Author(s): Robert Hillman

Fiction | Staff Favourites | Recommended

Fans of The Little Paris Bookshop will delight in this tender novel about love and forgiveness in 1960s Australia, in which a lonely farmer finds his life turned upside down by the arrival of a passionate librarian--a Holocaust survivor determined to leave Europe behind as she opens the first bookshop his town has ever seen.   It is 1968 in rural Australia and young Tom Hope is doing his best. In love with the land, but not much of a farmer, it's when his wife becomes pregnant--though by another man--that Tom finds true fulfilment in the role of a father. When inevitably his wife leaves, taking little Peter with her, Tom is heartbroken.   Enter Hannah Babel, quixotic smalltown bookseller: the second Jewish person--and the most vivid woman--Tom has ever met. Hannah has opened the town's first bookshop, filling its shelves with all the darkness and light of post-war Europe. Tom dares to believe they could make each other happy, but Hannah is a haunted woman. Twenty-four years ago she and her own little boy had arrived at Auschwitz.   About learning to make peace with evils both great and small, The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted is gorgeously written, gentle-spirited, and wise, sharing a hopeful story of unexpected love and second chances.

In the late 1960s, on the farm he has inherited from his uncle in Victoria’s north, Tom Hope endeavours to live a tranquil life.  The type of person who allocates scarce time to running over acorns with a tractor to enable them to be eaten by visiting wild ducks, he seems unlikely to prosper in agriculture.  An unsuccessful marriage to flighty Trudy increases his humility before a largely empathetic rural community and places Trudy’s infant son in his care for a time.  Tom discovers a talent for fatherhood in the short period before the child is taken to live with its mother in a faith community, far away to the south.     

Hannah Babel, an Hungarian Jew, has endured the horrors of Auschwitz where she lost her husband and son, and lived through the Russian occupation and nihilism that characterised the aftermath of the war in Budapest.  She has battled her way to Australia with wit, beauty and reserves of strength, and after some time spent teaching in a series of rural towns, opens a bookshop. The bookshop, symbol of folly and opportunity, a magnetic meeting place for those sensitive to the past and all the potential of the future, is a natural fulcrum for this book.

Told in the matter of fact, laconic tone which often characterises the dialect of much of rural Australia, where wry humour and understatement shroud reservoirs of emotional depth, this story visits various forms of extremism upon big-hearted people and explores the impacts on them.    Robert Hillman brings to us the quiet joy we all experience when two likeable people find one another amongst all the chaos of the world. - MARK