Cirrus@Austlit

'Steven Conte won the inaugural Prime Minister’s Literary Award for his first novel, The Zookeeper’s War, so it’s not hard to imagine that this new book, The Tolstoy Estate, has been much awaited in the 12 years since. The proof copy came with an absurd cover-sized puff about this being “a novel for people who still believe in the saving grace of literature in dark times”, which is enough to put anyone off. But The Tolstoy Estate is in fact a fine novel – grave, moving and engaging – and it will absorb every kind of reader with its weirdly humane war story in which the military characters are German medics. The span of the action – which encompasses a strange dislocated love story yet is also a meditation on literature and Tolstoy in particular – is beautifully handled, with an absolute sureness of step even though its structure seems fractured and not intrinsically probable or, on the face of it, viably shapely.' (Introduction)