'In Acland Street, St Kilda, there stands a cafe called Scheherazade.' Thus begins this haunting meditation on displacement and the way the effects of war linger in the minds of its survivors. At once fable and history, it takes the reader on a journey which ranges from Kobe to Paris, from Vilna ...
The lights have been turned down. It is at night that I prefer to visit Lily Varvarigos, my mother-in-law, now lying terminally ill. It is at night, as the city meanders towards sleep, that a special kind of energy can be felt. It simmers beneath the surface calm, among sixteen patients in a publ...
He walks the streets with his arms waving about, yet does not care for the looks of passersby. The streets about him are a blur. They could be the thoroughfares of Warsaw or London, Paris or Prague, Durban, New York, Havana or Rio, or any one of the many cities he has walked, across the six conti...
They can appear at any time. Figures step from the walls, calling to her. She answers the call. She converses with them. ‘Can’t you hear them?’ she asks. ‘Can’t you see them?’ They accuse her husband. They tell her he is complicit. They compel her to attack him in order to defend herself. She hee...
I say lies, for here on the flatlands of eastern Poland time sleeps. In the autumn of 1986, address in hand, I walked from the station along the railway embankment. A teenage boy idled by the tracks scanning the horizon. He picked up a handful of stones and cast them at the rails, one by one, del...
Take, for instance, the first winter snows; the remembrance remains clearer than the most recent of dreams. Mother Sheine is singing him to sleep. Lullabies fade to darkness and, as if no time has passed, he awakens to the sight of ice clinging to window panes above the bed. The morning light sil...