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Reviews...
"Hot Books - The best of the new releases - for 2002 . . . moody and multi-layered"
The Australian Review 29-30/12/2001
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"Written with the wheatbelt as the backdrop, WA born Temby has produced a lively, moving saga. Set during World War II, it explored the tensions created when Italian POWs were sent to work on Australian farms. Giuseppe Lazaro is slowly accepted by the Nash family until Eddie returns from her nursing duties in New Guinea. Sparks fly and the book sizzles."
Sunday Times (Perth) 7/4/2002
*****
"What an impressive and assured debut. Rarely does a first novel pull together plot and characters so convincingly.
Opening in 1943, this is the story of Giuseppe, a POW from Italy who is sent to work on a farm in Western Australia. He is fortunate in being assigned to a property run by a had working and fair man, Max. Giuseppe and his fellow Italian labourers are baffled by the unforgiving, arid landscape and the strange food on the homestead’s table at night, but they are accepted into the family - until, that is, the return of Max’s sister Eddy, a nurse who has been caring for the wounded in the Middle East. Haunted by the scenes of carnage and suffering she has left behind, she is furious that her brother has become friendly with the prisoners of war and is, at first, openly hostile. But eventually, her prejudices are worn away and she begins a covert relationship with Giuseppe, which, when discovered by Max, has serious consequences for each of them.
This is a quiet novel, a slow burning love story set against a backdrop of cultural conflict, handled with deft sensitivity and dramatic assurance. It would also make a terrific television drama or film."
Good Reading Caroline Baum June 2002 (LINK)
*****
"...Temby’s novel is well observed...moves in sweeping gusts towards its moody conclusion."
Age (Melbourne) 13/4/2002
*****
"It is 1943, Australia is at war. On the very first day of their arrival as labourers on Grey Tamma Farm, an isolated outpost of the West Australian wheat belt, three Italian prisoners of war find they have lost their identity.
Giuseppe, an engineer trained in Trieste, has become Joe; Vincenzo, a hardworking peasant from the Abruzzi mountains, has become vince; and Carlo, son of a small-town Umbrian schoolteacher, has become (despite his resentment at this arbitrary change of name to suit the insularity of the Australian "barbarians") Charlie.
Work on the farm is had, involving the clearing of tree stumps and the chopping of mallee roots, caring for cattle and horses, and cultivating wheat, but their labour is lightened by the unexpected friendliness of their employers, the your farmer Max Nash and his mother, a generous, seeet-natured woman who attempts to make the foreigners feel at home by accommodating them in her house, rather than in an outbouse, and attempting to cook pasta for them.
Piano-playing, poetry-reading Giuseppe, much better educated than his employers and their neighbours, is sensitive to the complicated emotions aroused in the community by the intrusion of aliens - who are not only "I-ties" but probably fascists.
His delicasy and the Nash’s good sense work wonders however, so that by the time Max’s sister ekdith returns to the farm after four years of service as an army nurse in Papua New Guinea, she is incense that the "enemy" have been allowed to make themselves so much at home.
Finally her mother says, "We wrote about the prisoners. You knew we had prisoners working for us."
"You didn’t tell me you’d adopted them."
Despite her initial rage, working on the farm brings Edith and Giuseppe together in companionship, and eventually love. The gradual reconciliation of the feelings for each other with family resentments and community prejudice preovides the substance of Susan Temby’s wise and well-researched novel, as Giuseppe works out his relationship with Edith, with Max and with the unfamiliar landscape that becomes his ultimate home.
The Bread with Seven Crusts could not have been published at a better time. Temby’s characters remind the reader that there was a period only 60 years ago and despite the brutalisation wrought by war, when decency and compassion ruled the treatment of aliens on these shores."
"Love Thy Enemy", Spectrum Sydney Morning Herald. Yasmine Gooneratne 1/6/2002
*****
"In this wise compassionate novel, we meet the engineer from the Italian Alps, now a prisoner of war sent to work on a farm in Western Australia. Through the Italian prisoner and the Australian family he lives with, Temby explores the antoagonisms, the collisons of culture, and the events that transform. An intelligent, lively and ultimately optimistic story of Australia during the Second World War."
Glenda Adams
*****
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