Last weekend at the Melbourne Jewish Writers Festival, I went to a session featuring debut authors, and became interested in this novel The Ties That Bind because of its subject matter. The chair, Nadine Davidoff, made the point that it traverses a number of themes with ideas bustling for attention but in a really good way. Davidoff is an editor who teaches at the University of Melbourne, and she’s been a commissioning editor at Random House and Black Inc., so she knows what she’s talking about. I think that book groups would enjoy discussing this title, and I also think that it would make an absorbing film.

The author, Lexi Landsman said that the book had its genesis in her own experiences. She had a colleague, she said, who was adopted but had no interest in meeting her sudden siblings. She had visited the Cumberland Resort in Marysville not long before the town was destroyed by bushfire, and had struggled to come to terms with how the landscape could be there one day, and then not. She also knew someone who had needed stem cell therapy and through the real life synchronicity of finding an American donor, had seen how the chance of finding someone on the other side of the world could change a life. And because she had been writing since she was a child, she found herself writing about these things and one day realised that she was writing a novel…

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/05/25/the-ties-that-bind-by-lexi-landsman/ ( )