Shadows and Women (1989)

Second Hand

Excellent Condition

Signed by the author!

Shadows and Women is the second in a trilogy of novels about Hungarians displaced by the Second World War.

Some of these Hungarians, including the author, András Domahidy, ended up in Australia. Domahidy writes in Hungarian and this is the first of his books to be translated into English.

The novel has three parts, each centring on a woman: Sophie, a New Zealand-born spinster newly married to widower architect, János Terényi, and now on here honeymoon; Inke, first wife of János and his friend Berci when they were rivals of her in 1939, before the call-up to the front; Christine, only child of János and Inke, twenty-one, restless and searching for her roots.

Set in Western Australia, the story moves back and forth from the new world to the old, between a settled suburban present in the late 1960s and a holiday on the Italian Lakes in the early 1970s, the earlier émigré adjustment of the 1950s, German refugee camps in 1945-46, and family estates in Transylvania on the eve of war, with their ever comfortable life about to dissolve for ever.

Shadows of the past cling to all the characters, giving substance to their lives and coherence to their story.