Alice Nelson

On 27 January 2015, the world commemorated the 70-year anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. As the last living witnesses of that terrible time pass away, award-winning writer Alice Nelson presents a powerful collection of fourteen narratives by Australian Holocaust survivors told in their voices. Each individual's account of the war years - and of the life that followed - tells a deeply personal story that affirms the resilience of the human spirit.

Survivors of the Holocust Speak

After This

'Sometimes, Max, I imagine that I see you in her. Not in the sense of any physical inheritance, but a fleeting essence. Something wary and remote. Haunted, you might say. Though her ghosts are not yours.' 'Faithless is a triumph, using a perfectly paced first-person narrative to unravel an obsessively complex love story with elegiac fluency.' THE CANBERRA TIMES 'A superb literary achievement.' ABR 'It is maddening how deeply I have fallen for this story.' READINGS Set between India and England, Faithless is the story of Cressida, a writer and translator, and her consuming love for Max, an enigmatic older writer - and married man. Cressida's passion for Max engulfs her from the first giddy rush of sensation when she meets him in the mountains of southern India. It is a desire so potent it delivers great stunning blows to her heart. And yet she can share it with almost no one. Then Cressida meets Leo, and she is forced to choose- between a life of passion or a desire for some peace of mind; between her romantic idealism and the possibility of a steadier, attainable happiness. As the years unfold with both these men, a fragile young child, Flora, also finds her way into Cressida's life and heart, and it is Flora who forces Cressida to confront her own capacity for love and deception, and to accept the compromises life forces on us. Faithless is a passionate love story and a profound reflection on the nuances of attachment, the nature of desire, the different connections and relationships that sustain us, and the ways that we deceive ourselves and others in the hope that, finally, we can reach stumblingly towards one another.

Faithless

‘Sometimes, Max, I imagine that I see you in her. Not in the sense of any physical inheritance, but a fleeting essence. Something wary and remote. Haunted, you might say. Though her ghosts are not yours.’Set between India and England, Faithless is the story of Cressida, a writer and translator, and her consuming love for Max, an enigmatic older writer – and married man. Cressida’s passion for Max engulfs her from the first giddy rush of sensation when she is eighteen and meets him in the mountains of southern India. It is a desire so potent it delivers great stunning blows to her heart. And yet she can share it with almost no one. Then Cressida meets Leo, and she is forced to choose: between a life of passion or a desire for some peace of mind; between her romantic idealism and the possibility of a steadier, attainable happiness. As the years unfold with both these men, a fragile young child, Flora, also finds her way into Cressida’s life and heart, and it is Flora who forces Cressida to confront her own capacity for love and deception, and to accept the compromises life forces on us; the lies we tell in service of those things we cannot live without. Faithless is a passionate love story and a profound reflection on the nuances of attachment, the nature of desire, the different connections and relationships that sustain us, and the ways that we deceive ourselves and others in the hope that, finally, we can reach stumblingly towards one another.

Children's House

A love song to the idea of families in all their mysteries and complexities, their different configurations and the hope that creates them. Marina and her husband, Jacob, were each born on a kibbutz in Israel. They meet years later at a university in California, when Jacob is a successful psychiatrist with a young son, Ben, from a disastrous marriage. The family moves to a brownstone in Harlem, formerly a convent inhabited by elderly nuns. Outside the house one day Marina encounters Constance, a young refugee from Rwanda, and her toddler, Gabriel. Unmoored and devastated, Constance and Gabriel quickly come to depend on Marina; and her bond with the little boy intensifies. The pure, blinding love that it is possible to feel for children not our own is the thread that weaves through The Children's House. When Marina learns some disturbing news about her long-disappeared mother, Gizela, she leaves New York in search of the loose ends of her life. As Christmas nears, her tight-knit, loving family, along with Constance and Gabriel, join Marina in her mother's former home, with a startling consequence, an act that will transform all of their lives forever. Alice Nelson skilfully weaves together these shared stories about the terrible things humans are capable of into a beautifully told, hope-filled novel exploring the profound consolations that we can find in each other.

The Children's House

Adrift in a failing marriage, Maya Wise is alone in a strange world far from home in this work of fiction. Intrigued by an elderly Chinese man carrying a caged nightingale, she begins to follow him through the streets and alleys of Hong Kong. Drawn to Ken Tiger and his painful tale of lost love in wartime Shanghai, Maya begins to piece together other stories, other histories from the world around her, and so comes to imagine a different future for herself, resulting in a moving meditation on exile, memory, and the ways in which we reconcile ourselves with loss.This revised edition is for book clubs and provides discussion notes at the end.

Alice Nelson

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