The Idea of Home (John Hughes, Giramondo, $24.95 pb, ISBN 1920882049, October) ****

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The Idea of Home by John Hughes is both a typical and, at the same time, strikingly original work. It’s a memoir that will resonate with many Australians’ experience as a cross-generational migrant tale. The author’s antecedents in the Ukraine (where his mother and grandparents had to escape from in World War II) and in Wales and Scotland form a complex and intriguing background to a childhood in Cessnock, a traditional coal-mining town in the Hunter Valley in NSW. It’s a childhood richly and disturbingly coloured by that migrant experience, where both a traumatised mother and an idealised grandfather loom large in an imaginative boy’s life. Hughes is a fine young scholar, and his academic brilliance takes him to Cambridge, and then home again, with a vastly changed view of the ‘old Europe’ he’d imagined from his family experience. It’s a thoughtful and analytical self-analysis, interestingly broken into a series of essays, always sensitive to the paradoxes and complexities of his background, where ignorance of the past could leave his imagination free to roam: ‘It was the easiest thing in the world to see the forests of the Ukraine, to listen at night to the howl of the wolves, in the backyards of Cessnock.’

David Gaunt is a co-owner of Gleebooks

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2004, Thorpe-Bowker