All the Beautiful
Liars
How true are the family
histories that tell us who we are and where we come from? Who knows how much
all the beautiful liars have embargoed or embellished the truth?
During a long flight
from Europe to Sydney to bury her mother, Australian expat Katrina Klain
reviews the fading narrative of her family and her long quest to understand her
true origins. This has already taken her to Vienna, where she met her Uncle
Harald who embezzled the Austrian government out of millions, as well as Carl
Sokorny, the godson of one of Hitler's most notorious generals, and then on to
Geneva and Berlin. Not only were her family caught up with the Nazis, they also
turn out to have been involved with the Stasi in post-war East Germany.
It's a lot to come to
terms with, but there are more revelations in store. After the funeral, she
finds letters that reveal a dramatic twist which means her own identity must
take a radical shift. Will these discoveries enable her to complete the puzzle
of her family’s past?
Inspired by her own life
story, Sylvia Petter’s enthralling fictional memoir set between the new world
and the old is a powerful tale about making peace with the past and finding
closure for the future.
Purchase Link
For a limited time, All the Beautiful Liars will be available for only
99p.
All the Beautiful Liars, the fictional memoir of Katrina Klain is a literary novel with a speculative
touch set in a period of recent history.
The
story opens in the Panopticon, administered by former boulevard hack, Jamie,
the keeper of loose ends and lost endings. Jamie has the facts, and he plays
them out on a LED screen. Katrina, armed only with memories from her childhood
in Australia, her dreams, and her own finding tries to complete the picture,
which she must do before her deadline expires.
Extract:
I
am Jaimie, Jaimie Stadler, the keeper of lost endings. A life in Limbo is my
lot: the price I must pay for my worldly delving into the tales of others,
their scandals and secrets.
My
job entails servicing The Panopticon in that period between death and the rest
of the journey to God knows where. God, perhaps, may not even know where; and
none, I am told, have come back to give the exact coordinates.
I
may be new at this game, but I have work to do. Not that such work is evident,
but there is a certain amount of opening doors, and closing them, pressing the
play button – I am not always responsible for the stop button – and providing a
fresh cup of tea, or glass of brandy.
Ah,
someone is knocking at the door. I must release the lock and let them enter.
But first let me click the play button so that you see what my visitor was
going through. It is a woman of late middle age. I shall put the kettle on.
Click.
Labelled already?
Labelled already?
|
Name & origin:
|
Katrina Klain, Australian citizen
|
|
Location:
|
Morgue of the Medical Insititute of the university of Vienna
|
|
Cause of death:
|
slit throat
|
What a clean sweep. And such neat stitching. The
human head, it is documented, remains conscious for ninety seconds after
decapitation (footnote 1: Severance by Robert Olen Butler, an American
writer). But that is the view from the other side.
In fact, it can take days, even weeks, before
beginning the journey down that tunnel of which one speaks. Not many get to the
light, I might add, most end up wandering the corridors, the proverbial loose
end having slipped from their grasp. But some are curious by nature. My guest,
I suspect, is one of these. Let us then move into her mind. I always find that
letting the ‘interviewee’ speak can liven up even the deadest reportage. (Do
excuse my little joke.) So, over to Katrina Klain for a first-person account of
the situation.
Shoot. Or should I say, cut?
Cut. My throat was cut! But when the blade slit
through and I asked ‘Why now?’ I realised that I still had some unfinished
business. I must find the story. It is not just my story, it’s my family’s,
too, or what I can make of it. We must have been a family of liars, making up
everything.
Except the bits that are true.
Author Bio –
Sylvia
Petter was born in Vienna but grew up in Australia, which makes her
Austr(al)ian.
She
started writing fiction in 1993 and has published three story collections, The
Past Present, Back Burning and Mercury Blobs. She has a PhD
in Creative Writing from the University of New South Wales.
After
living for 25 years in Switzerland, where she was a founding member of the
Geneva Writers’ Group, she now lives in Vienna once more.
No comments:
Post a Comment