'A monumental and gripping story, Red Heaven is a glamorous tale of a child with two fascinating and domineering guardians, inspired by the author's own childhood.
'Red Heaven is the story of a child's journey to adulthood, his loss of those he loves and his fixing of them in memory. It begins in the late 1960s in Switzerland, as the unnamed narrator's ideas about life are being shaped by two compelling rival influences, the architects of his youth.
'These are his so-called aunts-imperious, strong-willed, ambitious-both determined to make the boy into their own heir, a believer in their values. In self-contained episodes, each set in an alpine grand hotel, we see one aunt and then the other seek to educate their protege by imparting their experiences.
'Serghiana, the 'red princess', is the daughter of a Soviet general, a producer of films and worshipper of art, a true believer. Ady, a former actress and singer, is a dilettante and cynic, Viennese, married to a great conductor- in her eyes, life is nothing but an affair of surfaces; truth and beauty are mere illusions.
'The aunts and all those in their orbit are exiles, without a home, at the mercy of outside political events. They strive to see what lies beyond the chance events and intersections of their lives. Their allegiances shift. Their stories deepen- gradually the child comes to understand the shadows in their past.
'Memory and nostalgia-the aunts' gifts to him, gifts of obligation-are the purest expression of love allowed them. These stories stay with the boy, guiding his beliefs and his path in life, until he can grow up and absorb the influences of the world around him, and become himself.
'Red Heaven is about the people who make us what we- how they come into our lives, instruct or affect us, then depart the stage. This fiction, with its affinity for the elusive beauties and sadnesses of the world, is Nicolas Rothwell's finest achievement.' (Publication summary)
'Far North Queensland-based author and former foreign correspondent Nicolas Rothwell has won the $80,000 Prime Minister's Literary Award for fiction for his third novel, Red Heaven, in a ceremony in Launceston on Tuesday afternoon that was disrupted midway through by a fire alarm.'
'Nicolas Rothwell is perhaps best known as a critic of art and culture for The Australian, though he has also published several non-fiction books, one of which, Quicksilver, won a Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2016. Red Heaven, subtitled a ‘fiction’, is only the second of Rothwell’s books not to be classified as non-fiction. Always straddling the boundary between different genres, Rothwell has cited in Quicksilver Les Murray’s similar defence of generic hybridity in Australia: the novel ‘may not be the best or only form which extended prose fiction here requires’. Working from northern Australia, and intent upon exploring how landscape interacts obliquely with established social customs, Rothwell, in his narratives, consistently fractures traditional fictional forms so as to realign the conventional world of human society with more enigmatic temporal and spatial dimensions.' (Introduction)
'For Virginia Woolf, it was Hamlet. A play the Modernist giant found so resonant and abundant with meaning that she thought an annual re-reading, along with a record of the reader’s shifting responses to the text over time, would form a kind of autobiography – the self coming to know itself through sustained engagement with a work of art.' (Introduction)
'For Virginia Woolf, it was Hamlet. A play the Modernist giant found so resonant and abundant with meaning that she thought an annual re-reading, along with a record of the reader’s shifting responses to the text over time, would form a kind of autobiography – the self coming to know itself through sustained engagement with a work of art.' (Introduction)
'Nicolas Rothwell is perhaps best known as a critic of art and culture for The Australian, though he has also published several non-fiction books, one of which, Quicksilver, won a Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2016. Red Heaven, subtitled a ‘fiction’, is only the second of Rothwell’s books not to be classified as non-fiction. Always straddling the boundary between different genres, Rothwell has cited in Quicksilver Les Murray’s similar defence of generic hybridity in Australia: the novel ‘may not be the best or only form which extended prose fiction here requires’. Working from northern Australia, and intent upon exploring how landscape interacts obliquely with established social customs, Rothwell, in his narratives, consistently fractures traditional fictional forms so as to realign the conventional world of human society with more enigmatic temporal and spatial dimensions.' (Introduction)
'Far North Queensland-based author and former foreign correspondent Nicolas Rothwell has won the $80,000 Prime Minister's Literary Award for fiction for his third novel, Red Heaven, in a ceremony in Launceston on Tuesday afternoon that was disrupted midway through by a fire alarm.'
