This story takes place in Vienna in 1948. The backdrop is the deNazification of Austria and the turmoil experienced by people trying to find a place for themselves after the war.
Robert is a young man searching for the answer to his father's suspicious fall from a top-floor window. Anna has come to Vienna to search for her husband - a man with secrets of his own - who has disappeared, They meet on the train to Vienna.
Although their paths rarely cross in the city, they are connected by the people that they encounter along the way - a war-widowed American journalist, a hunchbacked young servant girl, a former POW whose primary purpose is to survive by any means, a detective who yearns for human connection (love?) but accepts that it will never happen. On the simple face of it, this is a missing persons story; a murder mystery. But really, there is no simple face. These characters are neither good nor evil. There are no absolutes. They present themselves as one way to one, another way to others - all are true but none are completely so. It is an absolute pleasure to read this book and see how the author strips away layer after layer leaving us finally (perhaps) with a semblance of truth.
This novel was short listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2013. It lost to Lynn Coady's short story collection 'Hell Going' (another excellent book). I probably would have voted for 'The Crooked Maid'.
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