of a family on a mission to restore the honour of its name’.
For many older Australian readers the name, Judy Nunn, will bring back memories of TV shows such as The Box, Sons and Daughters and Home and Away. Since those days Judy Nunn has become a prolific writer of historically based novels which foreground strong women. She was awarded the Order of Australia in 2015 in recognition of her achievements. In this, her latest novel, Pilbara, she takes her readers back to the 1800s and the early opening up of Australia to adventurers from across the globe.
Reviewing for the Queensland Reviewers Collective, Wendy Lipke, in presenting a more expansive description of the book, wrote:
The story begins with the arrival of Charles Burton and his three small children to the Port of Albany on the underside of the Australian map. The year is 1888 where Charles is to meet his uncle before travelling to the property in the Pilbara. However, the uncle is not there when they arrive, and they soon learn that they will have to travel to their destination on their own.
The story that follows is divided into three parts. The first setting is Yorkshire, England and the year is 1874. William Edward Burton is the 34th Squire of Pendleton in West Yorkshire. He lives with his young daughter Charlotte and as a responsible man, conscious of his position in life and intensely proud in his heritage, he has passed all these characteristics on to his young daughter.
His younger brother had gone to Australia to find his own future and ended up in the Pilbara which at the time was considered the real frontier in Australia or the ‘Godforsaken Wilderness’ (21). At the time this was a lawless, violent place where treachery was a way of life. It was a place where new arrivals fought for the riches on offer,
whether they be land, pearls or gold. Parts two and three of the book are set in the Pilbara with a return to Yorkshire at the latter part of the book. The Epilogue is set in Yorkshire 1903.
The characterisation is strong for all main players with a touch of mystery surrounding most of them, whether it be concerning the name they currently go by or parts of their personal history. The storyline is foremost, but the landscape also plays a large part in the story. The author has presented her information through descriptive text, dialogue and letters going back and forth between the two locations. These are presented in italics.
This 496-page epic is a tale of hardship, danger, strong family connections and keeping up appearances. Embracing the hardship of such an untamed land and the dangers for its inhabitants, the story is predominantly about humanity, a strong family bond, loyalty and doing what is believed to be right. Yet in parts it can be very raw. Honour and justice are two major themes throughout, whether in the Pilbara or back in Yorkshire.
Many events occurred in the Pilbara which took time to heal, but the area also allowed that to happen. The role of women and how the different genders were perceived and treated at that time in history, is evident throughout this novel’.
A wonderful opportunity to learn a little early Australian history in the remote outback regions, and enjoy a wonderful novel along the way. And note the characters of Charlotte and Charles – are they two, or one of the same – revealed to the reader, but not to most of those that they live and work with through the course of their time in the Pilbara, and the sea voyages there and back.
29th March, 2026
This book, recommended by my brother – ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ by Amor Towles, published in 2016, of 462 pages – a rather fascinating look at life in and around Moscow over a number of decades following the Russian revolution, though basically written as a fictional novel.
The best way to describe the book in broad terms – ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ concerns the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery.
This is not written as a history, although many facets of Russian developments during the decades during which Rostov is incarcerated in his ‘hotel accommodation’ are revealed throughout his story. Bill Gates wrote that ‘it is an amazing story because it manages to be a little bit of everything. There’s fantastical romance, politics, espionage, parenthood, and poetry. The book is technically historical fiction, but you’d be just as accurate calling it a thriller or a love story’.
In fact, some other comments by Gates’s commentary, wrote in 2019, give an excellent broad depiction of the scenario under which Rostov lived, which might encourage the doubtful reader. For eg, he noted that
“A Gentleman in Moscow is a fun, clever, and surprisingly upbeat look at Russian history through the eyes of one man. At the beginning of the book, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is sentenced to spend his life under house arrest in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel. It’s 1922, and the Bolsheviks have just taken power of the newly formed Soviet Union. The book follows the Count for the next thirty years as he makes the most of his life despite its limitations.
Although the book is fictional, the Metropol is a real hotel….. It’s the kind of place where you can’t help but picture what it was like at different points in time. The hotel is located across the street from the Kremlin and managed to survive the Bolshevik revolution and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. That’s a lot of history for one building. Many scenes in the book never happened in real life (as far as I know), but they’re easy to imagine given the Metropol’s history. In one memorable chapter, Bolshevik officials decide that the hotel’s wine cellar is “counter to the ideals of the Revolution.” The hotel staff is forced to remove labels from more than 100,000 bottles, and the restaurant must sell all wine for the same price. The Count—who sees himself as a wine expert—is horrified.
Count Rostov is an observer frozen in time, watching these changes come and go. He felt to me like he was from a different era from the other characters in the book. Throughout all the political turmoil, he manages to survive because, well, he’s good at everything. He’s read seemingly every book and can identify any piece of music. When he’s forced to become a waiter at the hotel restaurant, he does it with this panache that is incredible. He knows his liquor better than anyone, and he’s not shy about sharing his opinions. The Count should be an insufferable character, but the whole thing works because he’s so charming. Towles has a talent for quirky details. Early-ish in the book, he says the Count “reviewed the menu in reverse order as was his habit, having learned from experience that giving consideration to appetizers before entrees can only lead to regret.” A description like that tells you so much about a character.
I’ve read a bunch of books about Lenin and Stalin. A Gentleman in Moscow gave me a new perspective on the era, even though it’s fictional. Towles keeps the focus on the Count, so most major historical events (like World War II) get little more than a passing mention. But I loved seeing how these events still shifted the world of the Metropol in ways big and small. It gives you a sense of how political turmoil affects everyone, not just those directly involved with it”.
While not a ‘quick read’ like the three novels mentioned previously, it was a book that retained my interest throughout, such interest of course accentuated by the ‘historical’ aspects revealed from time to time. While Rostov’s ‘residence’ in the hotel comes over as relatively comfortable and even ‘safe’, it is obvious that is not generally the case in the ‘outer’ regions of Moscow or the wider Russia in those times.
