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The Snow Kimono (Mark Henshaw, Text)

Mystery and deception pervade Mark Henshaw’s first novel for many years, The Snow Kimono. The narrative crosses several continents—from France to Algeria and Japan—and connects characters from three generations. Auguste Jovert, a retired police inspector; his neighbour, former law professor Tadashi Omura; and his schoolboy friend, the eccentric writer Katsuo Ikeda are haunted by their past. Each has left behind a trail of deception and damaged relationships. But the past is never left behind for good, and the plot explores, with a sense of impending dread, how the characters’ lives have become intertwined. Henshaw’s prose is restrained and fragmented, which contributes to the noir-ish tone of the story. There is an almost immediate hook in the storyline, but some of the divergent narrative threads fall flat, while the conclusion may not come as too much of a surprise to careful readers. This book will appeal to fans of Paul Auster’s psychological novels, as well as readers of popular contemporary Australian literary fiction. Henshaw is the author of the award-winning Out of the Line of Fire (1988) and co-author of several crime novels under the pseudonym J M Calder.

 

Category: Reviews