Mireille Juchau
ISBN 978 1 920882 27 3
Paperback, x + 310pp
Published September 2007
$27.95
In her late twenties, Martine Hartmann moves from Sydney to New York to pursue her career as a photographer, leaving behind her mother Lotte, a holocaust survivor.
Nine years later, Martine’s daughter Ruby goes missing in Central Park. Ruby’s disappearance throws Martine into an emotional struggle which threatens to overwhelm her, but which also, in time, brings her to understand Lotte’s anxieties and inhibitions, and to discover the act of abandonment at their heart.
Burning In is a closely observed psychological novel with an extraordinary eye for detail, and an unerring instinct for the suppressed rhythms of thought and feeling. Structured around two mysteries and three generations of Jewish women, it is an extended meditation on loss and guilt, exploring the long shadows cast by the past on the present, and the relationship between parental love and the imperatives of survival.
About the author
Mireille Juchau’s first novel Machines for Feeling was shortlisted for the 1999 Vogel/Australian Literary Award. In 2002 her play, White Gifts, won the Perishable Theatre International Women’s Playwriting Competition and was performed and published in the US. Known also for her arts essays and reviews, Juchau has received grants from the Ian Potter Foundation, Arts NSW and the Australia Council, and is a recipient of a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship.
Awards
Burning In has been shortlisted for the inaugural Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, 2008 Age Book of the Year Award for Fiction, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Nita B Kibble Literary Award, longlisted for the inaugural West Australian Premier’s Australia-Asia Literary Award, and has been highly commended in the inaugural Barbara Jefferis Award.
