Act of Grace

By Anna Krien

Longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award 2020
'A novelist for our times' Anna Funder, author of Stasiland

In this brilliant novel of fear and sacrifice, trauma and survival, four characters' lives intertwine across time and place. Australian soldier Toohey returns from Baghdad in 2003 with shrapnel in his neck, crippled by PTSD. A decade earlier, aspiring pianist Nasim falls from favour with Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic son Uday, triggering a perilous search for safety. In Melbourne as the millennium turns, Robbie, faced with her father's dementia and family silences that may never be addressed, begins to test boundaries. And in the present day, Gerry seeks to escape his father Toohey's tyranny and heal the wounds inflicted by it.

Act of Grace is a meditation on inheritance: the damage that one generation bestows upon the next, and the potential for transformation. It is a searing, powerful and utterly original work by an exceptional Australian writer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Release date: Aug 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781782836490

Anna Krien

Anna Krien is the author of the award-winning Night Games and Into the Woods, as well as two Quarterly Essays, Us and Them and The Long Goodbye. Anna's writing has been published in The Monthly, The Age, Best Australian Essays, Best Australian Stories and The Big Issue. In 2014 she won the UK William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, and 2018 she received a Sidney Myer Fellowship.