Judges’ Report

The last two winners of the Nib, Nadia Wheatley and Helen Lewis, were the authors of personal memoirs touching on the effects of the Holocaust on their families. Both of them were interviewed at our presentation breakfast by Suzanne Leal, who as the author of the novel Border Street, researched and set in roughly the same place and time as those memoirs, was uniquely qualified to discuss the subject.

Now, in her third published novel, The Deceptions, our interviewer has returned to the research topic that continues to haunt her. In our perhaps biased assessment, Border Street was a more accomplished work of fiction than the Miles Franklin Award winner in the year it was published, Anna Funder’s All That I Am, a book with a similar theme and structure, but without such an elegant prose style.

The new Leal novel introduces a cast of characters one chapter at a time: Czech immigrants in near-present day Sydney, connected by their experiences in Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as their descendants and connections in the contemporary world. A young Jewish woman in the ghetto, who becomes an Auschwitz survivor, a former police guard, a legal secretary and a female minister all are linked by an intricate secret that could affect all of their lives.  Elements of that secret become apparent early in the piece, as the narrative momentum is carried forward not by the secret itself but by the need to conceal it; in the process, this book faces some of the past century’s greatest horrors in unflinching detail, while also showing how the lesser deceptions of peacetime life can be just as affecting.

The layers of research in this novel (revealed in an extensive bibliography) are worn as lightly as the clothing described so meticulously in it, but the clever structure and the glass-clear literary style mean that The Deceptions must be seen as a striking advance on the already impressive Border Street.