From the Bookshelf of Aussie Readers…

The Sound of One Hand Clapping

Richard Flanagan

Why we're reading this: In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp that festered like a bad wound in the remote Tasmanian high…more
[close] In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp that festered like a bad wound in the remote Tasmanian highlands, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her father was drinking too much, Sonja's mother walked into a blizzard never to return.

Some thirty-five years later, when Sonja visits Tasmania and her drunkard father, the shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present - changing forever his living death and her ordered life.

Famous Australian novel that was turned into a movie in 1998.

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May 05, 2020 Rhoda rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Set in Tasmania, Slovenian migrants Bojan and Maria live in a construction camp for a hydroelectric dam with their 3 year old daughter Sonja until one night, Maria leaves Sonja in the house alone and never returns.

The story is set over the time periods of 1954 when they lived in the construction camp to 1989 when as an adult, Sonja returns to Tasmania from Sydney to visit the father she hasn’t seen in 22 years.

This is an desperately sad and melancholy book about the feeling of having no real h ...more

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