All the Beautiful Liars

How true are the family histories that tell us who we are and where we come from? Who knows how much all the beautiful liars have embargoed or embellished the truth? During a long flight from Europe to Sydney to bury her mother, Australian expat Katrina Klain reviews the fading narrative of her family and her long quest to understand her true origins. This has already taken her to Vienna, where she met her Uncle Harald who embezzled the Austrian government out of millions, as well as Carl Sokorny, the godson of one of Hitler’s most notorious generals, and then on to Geneva and Madrid. Not only were her family caught up with the Nazis, they also turn out to have been involved with the Stasi in post-war East Germany. It’s a lot to come to terms with, but there are more revelations in store. After the funeral, she finds letters that reveal a dramatic twist which means her own identity must take a radical shift. Will these discoveries enable her to complete the puzzle of her family’s past? Inspired by her own life story, Sylvia Petter’s richly imaginative debut novel, set between the new world and the old, is a powerful tale about making peace with the past and finding closure for the future.

Sylvia Petter was born in Vienna but grew up in Australia, which makes her Austr(al)ian. She started writing fiction in 1993 and has published three story collections, The Past Present, Back Burning, and Mercury Blobs. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of New South Wales. After living for 25 years in the Geneva area, where she was a founding member of the Geneva Writers’ Group, she now lives in Vienna once more.