Fiction: The Dressmakers of Yarrandarrah Prison and other titles

PICK OF THE WEEK

The Dressmakers of Yarrandarrah Prison
Meredith Jaffé, HarperCollins, $32.99

Well-crafted, feel-good and funny, this novel tells the tale of the hapless Derek, a middle-aged man doing time for embezzling funds from his golf club. His ex-wife Lorraine has briskly moved on and remarried, her insatiable credit card having been the main reason Derek turned to crime in the first place, and Derek is now learning to sew in the Yarrandarrah Correctional Centre’s sewing group, run by the optimistic Jane. When Derek hears that his daughter Debbie is to be married, the group comes up with the idea of making Debbie’s wedding dress as a gift. As might be expected, hilarity ensues. Jaffé is an excellent creator of complex and believable characters. Lorraine is pure villain, but every other character in this story, and there are quite a few, is drawn with sharp-eyed humour and affection, and the plot is perfectly paced.

The Beautiful Fall
Hugh Breakey, Text, $32.99

Robbie has a mysterious neurological condition: every 179 days he forgets everything. It’s unclear from the story whether this form of amnesia is a real condition, but readers who have had any experience with amnesia in its various forms will be receptive and sympathetic to what Robbie’s dilemma might entail. He lives a strictly regimented and solitary life in which he has constructed for himself a bizarre task involving thousands of dominoes and intended to create a link with the past self he cannot remember. But then his life is shaken up by the young and lovely Julie, who turns out not to be the stranger she seems. The basic premise of this story is just plausible enough for the reader to believe in Robbie’s dilemma, but we hear altogether too much about the domino game, the logic of which will escape all but the most attentive reader.

Ein Stein: A Novel
Joe Reich, Hybrid, $29.99

This complex and intriguing tale of a fictional survivor of the Holocaust and the things he finds himself doing to survive brings up more moral quandaries than can be covered in one short review. In his tale of a Polish Jew called Yaakov Stein, also known when passing as non-Jewish as Fritz Schnabel and later in his postwar Australian life as Jack Stein, author Joe Reich uses the situation of the Jews in Hitler’s Europe to explore a number of moral dilemmas as well as forms of storytelling. As the war approaches, Stein is working for the real-life Schindler-like owner of Leica, Ernst Leitz II, who found ways for his Jewish staff and their families and friends to escape from Nazi Germany. Stein’s life story is embedded in a contemporary tale of a young Melbourne man who finds himself the custodian of the tale and who makes some startling new discoveries.