Alison Booth's Blog, page 2

Book Club Questions for The Painting by Alison Booth

Do you belong to a book club? Would you like some questions that might help kick off a lively discussion aboutThe Painting? If so, here are some suggestions…

The novel begins in Sydney not long before the breakup of the Soviet Union: Anika, a traumatised young immigrant from Hungary, inherits an impressionist portrait of an auburn-haired woman. Knowing nothing of its provenance, Anika takes it to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where the curators identify it as being the work of Impressionist artist Rocheteau. Shortly afterwards, the painting is stolen, and Anika is left wondering whom she can really trust. With a police investigation underway and a handful of suspects in the frame, she decides to take matters into her own hands. But soon she receives a nasty shock about the possible origins of her painting, and she knows she must travel back to Budapest – so that she can track down the truth and confront the ghosts of her grandmother’s past. And of her own.

There are three main historical periods in the story of The Painting – the Siege of Budapest in the Second World War, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and the breakup of the Soviet Union. Why do you think that Alison chose to begin her novel in the year 1989, rather than starting it in the Second World War and moving forward chronologically?

The three main female characters in the novel are all related. They are the grandmother Nyenye, the aunt Tabilla, and the young woman Anika. In your opinion, how have the characters of these three women been affected by their differing experiences during their formative years?

What are the main themes of the novel? To what extent is the novel a story of a stolen painting and to what extent is it an antiwar novel?

The novel is set in Budapest and in Sydney. Compare and contrast these different environments and consider what they contribute to the narrative.

Why has art become so important to Anika and her grandmother? How important is the theft of the painting to the main arc of the story?

Does the story resonate with you in terms of what is happening in Central and Eastern Europe currently?

Reading Group Questions for Book Clubs: The Philosopher’s Daughters

For readers who belong to a book club, here are a few questions that might help kick off a lively discussion about The Philosopher’s Daughters.

1. Who is your favourite character in the book and why?

2. The two sisters, Harriet and Sarah, are the main protagonists and for much of the novel they are living in the same location. The story is written from each of their viewpoints. What do you think these dual perspectives contribute to the story?

3. The sisters are very different characters. Compare and contrast their similarities and differences.

4. Harriet and Sarah were treated differently by their widowed father as they grew up. Consider how important their father was to the development of each.

5. The novel is set in the 1890s in London and in the Northern Territory of South Australia, and much of the action takes place in the wild and beautiful Australian landscape. Compare and contrast these different environments and consider what they contribute to the narrative and to the sisters’ character development.

6. One of the book’s themes is the importance of women’s suffrage, a cause to which the entire Cameron family is committed. Discuss how this theme is reflected in the principal characters’ choices.

7. How does this feminist background contribute to Harriet and Sarah’s reactions to the racism and frontier violence accompanying the expansion of the cattle industry?

8. How important is the scene of the cricket match near Port Darwin to the arc of the story?

9. The principal male characters are the young women’s father (the philosopher of the title), and Henry and Mick. In different ways these men influence the choices and growth of the young women. How do you think Henry and Mick were themselves were affected by the sisters?

A Tale of Two Launches

My sixth novel, The Painting, was published on the 15th of July 2021. There was a UK-based zoom launch that day, attended by people from the UK and Australia, and even some from North America. Yes, I’m sure you can imagine the time-zone difficulties, it’s something we’ve had to get used to in this crazy new world we’re living in. The fab Heather Boisseau of RedDoor Press hosted the event and inimitable Ann McGrath kicked off the discussion. This launch was followed by a UK book-blog tour, energetically facilitated by Helen Richardson, and garnering a number of splendid reviews that have appeared in social and print media. 

Two weeks later, on 29 July, there was a live event at The Street foyer in Canberra. How wonderful it was – after these interminable months of isolation and pandemic-induced anxiety – to have a few hours of joy with friends old and new, to celebrate getting The Painting out into the antipodean world. Frank Bongiorno led the discussion with his usual wit and expertise, and Lucy Neave skilfully moderated it.

