'Australian soldier Toohey returns from Baghdad in 2003 with shrapnel in his neck, crippled by PTSD and white-knuckling life. In the Iraq of a decade earlier, aspiring pianist Nasim falls from favour with Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic son Uday, triggering a perilous search for safety. In Melbourne as the millennium turns, Robbie, faced with her father’s dementia and the family silences that may never find voice, tests boundaries. And in the present day, Gerry seeks to escape his father Toohey’s tyranny and heal its wounds.
'These characters' worlds intertwine across time and place, in a brilliant story of fear and sacrifice, trauma and survival, and what people will do to outrun the shadows. Crossing the frontiers of war, protest and cultural reconciliation, Act of Grace is a meditation on inheritance: the damage that one generation bestows upon the next, and the potential for transformation.
'This is a searing, powerful and utterly original work by an exceptional Australian writer. It will leave you changed.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Krien’s debut novel explores trauma, reparations, and atonement, in all its psychological and political dimensions.'
'When American writer Flannery O’Connor had difficulty writing her debut novel, she pretended to herself that every chapter was in fact a self-contained short story, the form with which she was most comfortable. This trick she played on herself allowed her to complete her first full-length work of fiction, Wise Blood.
'The nine individual chapters of Anna Krien’s first novel, Act of Grace, contains many of the features of the modern short story (starting, as Chekhov advised, in the “middle of things” and ending with narrative resonance, rather than resolution).' (Introduction)
'Anna Krien is highly regarded for her deeply researched and incisive long-form journalism. Her books Night Games and Into the Woods, along with two Quarterly Essays, have cemented her as one of this country’s leading voices on contemporary sociopolitical and environmental issues, and an advocate for fairness and reason.' (Introduction)
'A young Aboriginal girl wears an abaya because she wants to see how it feels to inhabit someone else’s experience, someone else’s history. An exiled Iraqi musician plays a piano in a shopping centre in suburban Melbourne. Native Americans protesting the construction of a pipeline on their traditional lands are shot at with water cannons and rubber bullets. Countries are lost, sacred sites invaded by careless tourists, lines on maps exclude and dispossess, sacrifices and compromises are made, and individual lives are disfigured by historical circumstance.'(Introduction)
'Anna Krien is highly regarded for her deeply researched and incisive long-form journalism. Her books Night Games and Into the Woods, along with two Quarterly Essays, have cemented her as one of this country’s leading voices on contemporary sociopolitical and environmental issues, and an advocate for fairness and reason.' (Introduction)
'When American writer Flannery O’Connor had difficulty writing her debut novel, she pretended to herself that every chapter was in fact a self-contained short story, the form with which she was most comfortable. This trick she played on herself allowed her to complete her first full-length work of fiction, Wise Blood.
'The nine individual chapters of Anna Krien’s first novel, Act of Grace, contains many of the features of the modern short story (starting, as Chekhov advised, in the “middle of things” and ending with narrative resonance, rather than resolution).' (Introduction)
