Bookshop of the Broken Hearted by Robert Hillman

Why?

This was a little bit exciting for me as it is my first foray into netgalley.  Like many people, the title was enough.  Who wouldn't want to read about a bookshop?

What?

Otherwise known as amazon spiel:

Tom Hope doesn't chase rainbows. He does his best on the farm - he milks the cows, harvests the apples, looks after the sheep - but Tom's been lonely since Trudy left, taking little Peter with her to go join the holy rollers.

Enter Hannah Babel, quixotic smalltown bookseller: the second Jew - and the most vivid person - Tom has ever met. When she asks him to help her build Australia's most beautiful bookshop, Tom dares to believe they could make each other happy.

But it is 1968: twenty-four years since Hannah and her own little boy arrived at Auschwitz. Tom Hope is taking on a battle with heartbreak he can barely even begin to imagine.

Amazon Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

Rusty words  ☕ ☕ ☕ ☕ ☕

"A mountain rose above the picnic area, conical in shape, the slopes densely treed with mountain ash and red box, myrtle beech, black wattle.  But the green of the packed foliage gave way in a thousand places to the bone-white of dead trunks, the standing corpses of trees burnt in the Black Friday fires of 1939.  Enough time has passed since the eruption of the mountain into flame for an intricate pattern of living colour and dead colour to have emerged.  It was as if the thriving foliage of the living trees had undertaken a vast campaign of support for the dead trunks, hemming them in, holding them erect in many places."

This is a book about continuing in the aftermath; about how the trees continue to grow and evolve despite being stripped to their bare trunks.

Hannah "mad", amazing and determined is one whose journey and culture is not understood by the residents of Hometown in Australia.  Wherever she is, she never blends in but is somehow accepted throughout every chapter of her necessary travels.  She takes us through the trauma of existing as a Jew in Nazi occupied Europe both in concentration camps and then the chaos and unpredictability of the post war days and months.  Hannah is a survivor.

Tom is a farmer who in in love but been abandoned by his wife, Trudy, who then returns pregnant with another man's child.  Tom loves Peter; biology is not an issue to him.  Trudy takes Peter away.

Hannah meets Tom.  Their love story is considered unlikely but it is beautiful.  Can Hannah deal with Peter when he returns?  Will he remind her too much of what she lost at Auschwitz? 

This is a beautifully written tale of love and loss.  The language is precisely manoeuvred to ensure that the reader feels the raw emotion.  This book is superb.  Please read it.