Listen to a recording of the discussion here.

Photos of the Canberra event are by the Creswick Collective, and the recording is courtesy of The Street. Book sales at the Canberra launch were organised by Harry Hartog ANU. Photo of sales ranking is courtesy of Harry Hartog Woden. I’m hugely grateful to everyone involved, and also to those lovely booksellers and librarians, who are getting The Painting into the hands of readers.

The Painting is about a young Hungarian refugee who confronts her family's past in an engrossing quest for a stolen painting.

Cover Reveal THE PAINTING

THE PAINTING

by Alison Booth

Publication Date:

15 July, 2021

‘Offers a compelling and incisive portrait of Anika — a wise and wary exile from an oppressive regime — as she struggles to regain her trust in humanity’ MICHELLE WILDGEN, author of Bread and Butter

THE PAINTING tells the story of a traumatised young woman who confronts her family’s past in an engrossing quest for a stolen painting.

Sydney in early 1989, not long before the breakup of the Soviet Union. Anika, a traumatised young immigrant from Hungary, inherits a portrait of an auburn-haired woman. Could it be of value, and if so, how did something so precious end up in her family’s possession? Anika takes it to a leading gallery where the curators identify it as being the work of the renowned French Impressionist artist Rocheteau. Shortly afterwards, however, the painting is stolen.

Soon Anika receives a shock about its origins that links her ever closer to the two men she met the day she had the painting assessed, the curator Daniel and the enigmatic Jonno. As these men insinuate their way into her life, her suspicions about their motives – and her Hungarian grandmother’s integrity – grow ever more pressing. Only by returning to Budapest can Anika finally track down the truth and confront the ghosts of her grandmother’s past.

‘Deceptively simple, deeply human, The Painting lights the shadows of dispossession in Hungarian immigrant lives in Australia through art and romance, meat and menace, totalitarianism, provenance and Pest.’ Tom Flood, author of Oceana Fine

‘An enthralling and intelligently-plotted novel whose lead characters are drawn with such depth they could be sitting on the sofa beside you. Their lives are movingly woven together by the painting that means something quite different to each of them.’ Ann McGrath, historian and author of Illicit Love

‘The Painting by Alison Booth offers a compelling and incisive portrait of Anika — a wise and wary exile from an oppressive regime — as she struggles to regain her trust in humanity.’ Michelle Wildgen, author of Bread and Butter

Background to writing my new novel, The Painting

When I first started writing fiction, I had little notion of where my inspiration came from. An idea would bob up, apparently from the ether, and I would run with it. It is still the case that ideas for stories arrive fairly randomly, but now I understand that the milieu in which I place a story relates to the life I’ve lived, the places I’ve visited, and what I’ve read.

My latest novel, THE PAINTING, is to be published on 15 July 2021. It is a homage to the city that I grew up in. A city of bright sunlight and summer heat and beautiful beaches and sparkling blue water. But the trigger for the plot of THE PAINTING was an article that I read in a newspaper in early 2014, an article about a hidden Budapest art collection, an article that made me think, what if…?

The novel that I wrote after that what if moment begins in Sydney in early 1989, not long before the breakup of the Soviet Union: Anika, a traumatised young immigrant from Hungary, inherits an impressionist portrait of an auburn-haired woman. Knowing nothing of its provenance, Anika takes it to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where the curators identify it as being the work of Impressionist artist Rocheteau. Shortly afterwards, the painting is stolen, and Anika is left wondering whom she can really trust. With a police investigation underway and a handful of suspects in the frame, she decides to take matters into her own hands. But soon she receives a nasty shock about the possible origins of her painting, and she knows she must make plans to travel back to Budapest – so that she can track down the truth and confront the ghosts of her grandmother’s past.

