In this haunting new novel, Katerina Klova and her mother are crossing the Atlantic by ocean liner. When Anne suffers a psychotic breakdown, Katerina is left alone on a ship full of strangers who span classes and stations, all of whom carry their ambitions, fears and obsessions with them. For a seventeen-year-old girl, the daughter of an ambassador, it’s an exciting, frightening world to navigate.
'Atlantic Black is a psychologically intense and affecting story of unexpected familial betrayal, of a mother and daughter's relationship, of a brother and father whose voices resonate from afar. Personal loneliness, love and loss, are tightly bound to the wider reality of a world set on a fateful course. The legacy of violence, and of how the First World War precipitated the Second World War reverberates as if ‘tolling on the inside of a church bell’. Through the eyes of Katerina and her own family’s place within a fracturing world, we see the way damage, yet also hope, are passed from one generation to another. A.S. Patrić's writing is achingly tender, the tone merciless but heartbreaking in its compassion.
'The story takes place over one day and night, New Year's Eve, 1939. The RMS Aquitania steams across the Atlantic Ocean. On the horizon, the world is about to explode.' (Publication summary)
Dedication: for my father
Epigraph: We inhabit a world of unfinished stories, and echoes, the repetition of age-old horrors and miseries. -David Malouf
'Through the eyes of Katerina, readers experience a lifetime crammed into 24 hours.'
'An intense read, Atlantic Black is the story of a young woman, Katerina Klova, who is sailing on the liner Aquitania with her mother, Anne.' (Introduction)
A Conversation with A.S. Patrić
Chris Gordon
(interviewer),
2017
23467078
2017
single work
podcast
interview
'Hear our events manager Chris Gordon in conversation with Miles Franklin Literary Award winner, A.S. Patrić, about his new novel, Atlantic Black.' (Production summary)
'Writing this review in the first week in November, I look at the calendar and note that we are a few days away from the seventy-ninth anniversary of Kristallnacht, when, over the two days of 9–10 November 1938, at the instigation of Joseph Goebbels, there was a nationwide pogrom against German Jews that saw synagogues, business premises, and private homes ransacked. At least ninety people were killed, perhaps many more. It was a sign of things to come.' (Introduction)
'An intense read, Atlantic Black is the story of a young woman, Katerina Klova, who is sailing on the liner Aquitania with her mother, Anne.' (Introduction)
'A.S. Patric has been building a reputation with his hard-edged, dream-like fictions that owe as much to European modernism as they do to anything more local and contemporary. His last novel, Black Rock White City, dealing with Yugoslavian émigrés in John Howard's Australia, and the legacy of war in a new country, won the Miles Franklin; his new novel is an ambitious step forward – or back – into history'. (Introduction)
'Through the eyes of Katerina, readers experience a lifetime crammed into 24 hours.'
'On the surface, A. S. Patrić’s Atlantic Black is the story of a 17-year-old girl, Katerina Klova, and the 24 hours she spends unaccompanied aboard the Aquitania as it steams across the Atlantic on New Year’s Eve 1938. Her travelling companion, mother Anne, is recovering from a psychotic breakdown during which she’s attempted to gouge out her own eye and is restrained in the ship’s infirmary. Katerina is at once vulnerable and violent, dressed in her mother’s clothes and fur, adrift on the brink of adulthood. Many things are teetering on the edge: the year, as it passes; class distinctions, crumbling in the artificial air of the ship; the futures of Katerina’s brother, Kornél, and father Audrius; Anne’s sanity; and the world itself, on the precipice of war.' (Introduction)
A Conversation with A.S. Patrić
Chris Gordon
(interviewer),
2017
23467078
2017
single work
podcast
interview
'Hear our events manager Chris Gordon in conversation with Miles Franklin Literary Award winner, A.S. Patrić, about his new novel, Atlantic Black.' (Production summary)