In a http://www.literaturelust.com post, reviewer Melissa Gouty noted in 2023 some reservations – Why would I want to read about a solitary man wandering around a hotel in Moscow?” I thought to myself. “The last thing I want to read about is a privileged guy living in a luxury hotel in a country I’m furious at right now.”
But, after reading the book = well, she wrote – But the book is about so much more than a rich man. It’s about being kind, compassionate, and curious in the worst of circumstances. It’s about building relationships, making families, and thriving instead of just surviving. A joy to read, A Gentleman in Moscow is filled with observations of humanity and profound life philosophies.
So there you have it – thank-you Robert for the recommendation!
The following article was printed in The Conversation: Books and Ideas on the 6th March this year, and reviews five recent publications by women from Afghanistan.
The Taliban wages war on women, but their voices roar on the page. Here are 5 essential books by Afghan women writersby Ayesha Jehangir, Lecturer, Journalism and Communication, UNSW Sydney
There is something profoundly defiant, almost incendiary, about Afghan women writers. When the Taliban regained control of Kabul in August 2021, images of women protesting in the streets and girls being barred from classrooms circulated around the world.
Amid this institutionalised erasure, writing becomes an act of resistance. Recent Afghan women’s literature challenges this erasure. It is a way of reclaiming agency.
Afghanistan frequently reaches Australian readers through the hard grammar of war reporting and the procedural language of policy debate. Literature offers a different vantage point. Here are five essential books by contemporary Afghan women writers.
My Dear Kabul: A Year in the Life of an Afghan Women’s Writing Group
My Dear Kabul (2024) is not a traditional memoir told in a single voice, but a cartography of lived experience. It contains the voices of 21 Afghan women writers who ran a clandestine digital writing group as the Taliban consolidated power.
Drawn from WhatsApp exchanges that have been downloaded, translated and compiled into a collective diary, the book is a visceral account of life as a political system collapses.
Contributors vary in locale and literary temperament. Their entries oscillate between reportage, testimonies, narrative reflection and fragmented poetic utterance. The women in My Dear Kabul are mostly in their 20s and 30s, although there is one in her 60s. This plurality challenges monolithic representations of Afghan women.
We experience personal fear through the story of Sadaf, a teacher who describes the abrupt end to her classroom when the head teacher interrupts an exam to dismiss her Year 8 students because the Taliban are entering the city.
Fakhta, a law student from Daikundi province, had to flee the city along with other students in a university hostel. Her writing combines minute personal details with the existential uncertainty of the moment. “Towards an unknown fate,” she writes, “we all kept moving.”
A second book, Rising After the Fall (2023), edited by Lucy Hannah and Zarghuna Kargar, with illustrations by Sara Rahmani, has adapted the collective concept of My Dear Kabul for younger readers. Rising After the Fall has voices of different ages.
The book distils fragments of lived experience through glimpses of domestic resistance, displaced schooling and truncated freedoms. The edition situates Afghan girls not as passive recipients but as active narrators of their worlds. I find myself returning to it as an ideal birthday gift for young readers, a gesture of imaginative solidarity.
My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women
Edited by Lyse Doucet and Lucy Hannah, My Pen is the Wing of a Bird (2022) gathers short fiction by 18 Afghan women living inside the country. The stories have been written in Afghanistan’s two principal languages, Pashto and Dari, and translated into English by Afghans, several of them writers themselves.
These narratives, some of which are set in the claustrophobic domestic sphere and others in speculative or transitional landscapes, interrogate the conditions of life under patriarchal authoritarianism.
In Sharifa Pasun’s “The Late Shift”, for example, the reader encounters Sanga, a young mother and a journalist in 1980s Afghanistan, who navigates the overlapping demands of professional life, family responsibilities and existential threat.
Sanga works evening shifts, broadcasting the day’s news under the constant threat of rocket fire. By day, she attends Kabul University, then returns home to her two-year-old child, Ghamai.
Pasun uses the figure of a working mother to depict the labour of care against a backdrop of violence. As she writes:
the roads were busy with ambulances. The rockets couldn’t be heard anymore. Sanga knew that the opposition had run out of rockets. They must be tired like her, she thought.
We Are Still Here: Afghan Women on Courage, Freedom, and the Fight to Be Heard
Edited by Nahid Shahalimi, We Are Still Here (2022) compiles essays, testimonies and reflections by 13 Afghan women journalists, activists, educators, scientists, coders, musicians and artists. It covers the period before and after the Taliban’s takeover.
Individual lives are situated within global militarisation, evacuation, refugee displacement and the international humanitarian regime, without personal voices being reduced to geopolitical abstractions. Contributors refuse both silence and pity.
The book foregrounds women’s agency in shaping narratives of resistance, belonging and intellectual continuity.
The story of Razia Barakzai, a former official who worked in Afghanistan’s presidential office, stands out. Barakzai describes how she and other young women organised demonstrations in Kabul, even as the risks became immediate and personal. They carried placards in Dari, Pashto and English, declaring that Afghan women still existed and demanded their rights.
Her reflections capture the moral clarity driving these protests. Her story illustrates how Afghan women’s resistance often emerges through collective courage — transforming fear into solidarity and refusing both erasure and pity.
“To be silent,” she writes, “would mean we were accepting and surrendering to the Taliban’s power.”
Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother’s Letter to Her Son
Although Homeira Qaderi’s memoir Dancing in the Mosque (2021) predates the fall of Kabul, it gained renewed urgency in the post-2021 landscape. It is written as a letter to Qaderi’s son, whom she was forced to relinquish after divorcing her abusive husband. Afghan custody laws and social norms overwhelmingly favour fathers after divorce.
The book’s title comes from a formative childhood memory. As a young girl, Qaderi accompanies her grandmother to a mosque where women gather to pray and mourn. At one point, carried away by a moment of joy, she begins to spin and dance. The reaction is immediate. The women around her reprimand her sharply, reminding her such movement is “inappropriate in a sacred space”.
