Lost Voices

Christopher Koch

Fourth Estate, 2012 - Australian fiction - 465 pages

Twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award and an Officer of the Order of Australia for his contribution to Australian literature, Christopher Koch returns with Lost Voices, a remarkable new novel that confirms him as one of our most significant and compelling novelists. Twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award, Christopher Koch returns with a remarkable novel of gripping narrative power. Young Hugh Dixon believes he can save his father from ruin if he asks his estranged great-uncle Walter- a wealthy lawyer who lives alone in a Tasmanian farmhouse passed down through the family-for help. As he is drawn into Walter's rarefied world, Hugh discovers that both his uncle and the farmhouse are links to a notorious episode in the mid nineteenth century. Walter's father, Martin, was living in the house when it was raided by members of an outlaw community run by Lucas Wilson, a charismatic ex-soldier attempting to build a utopia. But like later societies with communitarian ideals, Nowhere Valley was controlled by the gun, with Wilson as benevolent dictator.Twenty-year-old Martin's sojourn in the Valley as Wilson's disciple has become an obsession with Walter Dixon: one which haunts his present and keeps the past tantalizingly close. As Walter encourages Hugh's ambition to become an artist, and again comes to his aid when one of Hugh's friends is charged with murder, the way life's patterns repeat themselves from one generation to another becomes eerily apparent. Dramatic, insightful and evocative, Lost Voices is an intriguing double narrative that confirms Koch as one of our most significant and compelling novelists.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - jody12 - LibraryThing

This Tasmanian familial history impressed our group this month. Most everyone found the story and its writing well done and cleverly thought out. Often a book that continues to jump back and forth ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - DaptoLibrary - LibraryThing

This Tasmanian familial history impressed our group this month. Most everyone found the story and its writing well done and cleverly thought out. Often a book that continues to jump back and forth ...

About the author

Christopher Koch was born in Hobart, Australia on July 16, 1932. He graduated with honors from the University of Tasmania with degrees in English and philosophy. Before becoming a full-time author, he worked as a radio producer for the Australian Broadcasting Service in Sydney. His first novel, The Boys in the Island, was published in 1958. The Year of Living Dangerously was made into a movie in 1982. The Doubleman and Highways to a War won the Miles Franklin Award. He died of cancer on September 23, 2013 at the age of 81.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Lost Voices; Lost Voices, Christopher John Koch
• Author: Christopher Koch
• Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2012
• ISBN: 0732294630, 9780732294632
• Length: 465 pages