AustLit

'Years ago, in a local medical pathology museum, I saw a large human bone with the remains of the spear that pierced it. Ever since I’ve wondered about that specimen’s history, and the label that failed to describe it.' (Publication summary)

'MARIA TUMARKIN’s fourth book, Axiomatic (Transit Books, 2019), is an urgent and formally daring work of nonfiction about criminal injustice, war trauma, exile, youth suicide, migration, friendship, and institutional memory. Her previous works — on the “morally ambivalent” nature of courage (Courage, 2007), on the aftermath of violence and war (Traumascapes, 2005), and on returning to the Ukraine of her birth (Otherland, 2010) — are each characterized by a burning attention to suffering and resilience and a potent, elastic narrative voice. As with any writer of note, Tumarkin’s distinctive style is hard to quantify — she writes with academic rigor but eschews theory and jargon; she’s neither a dispassionate observer nor confidante, but her tone has heat and intimacy; she’s unafraid of emotion, and her writing is animated with the same generosity and enthusiasm she brings to friendship, which also happens to be a recurring subject in her work. I interviewed Maria as she prepared to travel for Axiomatic’s American launch.' (Introduction)

'During my childhood in Castle Hill, a western Sydney suburb of housing developments, colonial weatherboards and bush blocks, I walked each week from school to piano lessons. The route took me down Showground Road where Patrick White and his partner Manoly bought six acres and a bungalow—‘a bit of Strathfield in a paddock’—in 1948. They named their house Dogwoods, and lived there for eighteen years.' (Introduction)

'It has been six months since Tess Müller stopped speaking. Her silence is baffling to her parents, her teachers and her younger sister Meg, but the more urgent mystery for both girls is where their mother, Evangeline, goes each day, pushing an empty pram and returning home wet, muddy and dishevelled.

'Their father, Stefan, struggling with his own losses, tends to his apiary and tries to understand why his bees are disappearing. But after he discovers a car wreck and human remains on their farm, old secrets emerge to threaten the fragile family.

'One day Tess's teacher Jim encounters Evangeline by the wild Repentance River. Jim is in flight from his own troubles in Sydney, and Evangeline, raised in a mountain commune and bearing the scars of the fire that destroyed it, is a puzzle he longs to solve.

'As the rainforest trees are felled and the lakes fill with run-off from the expanding mines, Tess watches the landscape of her family undergo shifts of its own. A storm is coming and the Müllers are in its path.

'Sometimes we must confront what has been lost so that we can know the solace of being found.

'The World Without Us is a beautifully told story of secrets and survival, family and community, loss and renewal.' (Publication summary)