The moment becomes emblematic. The mosque, which should be a place of spiritual refuge, becomes a site where a girl first learns the boundaries placed on her body and voice. Yet the image of the girl dancing also signals a stubborn impulse toward freedom that persists even within those confines.
The book moves associatively, drifting between childhood memories, reflections on motherhood, moments from Qaderi’s marriage, and the act of writing to her absent son. The narrative often circles back on itself, lingering on small sensory details: a room, a conversation, a fleeting moment of joy or grief.
The fragmented structure mirrors the turbulence that shapes Qaderi’s life: the dislocations of war, the contradictions of love and loss, and the unresolved ache of separation from her child. The memoir is an intimate act of remembering, where memories surface unevenly, guided by feeling rather than the orderly progression of events.
The looping, pausing and returning evokes the turbulence Afghan women have navigated. In a context where women’s education itself has been criminalised, Qaderi’s text stands as an enduring testament to the interior life as a site of resistance.
The Pearl that Broke Its Shell
“I knew nothing about pearls and shells either,” Nadia Hashimi writes in The Pearl that Broke Its Shell (2014), “except that one had to free itself from the other.”
The novel explores the quiet ingenuity with which Afghan women navigate restrictive gender norms. At its centre is Rahima, a young girl in Kabul who becomes a bacha posh (a girl temporarily raised in boys’ clothes so she can move freely in public and support her family).
The transformation allows Rahima to experience freedoms otherwise denied to her, such as attending school, running errands, even riding a bicycle through the city streets. Yet this fragile autonomy is always temporary. As Rahima reflects, “To be a bacha posh is to borrow a boy’s freedom until you are old enough to give it back.”
Across the 69 chapters of her novel, Hashimi interweaves Rahima’s story with that of her great-great-grandmother Shekiba – “born at the turn of the twentieth century, in an Afghanistan eyed lasciviously by Russia and Britain” – who also survived by inhabiting roles typically reserved for men.
Through these parallel narratives, The Pearl that Broke Its Shell reveals how Afghan women have long devised creative strategies for survival within patriarchal systems. The result is a moving portrait of resilience, one that suggests that beneath the constraints placed on them, Afghan women have courage and aspirations that persist across generations.
I’ve continued reading since the Christmas/New Year period, and as always like to share something about that material which this time includes some older publications. Only a short selection of readings this time, however some substantial commentary has been provided for the third listed book below.
Last One Out by Jane Harper, pub. 2025;
The Rainbow and the Rose, by Nevil Shute, pub. 1958;
The Agony and the Ecstasy: the biographical novel of Michelangelo, by Irving Stone, pub. 1961;
Atonement by Ian McEwan, pub. 2001.
13th January
The latest novel by Australian author Jane Harper called ‘Last One Out’, published in 2025, of 373 pages, a slow-moving novel which built up to its leading crescendo of awareness in the closing pages. A true mystery I guess, where the reader may well assume that the killer[s] are someone still in the town, but not revealed until the appropriate time. In some ways, as I read, I found myself silently saying ‘get on with the story’, yet still a difficult book to put down!!
“Last One Out” is a gripping mystery novel by Jane Harper that explores the disappearance of a young man and the haunting impact it has on his family and a small rural community.
The story revolves around Ro Crowley, who is waiting for her son Sam to return home on the night of his 21st birthday. However, Sam never arrives, and his disappearance sends shockwaves through the community of Carralon Ridge, and eventually Ro leaves her husband Cliff as they both struggle in different ways to overcome their loss.
Five years later, Ro returns to the now desolate town for Sam’s annual memorial, only to find it transformed by the encroaching coal mine that has driven most residents away. As she revisits the abandoned houses where Sam’s footprints were found, Ro seeks answers about her son’s fate, uncovering secrets that the remaining townsfolk may hold. The skeletal community is now an echo of itself, having fractured under the pressure of the coal mine operating on its outskirts. But Ro still wants answers. Only a few people remain. If the truth is to be found in that town, does it lie among them? She has not given up hope that Sam is still alive and is desperate to make sense of his final hours
From Australian Book Review of December, 2025, the reviewer, Barbara Pezzotti describes the affect of the mine on the town thus – ‘In Harper’s descriptive language, the presence of the mine is not only visible through the destruction of the landscape; it is also constantly felt and heard by the inhabitants of Carrolan Ridge. The rumbling and rattling of the machinery [24 hours a day] scarring the ground and destroying nature is constant, day and night. Replacing birdsong, it is the background to walking, eating, sleeping and talking….Heavy vehicles lumber their way up and down past people’s front doors. A grey layer of coal dust covers every flat surface, the taste of the water and the smell of sulphur in the air, a constant reminder of the mine’s devilish presence’
She also describes [in line with my opening paragraph above] where ‘In this slow-burn, stand-alone mystery, police investigation is non-existent and the burden of the enquiry rests only on Ro’s shoulders. Through flashbacks, the narrative gives an account of Ro’s five-year-long investigation. A new, unexpected clue materialises only towards the end of the novel, bringing finality’.
Chris Gordon, writing for Readings [Sept 2025] summarises the book as follows
“Jane Harper’s latest novel is a heartbreaker. There is no ruggedly handsome detective trying to make sense of his own frailties while solving a murder. Last One Out does something different to Harper’s previous works. The story concentrates on a family with a son, Sam, who disappeared five years prior to the book’s beginning. The novel’s focus remains on the mother, Ro, a doctor who fled her marriage and the community after the initial trauma. Yet she returns each year to the failing town to acknowledge her loss and to connect with the friends and family who remain. And here lies the other tragic component of the novel: the entire story is set in Carralon Ridge – an isolated rural town that has run out of steam and has been purchased for mining. The residents who haven’t left are bitter – defeated, even – and certainly nostalgic for times that now do not exist. The men seem to cower from change, while the women support everyone, clean, and hide their pain. Harper does an excellent job of working into the narrative the relentless nature of the dust, the noise of the mining, and the heat. This is not a town for tourists. This is a town that screams resentment and frustration. And this time, Ro’s annual visit uncovers the past – and her son’s murderer.
