The daughter of an elder in their church, she frets within the cramped confines of their version of faith, with its rigid doctrines and its denial of the body’s need for physical connection. Hanne is tall, uncomely and, to a distressing extent, unloved. Deftly craftedīoth are exquisite characters. But at the heart of the novel is what Kent terms “a queer love story” between the narrator, Hanne, and her friend Thea. There are empathically drafted portraits of love in all its complexities: between mothers and daughters, between siblings and neighbours. And particularly, she engages with what is largely excluded from the formal record: girls and women their friendships and the chains of love between them. Kent engages here, she writes in the preface, with the lives of the individuals and families who made the traumatic journey across the globe. The story is based on the migration of the Old Lutherans from Hamburg to South Australia. In Devotion, again set in the 19th century, she has turned from crime to community.
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