AustLit

'On the surface, A. S. Patrić’s Atlantic Black is the story of a 17-year-old girl, Katerina Klova, and the 24 hours she spends unaccompanied aboard the Aquitania as it steams across the Atlantic on New Year’s Eve 1938. Her travelling companion, mother Anne, is recovering from a psychotic breakdown during which she’s attempted to gouge out her own eye and is restrained in the ship’s infirmary. Katerina is at once vulnerable and violent, dressed in her mother’s clothes and fur, adrift on the brink of adulthood. Many things are teetering on the edge: the year, as it passes; class distinctions, crumbling in the artificial air of the ship; the futures of Katerina’s brother, Kornél, and father Audrius; Anne’s sanity; and the world itself, on the precipice of war.' (Introduction)

'Alex Miller is a gifted writer whose most compelling books – Journey to the Stone Country, for example, or Autumn Laing – have a simplicity of vision, an earthiness and poignancy, an integrity and grace few can match. How surprising and disappointing then that his new novel, The Passage of Love, is such a shambles: slack, unshapely and disheartening.' (Introduction)