Harper has written a wonderful literary exposé of a disappearing town. The metaphors she uses are damning of the environmental damage caused by mining. She perfectly captures the limbo in which the dispirited locals are trapped, along with the social fractures and fear the uncertainty causes. This is a universal story of decline. Readers of Harper’s previous crime novels – and this is another – will delight in her steady pace and astute character observations. I found this novel painfully affecting: our rural past is swept up in the dust with more than one victim.
Reverting back to Pezzotti’s analysis – ‘Last One Out lacks the rhythm and suspense of Harper’s earlier work [all of which I have read]. The sociological and psychological study of a disappearing community is compelling, but it distracts from the crime plot…………..This is not an uplifting story of resistance and empowerment, nor is it a sharp condemnation of the evils of neo-liberalism and globalisation. The moral of the story is simply to accept the inevitable consequences of corporate greed and focus on personal regeneration , even at the expense of community’.
In an article I included in this Column a few months ago, Harper’s novel was criticised to the extent, that as with her past books, the Aboriginal population did not feature . The original Australians don’t appear to have a place in this town or in her novels, so far!
25th January
A novel written many years ago, which I’ve just caught up with was ‘The Rainbow and the Rose’, by Nevil Shute, published in 1958, of 306 pages. When seasoned pilot Johnny Pascoe tries to rescue a sick girl from the Tasmanian outback, his plane crashes and leaves him stranded and dangerously injured. Ronnie Clarke, who was trained by Pascoe, attempts to fly a doctor in to help, but rough weather makes his mission more difficult than he imagined. As he waits overnight at Pascoe’s house for a chance to try again the next day, Clarke revisits the past of this unusual man [which he does through dreams he has while asleep]—and reveals the shocking and tragic secrets that have influenced his life.
The title is taken from a sonnet “The Treasure” by Rupert Brooke, which is quoted in full as a preface:
Wikipedia summary of the novel [readers’ spoiler]
The story concerns the life of Canadian Johnnie Pascoe, a retired commercial and military pilot, who has crashed while attempting a medevac flight in difficult weather conditions into a small airstrip a mountainous region of Tasmania. Unconscious and suffering from a dangerous head injury, he lies in the house of the child he had been sent to help, which is inaccessible by road and in contact with the outside world only by radio. Hearing of his plight, Ronnie Clarke — an airline pilot and student of Pascoe decades earlier — offers to try and land a young doctor. After two failed flights in one of Pascoe’s own Taylorcraft Auster aircraft from the small flight school Pascoe set up after retirement, Clarke rests overnight at Pascoe’s house, meets Pascoe’s two daughters, and narrates the life of his former mentor through three dream episodes.
In the first episode, Pascoe is a young fighter pilot in the Royal Flying Corps during The Great War and marries an up-and-coming actress. At war’s end they separate when she accepts a role in Hollywood, moves in with another man, and files for divorce from there with sole custody of their daughter.
A few years later, in the 1920s, Pascoe is chief pilot at the small flying school where Clarke learned to fly, and becomes romantically involved with a student pilot, Brenda Marshall, whose husband is in a mental asylum after sexually assaulting children. Things go awry after the birth of Pascoe’s and Marshall’s baby daughter, and when Marshall learns that her husband has refused to grant a divorce, she commits suicide by deliberately crashing her de Havilland Moth. Pascoe leaves the country, with the baby in the care of Marshall’s mother, and shortly afterwards he learns that the baby has died
In the final dream episode, after having served with Ferry Command during the Second World War beside Clarke, Pascoe is a senior pilot with fictitious AusCan Airlines in the 1950s, flying routes between Canada and Australia, and approaching mandatory retirement at age 60. Peggy Dawson, a flight attendant and former nurse in her late 20s, asks to join his cabin crew and impresses him during the interview. They begin to spend more time together during layovers, and he develops feelings for her that he notes are non-sexual. With retirement approaching, Pascoe wants to find a way to keep Dawson in his life, so he proposes marriage, even though he does not believe that his feelings are romantic. Dawson reveals that she rightfully should be named Brenda Maragaret Pascoe. She is Pascoe’s daughter with Brenda Marshall, who Pascoe believed to have died in infancy; she had left nursing and joined AusCan airlines to observe her father and possibly to make contact with him. The framing story closes with Ronnie Clarke making a successful attempt to land the doctor and Pascoe’s daughter Nurse Dawson in clear weather the next morning, only to learn that Pascoe had died during the night. Dawson remains to arrange for an informal burial, then plans to hike 40 miles (64 km) back through to bush with the rescue party to deal with her father’s estate. There is a strong suggestion that Dawson and the young doctor have developed feelings for each other.
Clarke returns to Melbourne, 36 hours after he left, and notes that his life is full of blessings with his spouse and children, while Pascoe, who was (in his opinion) the better man, had so little joy in life.
Like Conrad, Shute often uses a narrator to tell the story; in The Rainbow and the Rose, the narrator periodically shifts from Clarke to Pascoe.
16 February
The Agony and the Ecstasy: the biographical novel of MICHELANGELO by Irving Stone, published in 1958, of 664 pages. I can’t admit to reading this mammoth book in the hurry – in fact recall when it actually came into my possession, many years ago, or whether it was a purchase or s gift. My copy was personally signed by the author. In any case, I began to read it many years ago, put it aside, probably for a couple of decades, only getting back to it early this year, and determined to see it through!
I found it not just a biography of a great artist [in novel form] but also a fascinating depiction of the historical events of the period of his life and of the political and religious strife of Italy and surrounding areas of the then Europe. Reading in particular about the Popes of those times – well hardly comparative to the perceived moral and religious authority of the modern-day Pope. That’s a story on it’s own!!
Just one of many examples: [page 636] “Cardinal Giovanni Pietro Caraffa became Pope Paul IV. No-one quite knew how he had been elected. He was a thoroughly disagreeable man, violent of nature, intolerant of all about him. Pope Paul IV, knowing how completely he was hated, said: ‘I do not know why they elected me Pope, so I am bound to conclude that it is not the cardinals but God who makes the Popes’.
