Books, Books, Books Podcast
Australian writer Suzanne Leal discusses her highly accomplished new novel, The Deceptions, the story of an illicit relationship between a young Jewish woman and a gendarme in Czechoslovakia during World War Two and its ramifications decades later.
With Nicole Abadee
The Books, Books, Books podcast: where I interview the best writers, from Australia and overseas, about their new releases. Books, it’s often said, let you travel without leaving home. So this Mother’s Day, reopen this shuttered world for the woman who brought you into it.
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For the Oz-Lit addict
Suzanne Leal’s third novel, The Deceptions, is about a relationship between Hana, a young Jewish woman in the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia during World War II, and Karel, one of her guards. Karel, a married man, is besotted; Hana, more pragmatic, is grateful for his kindness and needs his protection. When she loses it, she faces the horrors of the concentration camps. Meanwhile, in modern Australia, Tessa is having an affair with her married boss when she meets Jon, a kind, attentive Englishman who shows her what a good relationship looks like. The threads of these two stories are woven together seamlessly in a cracker of an ending. A powerful story, sensitively told.
Mother's Day Special By Nicole Abadee