No one can live in Australia without being aware of the importance of immigration to the country’s history. When I grew up in Sydney, many of my friends were the children of immigrants. There was the girl who lived with her grandparents who’d left Russia from its eastern border. There were the children of parents who’d come to Australia from Displaced Person camps after the Second World War or later, parents who were from all over Europe: the ones I knew of were from Hungary, Latvia, Estonia, Austria, Italy, Greece, and the former Yugoslavia.

When I was very young, I remember seeing, in a book in my father’s study, a black-and-white photograph of tanks in a cobbled street in a city called Budapest. It was a frightening image that stuck in my head. Sometimes I imagined what it would be like having tanks of some foreign power trundling through the streets of downtown Sydney. The sheer size of the things, the puniness of the people watching. The image of those tanks has stayed with me all my life. It was the face of fear.

I learned that Russia had invaded Hungary in November 1956. Later I was to discover that this invasion was to quash an uprising by Hungarians who wanted the Russian occupation of their country to end. The uprising was put down after only 12 days, but many Hungarians involved in that revolution managed to cross the border into Austria. There refugee camps had been set up, and some of the refugees ended up in Australia. And one of them, Tabilla, was to become the aunt of the main character of The Painting.

The newspaper article that I chanced upon in 2014, the article that triggered my imagination, was in The Guardian. It was about a collection of paintings that a Hungarian butcher and his wife had secretly bought and kept hidden during the Communist period. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/03/hungarian-butcher-secret-art-collection-exhibited-after-50-years.

Of course, the events in my new novel are not based on this article; they are entirely fictitious, as are my characters. The Guardian article was simply the catalyst that set me off, imagining a young and traumatised Hungarian immigrant who ends up in Australia in the mid-1980s. She is carrying with her an Impressionist painting of unknown provenance from her grandmother’s collection, and she has no idea how her grandmother came by it.

I had to do a lot of research before I began the book – and while I was writing it – and one lovely part of this research was a field trip Budapest. This involved tramping all around the central areas of Buda and Pest, with visits to the principal sites including museums, to get a feel for the city and its architecture and its history. My main protagonist, Anika, was in her twenties when she left Budapest and travelled to Australia. I had to get to know her background, and that of her family, whose memories reached right back to the Second World War. I had to discover their involvement in the Hungarian Revolution, and in earlier events in that tumultuous period of the Second World War when Budapest was occupied first by the Germans and then by the Russians, and when many valuable artworks were looted.

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the process had started several years before. Hungary had been one of the first countries in the Soviet Bloc to loosen its ties with Russia. My new novel is to be published in 2021, exactly 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

When the Berlin Wall fell, in November 1989, I was living in London. I remember sitting glued to the television screen as Germans from East and West Berlin hacked off bits of the wall, and the joy and the tears on their faces. That was over 30 years ago now, and before many younger readers were born. I hope that they, and older readers who lived through that remarkable period, will enjoy reading my new work of fiction and accompanying Anika on her journey as she moves between countries, between Hungary and Australia. On her way she makes discoveries about her family’s past. And she also makes discoveries about who she is.

Background to Writing THE PHILOSOPHER’S DAUGHTERS

THE PHILOSOPHER’S DAUGHTERS is a tale of two very different sisters whose 1890s voyage from London into remote outback Australia becomes a journey of self-discovery, set against a landscape of wild beauty and savage dispossession.

The idea for this new novel just wouldn’t let me alone. I kept imagining 1890s London and two strong young women, the daughters of a moral philosopher. Someone like John Stuart Mill, a great advocate for the emancipation of women. Someone who gives the girls a relatively modern upbringing. Then I thought of altering the sisters’ circumstances so that they separately choose to journey into remote and wild Australia. What might happen to them? How might they see life at the ‘frontier’ once they are confronted with the brutal dispossession of the Indigenous population? How would their characters develop as they faced danger?

