Rosalie Ham's books include the bestselling novel
The Dressmaker, which became a 2015 film starring Kate Winslet, and
Summer at Mount Hope.
One of four books that changed the author, as shared at the
Sydney Morning Herald:
Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
Sebald conveys the Kindertransport by linking buildings, photos and past images with Austerlitz's thoughts, his human experience, thus making events vivid. Rather than witness horror, we see how ideas are shaped, how memory is formed, and we learn the truth. There are no chapters, and the narrator's "ramblings" are a trope, therefore connected to other events in the story, and thus the style distracts from what happened and we aren't repelled from the story. Fiction makes events real.
Read about
the other books on the list.
Austerlitz is among
Charles Fernyhough's top ten books on memory,
Susheila Nasta's top ten cultural journeys, and
the top ten works of literature according to Peter Carey.
--Marshal Zeringue
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