Black Rock White City A. S. Patric Transit Lounge | 248 pages

Forced to flee Sarajevo after the traumatic death of their children, poet Jovan and his writer wife Suzana find themselves trying to forge a new life together in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia – he working as a hospital janitor and she as a cleaner.

Author A. S. Patric himself was brought to Australia by his Serbian immigrant parents while he was still a child, and he won the 2016 Miles Franklin Award for this, his debut novel. He has an original way with words that I sometimes found dislocatory – especially when it came to the poetry – but that, in retrospect, resonated perfectly with his subject matter: the immigrant experience.

Words and language are dominant themes in the two narratives that unfold side by side (one present, the other past), raising questions of identity, choice, self-expression and understanding of the other. While Jovan’s workplace becomes the scene of a series of increasingly bizarre, threatening and finally murderous graffiti attacks that he is called upon to clean up, haunting flash-backs to their experiences back home in Sarajevo fill in the pieces of Jovan and Suzana’s personae.

The author’s taut, almost cinematic style makes for a gripping novel that’s hard to put down, and its current relevance gives it a poignancy that lingers long after the last page. Highly recommended.