The late nineteenth century has always held for me a particular fascination. My ancestors came to Australia from England and Scotland before Federation in 1901, arriving in the colonies of Sydney and Melbourne. I grew up intrigued by the thought that Australia once comprised small colonies teetering on the edge of the vast continent, and I think that’s one reason why wanted to travel back to the 1890s in order to view it.The second half of the novel, set in 1893, mostly takes place in the Northern Territory of South Australia. Together with the top of Western Australia, this was one of the last areas of the continent to be appropriated by white colonisers. At that time and in that part of Australia, the frontier wars were still being fought, largely over the establishment of the cattle industry, although they weren’t recognised as frontier wars back then. Indeed, only relatively recently has the full extent of settlement massacres been documented. See this article: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/ng-interactive/2019/mar/04/massacre-map-australia-the-killing-times-frontier-wars

In doing the research for this novel, I was aware that, for our history, we rely upon the words of others. And when we read those words we should ask ourselves whose story is missing. Typically, it will be the story of those who held no power at the time. The women and of course the Indigenous inhabitants.

The Northern Territory (NT) has long held a particular fascination for me. This began with my father’s reminiscences of the years he spent there as a very young man after the 1942 bombing of Darwin by the Japanese. I visited the Northern Territory for the first time in 2003, where in a Darwin hotel I witnessed casual racism that I found quite shocking. Since then, I’ve travelled widely in the NT, being fortunate to visit some remote Indigenous communities with my two daughters, both of whom are residents of the NT, one living extremely remotely on an Indigenous community and the other in Darwin.

Writing an historical novel gives one a marvellous excuse to delve into the past, to read around that period, as well as to take little excursions in other directions. For example, in some of my background reading for The Philosopher's Daughters, I came across a description of a cricket match in Darwin in 1908, written by Fred Blakeley. This encapsulated for me the era and the racism, amongst other things.

Reading Blakeley’s account gave me the idea of including a cricket match in The Philosopher's Daughters. My cricket match, written from both sisters’ perspectives, is a very different cricket match to Fred Blakeley’s. And it forms a useful framing device for the start of the sisters’ journeys into the NT outback.

The Philosopher's Daughters. is written only from the sisters’ viewpoints. Since they are very different in spite of their common upbringing, their twin viewpoints allowed the narrative to be more nuanced than if I’d been writing from the perspective of just one. As a woman of European extraction, I would never choose to write from the viewpoint of an Aboriginal Australian person. While I can try to imagine what their experiences might be like and feel empathy for their history and treatment at the hands of colonisers and beyond, I feel we have already stolen enough from them without stealing their stories.

Pre-publication endorsements for The Philosopher's Daughters

"A lyrical tale of wild, frontier Australia. Evocative, insightful, thought-provoking." Karen Viggers, author

"Booth is superb at the small detail that creates a life, and the large one that gives it meaning." Marion Halligan, author

"Delicately handled historical drama with a theme of finding self, both in relationships and art, backed by issues on race relations in Australia and women’s rights." Tom Flood, author and editor

October 10 - In Conversation - Alison Booth: The Philosopher's Daughters

Alison Booth in conversation with Professor Frank Bongiorno about The Philosopher’s Daughters. Moderated by Dr Andrew Leigh, this online literary event was hosted by ANU’s Harry Hartog Bookstore.

Listen to the recording at this link https://static.wixstatic.com/mp3/b123ab_7b4ba29cd9634e079f8bdf85f294182e.mp3

September 10 - In conversation - Alison Booth: The Philosopher's Daughters

Watch the YouTube recording of the conversation between author Alison Booth and Professor Deborah Mabbett and Dr Maggie Hamand. This event was held on 10 September 2020, to celebrate the London launch of Alison's most recent novel, The Philosopher's Daughters.

​RedDoor Press hosted Alison, Deborah and Maggie online via Zoom to discuss the publication of The Philosopher's Daughters, the challenges of releasing a book in a pandemic and the fascinating themes and history explored in the book.