Published in 1961, this is a captivating novel that chronicles the life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, exploring his artistic genius and personal struggles during the Renaissance and exploring the historical context of the time. The book is not only a tribute to Michelangelo’s genius, and at times, hi complex character, and the often tumultuous relationships he had with artists such as Leonardo de Vinci, but also a reflection on the broader tensions faced by artists in pursuit of their vision
The narrative begins with a young Michelangelo, grappling with feelings of loneliness and a desire for love following the death of his mother. His journey into artistry sees him facing both physical and emotional struggles, driven by an insatiable pursuit of perfection and the agony of creating masterpieces only to witness their destruction, and regularly facing the demands and changes of those demands by different Popes and other authorities of the time. Announcing that it was his ambition to wipe out all heresy in Italy, he unleashed on the Roman people the horrors of the Spanish inquisition”.
However, this book is about Michelangelo, although in reading through it, one quickly learns of the powerful influence that the various Popes of his time had on his work, his lifestyle, his relationships, and even at times, his life and freedom itself.
The novel emphasizes several key themes, including:
Irving Stone conducted extensive research for the novel including translating Michelangelo’s letters and studying his techniques. This meticulous approach allowed Stone to blend historical facts with fictional narrative, while the novel has been divided into precise sections that detail distinct periods of Michelangelo’s life, making the story both informative and engaging. Stone trawled through every document, including Michelangelo’s bills and legal documents, and even worked sat one time in an Italian quarry.
Writing in a publication from Sep 27-October3, 1997, called ‘The Vulture’ [an article which described itself as ‘Picks over the bones of contemporary culture], it was noted that ‘This version of the artist’s long, difficult life takes no risks. What we get is an intricate skeleton of events and a carefully textured skin of meticulous local colour. It is a fascinating canvas so long as you don’t expect much psychological flesh’. Well, if merely a skeleton, the 647 pages I read certainly contained plenty of skin and flesh!!
Having noted also with special interest the years and efforts and trials Michelangelo put into creating many if not all of his ‘masterpieces’, I found myself adding to my ‘bucket list of things I’ll never achieve’ a genuine desire to see in person those existing masterpieces such as the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, The Last Judgement, the statue David, The Garden of Eden, the Pieta, Moses, St. Peters, and so on [see following].
Getting back to the novel –
Key characters include Lodovico, Michelangelo’s father, whose harsh expectations and lack of affection contribute significantly to Michelangelo’s personal challenges. Lorenzo de’ Medici, a significant patron, embodies the Renaissance ideals that inspire Michelangelo, while Contessina de’ Medici and Clarissa Saffi represent the romantic entanglements that are ultimately thwarted by social constraints and Michelangelo’s artistic obsessions. Vittoria Colonna, a devoted reformist, captures his admiration later in life, though their relationship remains platonic. Lastly, Tommaso de Cavalieri serves as a devoted companion in his later years, showcasing the importance of friendship amidst Michelangelo’s solitary existence. This rich tapestry of relationships illuminates the artist’s life, highlighting the balance of agony and ecstasy inherent in his quest for artistic immortality.
As one reviewer noted – the novel explores his quest to become the living representation of Renaissance humanism, a journey filled with personal and professional hurdles. Michelangelo must navigate familial opposition, religious constraints, political manoeuvrings, and the competitive nature of artistic patronage to fulfill his vision.
From a Wikipedia summary we note that:
Beginnings and Early Challenges
Despite his father’s disapproval, young Michelangelo earns an apprenticeship under the painter Ghirlandaio, and later, the sculptor Bertoldo, who works under the sponsorship of Lorenzo de’ Medici, a prominent Florentine patron. Michelangelo quickly gains Lorenzo’s admiration and forms connections with his children, including future popes Giulio and Giovanni, and Contessina, his first love. He faces hostility from envious peers, including an infamous encounter with Torrigiani that leaves him physically marked, but through illicit study of anatomy, he hones the skills crucial to his craft. As Savonarola rises to power, threatening the Medici family and the cultural landscape of Florence, Michelangelo finds himself at a crossroads.
Rome: A Turning Point
Seeking refuge in Bologna during Savonarola’s reign, Michelangelo encounters Clarissa Saffi and creates “Bambino,” drawing the attention of Leo Baglioni. His first visit to Rome introduces him to influential figures such as banker Jacopo Galli, who commissions his work, and architects Giuliano Sangallo and Bramante, the latter becoming a rival. Here, Michelangelo sculpts the renowned Pieta, learns the intricacies of patronage, and becomes involved in the ambitious project of St. Peter’s Basilica, which will dominate his later years.
Return to Florence
Back in Florence, Michelangelo creates his monumental statue, “the Giant,” or David, which comes to symbolize the city itself. He crosses paths with Leonardo da Vinci, his chief rival, and Raphael, forming a triumvirate of Italian Renaissance art. Michelangelo’s rivalry with Leonardo intensifies as they compete to paint frescoes for Florence’s rulers. Pope Julius takes note of Michelangelo’s prowess and summons him to Rome, compelling him to work in bronze and undertake the monumental task of painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Julius’s vision of a new St. Peter’s aligns with Michelangelo’s burgeoning architectural ambitions.
Under Papal Influence
Following Julius, the Medici popes Giovanni and Giulio add new dimensions to Michelangelo’s challenges. Giovanni demands that Michelangelo procure marble from the remote Pietrasanta, inadvertently turning him into an engineer, while Giulio’s forces require him to fortify Florence, utilizing his engineering acumen. Pope Paul III commissions Michelangelo for the Last Judgment and appoints him architect of St. Peter’s amidst ongoing disputes. Michelangelo’s culminating achievement is the dome of St. Peter’s, a fitting testament to his artistic and architectural legacy. Alongside his professional triumphs, he finds personal solace in the company of Tommaso de Cavalieri, who would carry on his work on St. Peter’s, and Vittoria Colonna, his intellectual companion and muse.
