Dead Europe

Powerful and shocking, Dead Europe is an exploration of what lies beneath Europe's cosmopolitan and progressive veneer - a brutal and cynical reality that is bursting at the seems with its hatreds and prejudices. Isaac, a Greek Australian photographer travelling through the sites of his imagination - the Greece of his parents; Prague, the city of hope of a high school teacher; the Paris of this father's university days - finds the new Europe as one of forced labour, child prostitution and abuse, and centuries of hatred. His tale is interwoven with the story of his family's curse - a disturbing story about ancient superstitions and, again, hatreds, that most disturbingly of all are so much a part of the present. Tsiolkas' writing is always sharp: the prose clean, his characters full, and his observations rich (especially in his reminiscences of Melbourne), and Dead Europe is probably his strongest writing so far. It's not, however, one for the light-hearted. The world herein is bleak and it is brutal, and we are not spared any of the details. In fact, the fetidness of the world described is so rich that it is pungent. Andrew Cornish is from Readings Carlton