Sunrise West
Winner
2008 SA Arts Award for
Non-Fiction
Winner
2008 NSW Premier's Award for
Community Affairs
Sunrise West is a sequel to East of Time, picking up the author's story where that book left off. But it is also separate and self-contained, and set in a vastly different series of landscapes. Sunrise West navigates between two worlds: the author's wartime and post-war experiences in Europe, and his subsequent new life in Melbourne, Australia. The hallmark of the first world is darkness and light; that of the second, hope and restoration – but a restoration forever coloured by a past which cunningly refuses to give up its claim. Like its prize-winning predecessor, Sunrise West is a personal weave of autobiography, history and imagination, rich in ideas and peopled with an array of memorable characters. Whether describing the momentous or the mundane, Jacob Rosenberg writes with passion, irony and dark humour – and above all, a compelling zest for life.
“This remarkable book follows strange paths. It begins in the worst hell of mid-twentieth-century Europe, to accompany the narrator through darknesses and perils into a dappled light which is also Australia. Its brilliant vignettes focus on successive personalities or on sudden epiphanies. We are led through them to see that no ideology or belief structure offers lasting value: the soul must have its distinct resources of strength. As an inner voice says, late in Rosenberg's wise, prismatic narrative: 'A man can escape anything but himself'.” Chris Wallace-Crabbe
“As with East of Time, the book is unputdownable. Second and third readings keep yielding more insights. Rosenberg is a writer whose experiences are richly allusive and layered.” The Age
194 pp pb
ISBN 978-1-876040-84-0
$26.95