Looking at perhaps the most famous of his works, with copies of these to follow:
David, completed by Michelangelo in 1504, is one of the most renowned works of the Renaissance. The masterwork definitively established his prominence as a sculptor of extraordinary technical skill and strength of symbolic imagination – created from 1501 to 1504.
The Sistine Chapel: – from the creation to Noah in 175 individual paintings covering 12,000 square feet
The creation of Adam (bottom), the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib (centre) and the temptation and expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden (top)
The Pieta: this is Michelangelo’s masterpiece that depicts the Virgin Mary cradling the lifeless body of Jesus after his crucifixion.
David by Michelangelo Florence Galleria dell’Accademia
[David]
The Last Judgement [1536-41]in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City.
–
The Sistine Chapel ceiling, in the Vatican Palace [1508-1512], Vatican Palace, Vatican City
The Creation
Above -Madonna and Child [1524-34], Medici Chapel, Florence; and below, The Last Judgement [1536-41]in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City.
In conclusion, the night before Michelangelo died [in Irving Stone’s fictional biographical terms]
[page 647] “That night, as he lay sleepless in bed, he thought, ‘Life has been good. God did not create me to abandon me. I have loved marble, yes, and paint too. I have loved architecture, and poetry too. I have loved my family and my friends. I have loved God, the forms of the earth and the heavens, and people too. I have loved life to the full, and now I love death as its natural termination. Il Magnifico would be happy: for me, the forces of destruction never overcame creativity.”
19th February
Another book from earlier years – Atonement by Ian McEwan, published in 2001, of 372 pages. This book was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize, and after reading, I was not surprised with that nomination. Widely regarded as one of McEwan’s best works, ‘Time’ magazine named Atonement in its list of the 100 greatest English-language novels since 1923.
It is set in three time periods, 1935 England, second World War England and France, and present-day England, and covers an upper-class girl’s half-innocent mistake that ruins lives, her adulthood in the shadow of that mistake, and a reflection on the nature of writing.
On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees from a distance, her sister Cecilia strip off into her underwear, and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house to retrieve a vase that has been thrown in by the son of the estate’s cleaner, who has virtually been a part of the family since childhood. . Watching her too is that family friend, Robbie Turner who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will young become innocent victims of a young girl’s imagination and writing ambitions as Briony commits a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone, while the other two, and the extended family suffer and have their lives changed in various ways.
As noted on the ‘Bookaholic Academy’ a few years ago – ‘Some books are just stories, and then there are those that feel like they’ve crawled under your skin and left a mark. Ian McEwan’s Atonement falls into the latter category. It’s not just a novel – it’s a gut punch wrapped in beautiful prose, a story about guilt, love, and the slippery nature of truth. If you’ve ever wondered how one mistake can ripple through lives like a stone thrown into water, this book gives you the answer in heartbreaking detail’.
That and the vivid heart-rending depictions of the allies and civilians as they flee from the Germans towards Dunkirk [the second period of the book], and the horrific [to a bystander as a reader] experiences of both Briony and her sister as nurses in the English hospitals attending to the wounded arriving from across the Channel from France [third time period] emphasise so strongly that second category mentioned above.
I’ve copied below the full synopsis of the book, as published by Wikipedia, which is basically a spoiler for those who may be intending to read the book. As a ‘non-spoiler’, a brief plot overview could be:-
‘At it’s core, Atonement is about Briony Tallis, a 13-year-old girl, with an overactive imagination. One hot summer day in 1935, she witnesses something she doesn’t fully understand. But instead of keeping her confusion to herself, she makes an accusation – one that changes the lives of her sister Cecilia and Cecilia’s lover, Robbie, forever. From there, McEwan drags us through the brutality of World War II, the fragility of love in a world torn apart, and the crushing weight of regret. The structure is layered, moving from a childhood mistake to its devastating consequences, and finally to the lasting scars left behind’.
At this point, if you don’t want to read the spoiler, stop reading here!
From a Wikipedia contribution about ‘Atonement’
Part one
Briony Tallis, a 13-year-old English girl with a talent for writing, lives at her family’s country estate with her parents Jack and Emily Tallis, who are members of the landed gentry. Her older sister Cecilia has recently graduated from the University of Cambridge with Robbie Turner, the Tallis family housekeeper’s son and Cecilia’s childhood friend, whose university education was funded by Jack Tallis.
In the summer of 1935, Briony’s maternal cousins, 15-year-old Lola and 9-year-old twins Jackson and Pierrot, visit the family amidst their parents’ divorce. Cecilia’s older brother Leon returns from London, accompanied by his friend from Oxford, the well-off manufacturer Paul Marshall. Cecilia and Robbie bicker over a vase, which breaks and falls into a fountain. Cecilia strips to her underwear and dives in to retrieve the pieces, surprising Robbie. Briony, watching from a window, is confused and intrigued by Cecilia and Robbie’s actions. She is inspired to begin writing psychological realism, and the reader is informed that this will eventually become a hallmark of her fiction.
In the wake of the incident by the pond, Robbie realizes he is attracted to Cecilia, and writes several drafts of a love letter to her. He gives the letter to Briony to deliver to Cecilia; however, he inadvertently gives her a version he had meant to discard, which contains lewd references (“In my dreams I kiss your cunt“). By the time Robbie realizes his mistake, Briony has already returned to the house with his letter.
Despite Robbie’s instructions to the contrary, Briony opens the letter and reads it. She is shocked by its vulgar language, and becomes convinced that Robbie intends to harm Cecilia. An injured Lola goes to Briony for comfort, claiming that her younger brothers attacked her, although it is implied to have instead been Paul Marshall, who has a long scratch on his face. Briony relays the contents of the letter to Lola, who labels Robbie a “maniac,” re-affirming Briony’s feelings. Robbie arrives at the main house for a family dinner party, and is confronted by Cecilia. He confesses his feelings to her, and she responds in kind. Later the same evening, Briony walks in on Robbie and Cecilia having sex in the library. The immature Briony believes she interrupted a vicious assault on Cecilia, and stands stunned while Robbie and Cecilia quickly exit.
