The Year That Was

AUSTRALIA After having been three times the bridesmaid at the Booker McConnell Awards, Thomas Keneally is at last the bride with his novel Schindler's Ark (Hodder & Stoughton). It tells the story of a smooth and wealthy industrialist who managed to use his friendship with high-ranking Nazis and his black market alcohol to help Jewish prisoners escape. With its interest in the relationship between history, reportage and fiction, its grotesque images, and its dialectic between a man too earthly to be a saint and a community which wants to make him one, it's clear that the finished novel develops some of the central obsessions in Keneally's work.