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Carmel McMahon’s memoir deftly weaves together colonialism, emigration and family history
Book review
In a killer opening line, Carmel McMahon writes: “After I got sober, it took a while to start writing again.” But a reader who’s hoping for a sensational account of drunken escapades, a vodka-soaked gargler’s ‘Confiteor’, will quickly find they are in the wrong shop.
This is no tell-all chronicle of public humiliations. Rather it’s a reflection on the cyclical nature of time itself and on how these cycles affect a life, a family, a nation.
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