The Speech

The novel draws on the life of a real man whose extraordinary gifts were shadowed by madness, and it traces how his fate reverberates through three generations of one family. Its concerns reach beyond the personal into the workings of government and the tangle of officialdom.

Clara, an inexperienced young woman, moves from Amsterdam to Australia to join Peter. At first their life together is contented, but a gradual, almost unnoticed shift takes hold and their bond gives way. After they separate, Clara is left with a little girl who is devoted to her father, and she must make painful decisions. Meanwhile, the bureaucrats around her, whose job is designing services for vulnerable people, carry on with an absurd comedy that sits oddly beside her private anguish.

The story asks how Clara can find her way through the circumstances surrounding her, and what happens when choices made for her own sake spill outward and affect many others. It is a book about confronting hard moral dilemmas.