At the dinner, which is generally tense, it is discovered the twins have run away. The party breaks into teams to search for them. When Cecilia goes with Leon, Robbie and Briony each set off on their own. In the darkness, while everyone is searching for the twins, Briony discovers her cousin Lola being raped by an assailant neither girl can clearly see. The attacker flees. Briony, convinced that it must have been Robbie, gets Lola to agree that she likely heard Robbie’s voice. The girls return home, and Briony identifies Robbie to the police as the rapist, claiming she saw his face in the dark. Lola is sedated by the local doctor, Cecilia screams at Briony and locks herself in her room, and Paul Marshall shares cigarettes with the policemen.
Robbie does not return, and the family and police officers stay awake waiting for him. As dawn breaks, Robbie appears in the driveway with Jackson and Pierrot, having found and rescued them. He is arrested on the spot and taken away, with only Cecilia and his mother believing his protestations of innocence. Briony is satisfied by this conclusion to her mythologized version of the events, with her as the hero and Robbie as the villain.
Part two
By the time the Second World War has started, Robbie has spent several years in prison. He and Cecilia have passed several years exchanging letters, maintaining their love for each other. Robbie is released from prison on the condition he enlist in the army. Meanwhile, Cecilia has completed training as a nurse, and cut off all contact with her family for the parts they played in locking Robbie up. Shortly before Robbie is deployed to France, they meet once for half an hour, during Cecilia’s lunch break. Their reunion starts awkwardly, but they share a kiss before leaving each other.
In France, the war is going badly, and the army is retreating to Dunkirk. As the injured Robbie makes his way there, he thinks about his love for Cecilia and his hatred for Briony. However, he eventually concludes that Briony was too young to be blamed fully, and writes Cecilia a letter encouraging her to reconnect with her family. His condition deteriorates over the course of the section; he weakens and becomes delirious. Robbie falls asleep in Dunkirk, one day before the evacuation begins.
Part three
A remorseful Briony, now eighteen years old, has refused her place at Cambridge and instead is a trainee nurse in London. She has realised the full extent of her mistake and decides it was Paul Marshall, Leon’s friend, whom she saw with Lola.
Briony still writes fiction, and receives a letter from Cyril Connolly at the hospital where she works. Cyril is rejecting Briony’s submitted draft of her latest work to his magazine, Horizon, but providing kindly and constructive feedback. The work is in fact the first draft of the first section of this novel.
Briony travels to attend the wedding of Paul Marshall and her cousin Lola, with the knowledge that Lola is marrying her rapist. Briony considers speaking up during the wedding, but does not. Afterwards, she visits Cecilia, who is cold but invites Briony in nonetheless. While Briony is apologizing to Cecilia, Robbie unexpectedly appears from the bedroom. He has been living with Cecilia while he is on leave from the army. Robbie expresses his fury at Briony, but with Cecilia’s soothing remains civil.
Cecilia and Robbie both refuse to forgive Briony, who nonetheless tells them she will try to put things right. She promises to begin the legal procedures needed to exonerate Robbie, even though Paul Marshall will never be held responsible for his crime because of his marriage to Lola. As Briony leaves Cecilia’s, she is optimistic about her role in Robbie’s exoneration, thinking that it will be “a new draft, an atonement” and that she is ready to begin.
Postscript
The final section, titled “London 1999”, is narrated by Briony herself in the form of a diary entry. Now 77, she is a successful novelist who has recently been diagnosed with vascular dementia, so she is facing rapid mental decline.
It is confirmed that Briony is the author of the preceding three sections of the novel. She attends a party in her honor at the Tallis family home, where the extended Tallis children perform The Trials of Arabella, the play that 13-year-old Briony had written and unsuccessfully attempted to stage with her cousins in the summer of 1935. Leon and Pierrot are in attendance, Jackson is fifteen years deceased, and Lola is alive but does not attend. Finally, Briony reveals to the reader that Robbie Turner died of septicaemia on the beaches of Dunkirk, that Cecilia was killed several months later when a bomb destroyed Balham Underground station during the Blitz, and that Briony’s story of seeing them together in 1940 was a fabrication. Briony did attend Lola’s wedding to Paul Marshall, but confesses she was too “cowardly” to visit the recently bereaved Cecilia to make amends. The novel, which she says is factually true apart from Robbie and Cecilia being reunited, is her lifelong attempt at “atonement” for what she did to them.
Briony justifies her invented happy ending by saying she does not see what purpose it would serve to give readers a “pitiless” story. She writes, “I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end.”
I have not read The Odyssey completely, and really can’t assess the accuracy of truthfulness of the following article, but I found it an interesting summation and perhaps worth some studious examination. In fact at this stage of my life, I’m not sure that I will ever get around to tackling Homer’s ‘poem’. As with Homer’s ‘The Iliad’, both books were purchased back in 2012, and while I did make a start in each case, other reading at the time proved more enticing!
The copy I have is presumably an example of one of many translations that Emily Wilson is revising. It is a translation by George Chapman [who also translated my copy of The Iliard]. Perhaps the comments made in the Introduction to my copy by Dr Adam Roberts of the University of London, give an indication of some of Wilson’s criticisms that follow. Roberts notes that “Chapman’s Odyssey has an unfortunate reputation as a relatively inaccurate rendering of Homer’s original…[but]..The consensus of most critics is that the tone and timbre of Chapman is more ornate, more quaint and more explicitly moral than Homer. Moreover, there are reputed to be many places where, according to critics, Chapman deliberately or otherwise shifts the emphasise, adds to or subtracts from, or flat-out mistranslates his source”.
This aspect of mistranslation, in reading the following article, appears to my mind, to be the major emphasise of Wilson’s translation In any case, for what it is worth, the following is her interpretation of the way Odyssey should be read, presumably the first interpretation by a woman.
For 400 years, every English translation of The Odyssey was done by a man. Then one woman translated it, and suddenly everyone realized how much had been quietly changed.
