Those Who Come After is a book that straddles the crumbling, aristocratic world of post-war Europe and the hot, dry landscape of Australia, today and in the 1960s. Juliana Stolburg was 12 when her family of three stepped off a boat that travelled from Europe to Melbourne in 1959. With her father, theson of a Lord of Zeeland (a province of the Netherlands) and her mother, a Jewish peasant and political prisoner of the death camp Dachau, she moves to the bottom of the earth to restore the fortune that was lost to the Stolburgs as a result of the war. But the family has lost much more than heirlooms and gold.

This atypical migrant tale weaves between Juliana’s life at 60, as a just-retired diplomat, and her life as a sickly child, first in Zeeland, playing in the collapsing castles of her ancestors, and then as a strong-willed adolescent in the new world of Melbourne. Married, but childless, Juliana realises she is the last of the illustrious Stolburgs when her aunt, Lady Katrien, a lady-in-waiting to the royal family in the Netherlands, dies. Elisabeth Holdsworth was born in Zeeland and arrived in Australia in the same year as her protagonist. In 2007 she won the Calibre Prize for an essay with the same title as this, her first novel.

Those Who Come After explores the legacy of the war that ravaged Europe and the people who survived. It is the story of resilience, emotional fall-out and an era that slowly collapsed. Although parts of this book feel clunky, this wide-ranging story encompasses a life that has borne unimaginable trials. But Holdsworth writes without emotional fanfare, allowing the reader to be swept across oceans to the icy climes of Zeeland, and back again, to the sound of cicadas in the Australian air.

Virginia Millen is an editor at Hardie Grant Magazines and a freelance reviewer