Vendor
	Fritz Agency Christian Dittus
Original language
English

ACT OF GRACE

Anna Krien

Iraqi aspiring pianist Nasim falls from favour with Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic son, triggering a perilous search for safety. In Australia, decades later, Gerry is in fear of his tyrannical father, Toohey, who has returned from the Iraq War bearing the physical and psychological scars of conflict. Meanwhile, Robbie is dealing with her own father's dementia when the past enters the present.

These characters' worlds intertwine in a brilliant narrative of guilt and reckoning, trauma and survival. Crossing the frontiers of war, protest and reconciliation, Act of Grace is a meditation on inheritance: the damage that one generation passes on to the next, and the potential for transformation.

Anna Krien is the author of the award-winning Night Games and Into the Woods, as well as two Quarterly Essays, Us and Them and The Long Goodbye. Anna's writing has been published in The Monthly, The Age, Best Australian Essays, Best Australian Stories and The Big Issue. In 2014 she won the UK William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, and 2018 she received a Sidney Myer Fellowship.

Available products
Book Published 2019-10-01 by Black Inc.

Comments

Krien makes astute observations about nationalism, religion and politics. With Baghdadi Jew Jacob, who refused to be part of the exodus to Israel in the 1950s, claiming that Zionism was for European Jews not Iraqi Jews'', Krien explores what it means when a person declares loyalty to their nation over their faith, and how a strong connection to a place can override much else, allowing people to fall into dangerous situations.

An ambitious and compelling study of trauma and how it's transferred and inherited a nuanced consideration of the different forms and ethics of activism.

Anna Krien has taken a huge leap of creative faith, and from the very first page to the last I was ready to follow her anywhere. -- Ceridwen Dovey

Longlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Masterful a far-reaching tapestry of a novel. Nuanced and whip-smart, Act of Grace is a work of profound empathy a book of and for our times. As the narrative unfolds with precise muscularity, Krien's inhabitation of each character approaches the divine." Peggy Frew

Shortlisted for the 2019 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards.

"...hugely impressive (...) it's startling to read a first novel that gathers so much and travels so far, yet flows so effortlessly. Krien writes brilliantly..." Read more...

Lately it has been hard to find fiction that genuinely attempts to grapple with the big questions facing the world, and Anna's striking commitment to showing us the world as it is, through characters who are deeply affecting and utterly convincing, is rare and very special. While much of the setting is Australian, it is a book whose concerns are truly global, immediate, and timeless as it moves seamlessly between people and settings, showing us the profound and lasting legacy of trauma on individuals, cultures, and nations. She's a huge talent. --Hannah Westland, acquiring editor at Serpent's Tail

Krien makes riveting the sweep of history and the lived price of war; at the same time she reveals, with great insight, the intimacies of daily love and tiny, splintering acts of violence in families. She is both wide-angle and close-up, and there is redemption in every line. -- Anna Funder

Rights sold: UK (Serpent's Tail); ANZ audio (Wavesound)