Medium Hardback with Dust-Jacket, Good Condition, 1985, 315 pages, ISBN 0 340 38449 2

A Family Madness – Thomas Keneally

‘Oh holy Jesus,’ screams a policeman as he emerges horror-stricken from a modest house in a Sydney suburb, ‘Who are these people?’

Terry Delaney knows only too well. A clean-living innocent Australian, happily married, with his income as a security guard considerably boosted from match fees as a Rugby League footballer, his life is now in ruins.

Whatever horror has occurred, it is the culmination of an obsession, a clash of the old world and the new, a grand passion.

Inside the house are the Kabbels: Rudi the father, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, his sons Warwick and Scott, but most important to Delaney, the beautiful blonde and desirable Danielle. But her daughter – their child – the Kabbels have refused to allow him to see.

Why? Who are these Kabbels? When Delaney first meets them they are running their family business, Uncle Security. But there are unresolved skeletons in the family. Rudi’s father, a former wartime police chief in the putative Baltic state of Belorussia, was a liquidator of Jews, a Nazi collaborator. Was Rudi’s mother as innocent as she seemed? And there is honorary ‘Uncle’ Willi, a liberal German Kommisar, assassinated by Russian partisans before young Rudi’s eyes.

‘Uncle’ Willi’s death has a devastating effect on Rudi – in a vision he sees a great wave that will cleanse the world of such cruelty and strife. As Rudi grows older the dream becomes his obsession, and Delaney’s life is irrevocably changed.