Read
The British Australian novelist Evie Wyld is the great poet of what lies unsaid, both within personal family stories and within the wider, more implicating silences of history. Her fourth novel is ostensibly an intergenerational Australian family saga – its vivid cast of characters includes drunken uncles, neglectful mothers and pregnant teenagers, not to mention Hannah, who has escaped all this for a new life in London – but it’s also a startlingly stealthy exploration of the inescapable legacy of Australia’s white colonial past. What interests Wyld is not so much the abuses of history but the impact of the dead upon the living and the extent to which we are complicit with a past for which we bear no direct personal responsibility. A pity no place could be found for it on an usually serious Booker longlist, announced this week.
