I know, I know, I'm hard to please...
I want stimulating books that tackle important contemporary issues...but...
I just don't want them all in the one book.
There are three strands to this novel. This is the blurb
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.
And these are the issues that bubble up:
family violence
Stolen Generation dislocation
Islamophobia
discrimination against cross-dressers
prostitution
early onset dementia
racism from both sides towards Indigenous Australians with European heritage
PTSD after military tours of Iraq
refugees with real histories of torture and trauma but fake identities
Aboriginal children with foetal alcohol syndrome
the climbing of Uluru debate
Mexicans trying to cross the US border
brutal US prisons
the Aboriginal flag on West Gate Bridge debate

To read the rest of my review and see links to opinions different to mine please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/10/30/act-of-grace-by-anna-krien/ ( )