AustLit

'WHEN THEY WERE young, the three Meller sisters — Cibi, Magda, and Livi — promised their father that they would always take care of one another and never let anyone separate them. But they were Slovakian Jews, and they grew into their teens as Hitler rose to power. Soon enough, they were forced apart: Cibi, 19, and Livi, 15, were carted off to Auschwitz by the Hlinka Guard, some of whom were former classmates. Madga, 17, was left behind with their mother and grandfather, often hiding in the woods, until two and a half years later she too was dragged off to Auschwitz and the sisters were reunited. Starved, improperly clad for bitter winters, sick with typhus, and thrust into hard labor, astonishingly all three survived the camps, escaped a death march, and built a new life in Israel. Their real-life story is captured in the gut-wrenching yet stubbornly hopeful novel Three Sisters.' (Introduction)

'It’s been over a decade since the release of Jane Campion’s last film. 2009’s Bright Star is a swooning portrait of the immortal romance between the poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and his lover, Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). It was about as Campion as a film can get — based on a romantic (in this case, literally Romantic) literary source, set in a lush environment that verges on frightening in its wild overgrowth, fascinated by the turbulence of interpersonal psychosexual dynamics, and redolent with explorations of Campion’s most signature concern: the persistence of women in a world organized against them. If Campion had intended it to be her final feature, and many suspected as much, as her hiatus from the big screen stretched from three into five, seven, and then 10-plus years, it would have been a fitting swan song. The most accomplished literary filmmaker on the world stage, plucking out an elegy to the most elegiac poet in the English canon.' (Introduction)