The Minstrels (Eva Hornung, Text)

A beautiful yet distressing work of rural fiction, The Minstrels by Eva Hornung (The Last Garden; Dog Boy) draws together the epic moral scope of John Steinbeck, the dystopian unease of Margaret Atwood and the sobering emotional intimacy of John Williams to create a startlingly original portrait of familial love and grief. The novel centres on Gem, a wry and perceptive girl who lives on a fictional Australian farm with her brother, Will, and their parents, and traces the calamitous – often debilitating – events that shape her family’s life. Moving across multiple settings and decades, The Minstrels superbly reveals how traumatic experiences can resurface, evolve and refuse to remain contained in the past. Rather than offering easy answers, the narrative asks how one might live both within and beyond the long shadow cast by horrifying truths. Hornung constructs a fiction of ghosts: Gem’s memories consistently affect her day-to-day life in a constant tension between past and present, leading to some of the novel’s most fascinating realisations. Although certain significant events may unfold too quickly for some readers to fully absorb, the book’s sweeping range means that other key investigations (climate change, First Nations land rights and history) are developed in insightful and expansive detail. An ambitious and assured novel, The Minstrels will appeal to readers of Charlotte Wood and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Alex Durac is a writer and editor. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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