Tomas, a cellist and dreamer, denies the devastating changes happening in 1930’s Germany—until he is drafted into Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Many years later, having emigrated to Australia, he raises his granddaughter Lara to love music and birds. He also chooses to hide from her a terrible secret.
When her beloved Opa dies, 22 year-old Lara receives a shadow box of mysterious ornaments that force her to confront his past. Seeking to understand his years of silence, and to find a way through her own grief, she travels to Germany—the objects her only guide.
Shadows & Wings is a novel of cyclic journeys between hemispheres, the connections between ourselves and those we can never know, and the haunting power of art, love and dreams.
* Shortlisted for the Australian CAL Scribe Fiction Prize.
“This is very beautiful and deeply sensitive writing. With characters affected by nameless forces, the text reads as fable and allegory, and at times evokes the nightmarish sense one gets from reading Kafka. Other sections have something of the quality, in written form, of Shaun Tan’s masterly graphic novel, The Arrival.”
ARNOLD ZABLE (author of Jewels and Ashes, Café Scheherazade, The Fig Tree and Sea of Many Returns)
