Mark Henshaw
The Snow Kimono
Text Publishing, 2014
There are times in your life when something happens after which you’re never the same. It may be something direct or indirect, or something someone says to you. But whatever it is, there is no going back. And inevitably, when it happens, it happens suddenly, without warning.
Paris: 1989. Recently retired Inspector of Police Auguste Jovert receives a letter from a woman who claims to be his daughter. Two days later, a stranger comes knocking on his door.
Set in Paris and Japan, The Snow Kimono tells the stories of Inspector Jovert, former Professor of Law Tadashi Omura, and his one-time friend the writer Katsuo Ikeda. All three men have lied to themselves, and to each other. And these lies are about to catch up with them.
A quarter of a century after the award-winning bestseller Out of the Line of Fire, Mark Henshaw returns with an intricate psychological thriller that is also an unforgettable meditation on love and loss, on memory and its deceptions, and the ties that bind us to others.
2015 - Winner, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction
2015 - Winner, ACT Book of the Year Award
2015 - Winner, ACT Book of the Year Award
2015 - Longlisted, Voss Literary Award
2015 - Shortlisted, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards
2015 - Shortlisted, Queensland Literary Awards, University of Queensland Fiction Award
“Henshaw’s prose [is] luminous and crisp, like the snowy countryside of Japan or the barren lanes of Algiers, and the effect is instead trancelike. As the stories fold inside one another like poetic Russian dolls, I’m drawn closer to the heart of it all.”
About the Author
Mark Henshaw has lived in France, Germany, Yugoslavia and the USA. He currently lives in Canberra. His first novel, Out of the Line of Fire (1988), won the FAW Barbara Ramsden Award and the NBC New Writers Award. It was one of the biggest selling Australian literary novels of the decade and has been re-released as a Text Classic. The Snow Kimono won the 2014 NSW Premier’s Award for Fiction and Mark Henshaw was the 2015 winner of the Copyright Agency’s Author Fellowship.
