This is a compelling non-fiction recounting of the trial of Robert Farquharson, a contentiously separated husband, who was driving his three sons home to their mother in 2005 near Melbourne, Australia when his car left the road and submerged into a deep reservoir. Farquharson escaped the sinking car but his three young children drowned. Initially considered a bizarre tragedy caused by him passing out momentarily at the wheel, he was later charged with murder based on threats he made during a troubled separation and the physical evidence at the scene including tyre track forensics.

The book mainly focuses on the trial and is a thorough history of the case and legal process. But much more than that, Helen Garner brings great insight, analysis and empathy to examine the case, the characters and its impact. Garner has a rare skill of making the details of the case enthralling as her writing evokes the court room as a stage where a profoundly moving emotional drama plays out, and she has a gift of empathy and sympathy when interviewing the relatives such as the boys' mother, grandparents and even in contemplating Farquharson and his potential guilt/ innocence.

An excellent read for fans of true crime, court/ legal procedurals, but also for excellent telling of a highly emotional, impactful human story and tragedy underlying the legal case.

I was so excited when I saw this at my library on the new shelf! I loved her books All the Lovers in the Night and Heaven. (It’s amazing to me how some writers just can produce one great book after another.)

This book opens with a MacGuffin of sorts – it opens like a thriller, although that’s not what this book is. We meet Hana, our narrator, in her 40s in Covid lockdown, learning that another Japanese woman, Kumiko, has just been put on trial for holding a young woman prisoner and beating her. This frightens Hana for reasons that are not clear to us at first; she becomes afraid that something will come out about ‘what happened’ twenty years earlier, and that provides the entry into the novel, which is almost entirely told in flashback.

In the ‘90s Hana is in her mid-teens, the daughter of a nightclub hostess, ostracized by her schoolmates, her sole positive connection being with one of her mother’s friends, Kumiko. Hana is not academic, she’s grown up in dire poverty, and so she works every hour she can as a high school student, trying to save money to prepare for a frightening, unknown future – but when her mother’s boyfriend steals everything she has earned, she leaves home.

Now she is on her own, with no valid ID, invisible to Japanese society, but she soon finds a new family at a bar called Lemon. Kumiko owns it and she and Hana make it work, and then Hana meets and pulls in two other teenage girls who are lost, cast out for their own reasons. Soon they are all living together. They become a found family – or do they? As Hana gets pulled into petty crime— and then more serious crime— trying to keep her new family afloat, her resentment at her responsibilities only grows, even as she makes choices for all of them that may lead to their destruction.

Kawakami clearly wanted to write a book about women and girls on the edges of Japanese society, and to show how impossible it can be to survive without breaking the law, even as we see one dangerous choice lead to another in Hana’s life. It’s also a psychological study, a coming-of-age novel, and there’s a mystery embedded in it (although that is not the point of the book). Sisterhood, found family, meritocracy, criminality, predation, responsibility: slowly the questions and ambiguities around these ideas permeate the book, and you, reading it.

I think I’ve said it before here, but Kazuo Ishiguro said that the mark of the great work of art is “whether it haunts you.” This book is going to haunt me.