Queensland University Press

Yvette Walker’s remarkable début novel is told in a series of letters that cross time and continents, tracing the intimate lives of three couples, one straight, one lesbian, one gay. Starting in 1969 in an artist’s studio in Cork, where a Russian painter and his Irish novelist wife exchange love letters, it moves to 2011 and a lesbian bookseller in Western Australia and her estranged girlfriend, and finally to 1948 and a retired English doctor mourning his German lover.

A curious fact of modern history is that it seems to take a single decade, sometimes less, for an exploited or colonised people to become, in turn, exploiters or colonisers. This is especially true in Asian history: the Chinese conquest of Tibet, the forceful takeover by India of Portuguese Goa and more recently, in 1975, the military campaign launched by Indonesian forces against East Timor.