The Snow Kimono

Winner of the prestigious Christina Stead Prize for Fiction,

NSW Premier's Literary Award 2015

Paris, 1989. Recently retired police inspector Auguste Jovert receives a letter from a woman who claims to be his daughter. Two days later, a stranger knocks on his door. His name is Tadashi Omura, and he is a former law professor. He tells Jovert stories about his life, and about a man named Katsuo Ikeda, whom he met when they were both children and who later became a successful writer.

Set in France, Japan, and Algeria, The Snow Kimono is a jigsaw puzzle of a novel. The stories that Jovert and Omura tell each other fit together in unpredictable ways. Each new story changes the possibilities of what might happen next. Little by little we glimpse how these men have lied to themselves and to each other. These lies are about to catch up with them.

A quarter of a century after the best-selling, multi-award-winning Out of the Line of Fire, Mark Henshaw returns with a novel that is both a psychological thriller and an unforgettable meditation on love and loss, memory and its deceptions, and the things that bind us to others.

Mark Henshaw has lived in France, Germany, Yugoslavia, and the United States. He currently lives in Canberra. His debut, Out of the Line of Fire (1988) was one of the biggest selling Australian literary novels of its decade and was published in France, Germany, and Italy.