Stephen Orr

Lost children appear (or disappear) everywhere in literature and film: in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002) and Clint Eastwood’s Changeling (2008). Wendy James’s new novel, Where Have You Been?, concerns a lost teenager, and Carmel Bird’s Child of the Twilight (which I reviewed in last month’s ABR) explores the mythic status of the lost child. However, Stephen Orr’s novel Time’s Long Ruin goes to the harrowing core of one of the most disturbing mysteries in twentieth-century Australia – the disappearance of the Beaumont children.

Nobel prize winner Albert Camus played soccer for Algeria. First-time novelist Nikos Athanasou has been likened to Camus – for his writing, not his ball skills – but, on the basis of his début, this comparison is hard to sustain. A more convincing parallel between the two authors might lie in the diversity of their skills; Athanasou’s new career as a writer is secondary to his ‘day job’ as Professor of Orthopaedic Pathology at Oxford.