'It is the mid-1980s. In Australia, stay-at-home wives jostle with want-it-all feminists, while AIDS threatens the sexual freedom of everyone. On the other side of the world, the Soviet bloc is in turmoil.
'Mikhail Gorbachev has been in power for a year when twenty-four-year-old book illustrator Galina Kogan leaves Leningrad - forbidden ever to return. As a Jew, she's inherited several generations worth of Russia's chronic anti-Semitism. As a Soviet citizen, she is unprepared for Australia and its easy-going ways.
'Once settled in Melbourne, Galina is befriended by Sylvie and Leonard Morrow, and their adult son, Andrew. The Morrow marriage of thirty years balances on secrets. Leonard is a man with conflicted desires and passions, while Sylvie chafes against the confines of domestic life. Their son, Andrew, a successful mosaicist, is a deeply shy man. He is content with his life and work - until he finds himself increasingly drawn to Galina.
'While Galina grapples with the tumultuous demands that come with being an immigrant in Australia, her presence disrupts the lives of each of the Morrows. No one is left unchanged. Invented Lives tells a story of exile - exile from country, exile at home, and exile from one's true self. It is also a story about love.'
(Publication summary)
Dedication: To the Porters : Jean, Chester, Maudie and Josie
Epigraph: 'Exile itself has become an emblem, no matter whether it is experienced by someone in his own country, his own room, and in his own language, or outside and far removed from them. The moment we are all experiencing is convulsive. The theatre of the world is convulsive... no matter where we live. We are all exiles.' - Norman Manea, The Fifth Impossibility
'I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.' Psalm 102
'Invented Lives, Andrea Goldsmith’s eighth novel, explores how and why people construct the lives they live. The novel’s four protagonists come to understand how they have formed the identities they project and how these differ from how they perceive themselves. To invent is derived from the Latin invenire: to find out or discover. By discovering how they have created their identities, Goldsmith’s characters can decide how best to understand themselves.' (Introduction)
'Andrea Goldsmith is a distinguished and prolific Australian writer. To review her new novel, Invented Lives, I returned to a review I did of her 2009 novel Reunion, to remind myself of what I’d said. In doing so, I noticed structural similarities between the two, and also to her award-winning 2015 novel The Memory Trap.'(Introduction)
'This new novel from the author of the award-winning The Memory Trap explores what happens when an imagined life meets reality.'
'The London-based literary agent Ed Victor once said to the writer Susan Johnson that he’d never come across a people more insecure about their relationship with their homeland than Australians – except, of course, the Russians. So perhaps it makes sense that an Australian should tell this story of a Jewish Russian émigré struggling to reinvent herself while missing what was best about the old country.' (Introduction)
'John Berger describes emigration as ‘the quintessential experience of our time’ (And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, 1984), and gives credence to the concept that geographic and psychological exile is pervasive to the human condition. ‘No one willingly chooses exile – exile is the option when choice has run out,’ says the protagonist of Invented Lives, Russian-Jewish émigré Galina Kogan.' (Introduction)
'The London-based literary agent Ed Victor once said to the writer Susan Johnson that he’d never come across a people more insecure about their relationship with their homeland than Australians – except, of course, the Russians. So perhaps it makes sense that an Australian should tell this story of a Jewish Russian émigré struggling to reinvent herself while missing what was best about the old country.' (Introduction)
'This new novel from the author of the award-winning The Memory Trap explores what happens when an imagined life meets reality.'
'Andrea Goldsmith is a distinguished and prolific Australian writer. To review her new novel, Invented Lives, I returned to a review I did of her 2009 novel Reunion, to remind myself of what I’d said. In doing so, I noticed structural similarities between the two, and also to her award-winning 2015 novel The Memory Trap.'(Introduction)
'Invented Lives, Andrea Goldsmith’s eighth novel, explores how and why people construct the lives they live. The novel’s four protagonists come to understand how they have formed the identities they project and how these differ from how they perceive themselves. To invent is derived from the Latin invenire: to find out or discover. By discovering how they have created their identities, Goldsmith’s characters can decide how best to understand themselves.' (Introduction)
'John Berger describes emigration as ‘the quintessential experience of our time’ (And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, 1984), and gives credence to the concept that geographic and psychological exile is pervasive to the human condition. ‘No one willingly chooses exile – exile is the option when choice has run out,’ says the protagonist of Invented Lives, Russian-Jewish émigré Galina Kogan.' (Introduction)
