Josef Mandl, retired from business, takes a sharp-eyed look at his past.
As a young man in the communist underground in Vienna he fought street
battles against the Nazis. Safe from persecution in New Zealand,
however, he is classed as enemy alien and locked up on Somes Island in
Wellington Harbour. At war's end, an Austrian Jew in a 1940s antipodean
and colonial society, Mandl exists in harmony and in conflict with
refugees and New Zealanders alike. His story mirrors the alien
experience everywhere. In precise, elegant prose Maurice Gee looks at
themes of loss and dispossession, of family, friendship and love,
investing the familiar with touching significance.
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