Australia ~ Lost Voices

Christopher Koch

Pam recommends a book about Australia:  "I just read a wonderful book by Christopher Koch called Lost Voices for my book group.  I reviewed it on my blog.  It takes place in Hobart.  We have convict history here and there is a lot written about it.  People were transported here from England in the late 1700s and 1800s and it started out as a penal settlement which is an unusual beginning for a country.  Convicts also went to Sydney as well.  New Zealand was too violent with the Maoris for settlement there and the USA was in the middle of the American Revolution, so Australia was the destination."

Lost Voices ~ by Christopher Koch, 2012, fiction (Australia)

Young Hugh Dixon believes he can save his father from ruin if he asks his estranged great-uncle Walter — a wealthy lawyer who lives alone in a Tasmanian farmhouse passed down through the family — for help.  As he is drawn into Walter's rarefied world, Hugh discovers that both his uncle and the farmhouse are links to a notorious episode in the mid-nineteenth century.  Walter's father, Martin, was living in the house when it was raided by members of an outlaw community run by Lucas Wilson, a charismatic ex-soldier attempting to build a utopia.  But like later societies with communitarian ideals, Nowhere Valley was controlled by the gun, with Wilson as benevolent dictator.  Twenty-year-old Martin's sojourn in the Valley as Wilson's disciple has become an obsession with Walter Dixon:  one which haunts his present and keeps the past tantalizingly close.  As Walter encourages Hugh's ambition to become an artist, and again comes to his aid when one of Hugh's friends is charged with murder, the way life's patterns repeat themselves from one generation to another becomes eerily apparent.

Read more about the author, Christopher Koch.
Read Pam's review on her blog, Travellin' Penguin.