Australia Day

Algernon Talmage / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

Few would argue with the idea of having a public holiday to celebrate Australia’s nationhood. But attaching that holiday to the day that the First Fleet landed in Australia and claimed sovereignty over the eastern seaboard is much more debatable. Yet that linking of Australia Day with the landing of the First Fleet in 1788 has been in place since the 1930s. The state of Victoria adopted 26 January as Australia Day in 1931 and by 1935 all of the other Australian states and territories had followed suit.

On Australia Day it is natural to think about Australia’s origins and history. And sadly the chosen day is one that many Indigenous people think of as Invasion Day, or Mourning Day, or Survival Day, the latter because –– against the odds and the new settlers’ perceptions –– .

Might an alternative date to celebrate Australia Day be more palatable? Many people think so. Maybe a better celebration date would be the coming together of the various colonies into a Federation on 1 January 1901. However, this date is problematic for at least one very important reason: we all love our public holidays and wouldn’t want to see the New Year’s Day public holiday conflated with Australia Day.

So what to do? One idea would be to pick a time of the year that is short of public holidays and make that Australia Day. On this day, we could celebrate a history of reconciliation, community, multiculturalism.

For me Australia Day should also be a day of celebration of country and stewardship of this earth and a recognition of the need to look after it. This would reflect the goals of the Indigenous population – the First Australians.

For many of us, Australia Day in 2020 was especially poignant, for much of our country was on fire and issues of climate change were in the forefront of eople’s minds. And many of us were wondering how Aboriginal land management practices might be better understood by our policy makers.

Australia Day is also a celebration of all that has been good about this country – the multiculturalism, the sense of community, and the welcoming of displaced peoples after wars.

My husband, a British citizen by birth, was naturalised on Australia Day. In a moving ceremony in Canberra some years ago, he was one of a number of people from remarkably disparate countries who were welcomed as new citizens.

As well as being a British citizen, I’m a fourth generation Australian, my ancestors having arrived on the eastern seaboard of Australia in the late nineteenth century, prior to Federation. In this sense, my new novel, The Philosopher’s Daughters reflects my family history.

The novel is a tale of two very different sisters, who were educated in London by their philosopher father. The sisters’ 1890s voyage from London to the remote outback of Australia becomes a journey of self-discovery, set against a landscape of wild beauty and a story of savage dispossession. In their very different ways the sisters develop a great affinity for the country and a sympathy for the original inhabitants who were displaced so harshly without any treaty.

Publication Day for The Philosopher’s Daughters

Publication day for was 2 April, 2020, a day when we were in lockdown to try to beat the dreaded Covid-19.We had planned events in the UK, which is where is published. Needless to say, these events had to be cancelled and my trip to the UK had to be shelved too. To make things more complicated, the London warehouse went into lockdown some weeks ago and book distribution halted.However, the publisher and publicist organised a UK book bloggers tour that began before the lockdown, and I’ve been thrilled with the responses. You can see these on my Twitter account @booth_alison (search using the hashtag #ThePhilosophersDaughters).If you would prefer to read sooner rather than later, you might care to purchase an ebook version. is available in ebook form at most ebook retailers including Amazon Kindle in both the UK and in Australia, and also Kobo and Apple Books.Once book distribution resumes and the paperback version of is fully mobile again, we will firm up plans for book events in Australia - and I hope also the UK, when international travel is allowed. Rumour has it that it won’t be long before books are back on UK roads, so if you’d like a paper copy rather than an ebook you might want to pre-order now through your favourite bookstore or through the publisher at this link: https://reddoor-book-shop.myshopify.com/collections/new-releases/products/the-philosophers-daughters The publisher will also ship airmail to destinations outside the UK.The outreach from the Australian book community to authors whose releases have been affected by the Covid-19 lockdowns has been most impressive. I’m very grateful to authors and book bloggers who have offered coverage on their blogs to authors like me. Here is a link to Sophie Masson’s beautiful website, where she posted on publication day my guest blog about The Philosopher's Daughters. I hope you enjoy reading it.