When Emily Wilson sat down to translate Homer’s Odyssey in 2017, she knew she was entering territory that had belonged exclusively to male scholars for centuries. Chapman in 1616. Pope in 1726. Fitzgerald in 1961. Fagles in 1996. Brilliant minds, all of them. Translators whose work had shaped how English speakers understood one of Western civilization’s foundational texts.
But Wilson, a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to ask a question none of her predecessors had seriously considered: What if centuries of male translators had been quietly editing the story to match their own assumptions about heroes, women, and morality?
She started with the very first word Homer uses to describe Odysseus: “polytropos.”
Every major translator had rendered it as something flattering. “Resourceful.” “Versatile.” “The man of many ways.” Words that made Odysseus sound admirable, heroic, the kind of protagonist you’d want your children to emulate.
Wilson translated it as “complicated.”
One word. But it changes everything.
Suddenly Odysseus isn’t just clever—he’s morally ambiguous. A man who lies even when honesty would serve him better. A survivor who manipulates, deceives, and rationalizes violence. Still the protagonist, still fascinating, but no longer simply heroic.
That’s what “polytropos” actually means in Greek. But for four centuries, translators had smoothed it over because complicated heroes made readers uncomfortable.
Wilson realized she’d stumbled onto something bigger. If they’d changed the first word, what else had been altered?
She kept digging.
The answer was staggering: almost everything involving women.
Consider what happens when Odysseus finally returns home after 20 years. He discovers that enslaved women in his household were forced into sexual relationships with the suitors who had occupied his palace. He and his son Telemachus execute these women in a brutal mass hanging—strung up together, left to die slowly.
Homer’s Greek uses the word “dmôai,” which has a precise meaning: enslaved women. People who were property, who had no legal rights, no power to refuse, no agency over their own bodies.
But English translators wrote: “maids.” “Maidservants.” “Servant girls.” One even wrote “guilty maids who made love with suitors.”
Do you see what happened? The language made it sound like these women had chosen to betray Odysseus. That they were complicit. That they deserved execution.
Emily Wilson translated the word exactly as Homer wrote it: “slaves.”
Suddenly the entire scene shifts. This isn’t justice—it’s a powerful man murdering enslaved women who were raped by invaders. Women who had no choice, no power to resist, no way to protect themselves.
That’s what Homer wrote. But for 400 years, English readers never knew because translators couldn’t bring themselves to call slavery what it was.
Or take Penelope, Odysseus’s wife who waits 20 years for his return. Earlier translators portrayed her as the ideal patient wife—faithful, pure, suffering nobly, the perfect Victorian woman.
But Homer’s Greek describes her as “periphron.” The word means shrewd, strategic, prudent, circumspect—someone who thinks several moves ahead.
Wilson’s Penelope isn’t just waiting passively. She’s manipulating over a hundred suitors, buying herself time through elaborate schemes, gathering intelligence, positioning herself politically for survival. When Odysseus finally reveals himself, she doesn’t collapse in grateful tears. She tests him. She demands proof. She makes him work for her trust.
Because she’s smart. Homer said she was smart from the beginning. But translators kept making her passive because intelligent, strategic women made Victorian readers uncomfortable. So they emphasized her tears and her weaving, and downplayed her brilliance.
Then there’s Calypso, the goddess who keeps Odysseus on her island for seven years. The Greek word Homer uses is “katechein”—to detain, to restrain, to hold captive against will.
But generations of translators wrote that Calypso “loved” him. That they had a “relationship.” That she “cared for” him.
Wilson translates it clearly: Calypso “kept” him as her captive. She “owned” him. She forced him to sleep with her.
Suddenly it’s obvious—this wasn’t a romance. It was imprisonment and sexual coercion. A goddess using her power to trap a mortal man who wanted to go home.
Homer said that explicitly. But translators softened it, romanticized it, because it complicated the heroic narrative they wanted to tell.
When Wilson’s translation was published, the literary world erupted. The book became a New York Times bestseller. Critics called it revelatory. Readers discovered they could finally hear Homer’s voice clearly, without centuries of editorial interference.
There was backlash, of course. Some scholars accused Wilson of imposing modern feminist values on an ancient text. Of “updating” Homer for contemporary audiences. Of distorting the original to make a political point.
Her response was devastatingly simple: Read the Greek.
Every single choice she made was defensible from the original language. She wasn’t adding feminism—she was removing centuries of anti-feminist bias that previous translators had inserted without acknowledging it.
Wilson imposed one iron rule on herself: consistency. If a Greek word means “slave,” translate it as “slave” every single time. Not “slave” when it’s a man and “maid” when it’s a woman. If a word indicates captivity, don’t call it love. If a character is described as intelligent, don’t emphasize their beauty instead.
Translate what Homer actually wrote, not what later cultures wished he’d written.
The result is an Odyssey that’s sharper, stranger, more morally complex—and more honest.
Odysseus isn’t a noble hero or a villain. He’s a complicated man who does both terrible and remarkable things, exactly as Homer presented him.
Penelope isn’t a passive wife waiting for rescue. She’s a strategic thinker navigating impossible political circumstances with intelligence and resolve.
The enslaved women aren’t guilty betrayers. They’re enslaved women murdered by the man who owned them, victims twice over.
Calypso isn’t a romantic interest. She’s a captor who abuses her power.
For 400 years, English-speaking readers thought they understood The Odyssey. But they were reading Homer filtered through Victorian morality, Edwardian gender assumptions, and translators who judged women more harshly than men while excusing male violence.
They were reading translations that reflected what those translators believed, not what Homer said.
Emily Wilson didn’t modernize The Odyssey. She de-Victorianized it. She stripped away four centuries of accumulated bias and let Homer’s Greek speak directly.
And it turns out The Odyssey is a better, more interesting, more morally challenging poem than we realized.
Not because Wilson added anything—but because she finally stopped letting centuries of male translators quietly edit the women out of their own story.
She became the first woman in 400 years to translate The Odyssey into English. And in doing so, she became the first translator in generations to simply tell the story Homer actually wrote.
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