JOYFUL

A major literary work of striking originality from one of Australia's most dynamic writers.

Tess Wachowicz is a woman of great beauty and accomplishment. Her second marriage at the age of forty to Leon Joyce, a privately wealthy dealer in fine and rare books, puzzles her friends and admirerers. Tess is famously libidinous; Leon is asexual. The assumption is that Tess has made an ‘arrangement' with Leon, but the arrangement is stranger than anyone imagines. When Tess falls fatally ill and dies after months of struggle, her husband's grief drives him to the brink of madness. He retreats to Joyful, an old property in rural Victoria, once the site of an utopian community run by his great-aunt. There, Leon faces harrowing secrets kept from him by Tess, and also uncovers the hidden life of the long-ago utopian community.

Leon's grief and sense of betrayal is mirrored in the concurrent story of Emmanuel Delli and his wife Daanya, Kurds who adopted Australia after the Gulf War to escape the nightmare of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Emmanuel arrived in Australia with an international reputation in Mesopotamian studies; Daanya is a pediatrician. Their daughter Sofia, a musical protégé of Tess Wachowicz, takes her own life in a Melbourne hotel after the failure of an ill-advised relationship with her father's closest friend. Emmanuel experiences his daughter's death as a betrayal of his love for her, and like Leon, he is driven close to madness.

Circumstances eventually bring Leon and Emmanuel face-to-face at Joyful, where their separate struggles to overcome grief and betrayal merge, and find resolution.

In this extraordinary comedy of grief, Robert Hillman evokes his characters, from the merely unconventional to the frankly deranged, with kindness, grace and wit. Joyful is a gift that will leave the reader deeply moved and filled with delight.

Robert Hillman has written a number of books including his 2004 memoir The Boy in the Green Suit, which won the National Biography Award.