Longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award 2020 'A novelist for our times' Anna Funder, author of Stasiland In this brilliant novel of fear and sacrifice, trauma and survival, four characters' lives intertwine across time and place. Australian soldier Toohey returns from Baghdad in 2003 with shrapnel in his neck, crippled by PTSD. A decade earlier, aspiring pianist Nasim falls from favour with Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic son Uday, triggering a perilous search for safety. In Melbourne as the millennium turns, Robbie, faced with her father's dementia and family silences that may never be addressed, begins to test boundaries. And in the present day, Gerry seeks to escape his father Toohey's tyranny and heal the wounds inflicted by it. Crossing the frontiers of war, protest and cultural reconciliation, Act of Grace is a meditation on inheritance: the damage that one generation bestows upon the next, and the potential for transformation. It is a searing, powerful and utterly original work by an exceptional Australian writer.

When it comes to the Australian writer Anna Krien's debut novel, Act of Grace, 'ambitious' feels like an understatement . . . A potent study of power . . . she deftly knits together time periods and places. Her characters, though, are her greatest achievement . . . In placing these complicated, vulnerable characters together, Krien crosses cultural and generational divides to dazzling effect. -- Lucy Knight * Sunday Times *
It's startling to read a first novel that gathers so much and travels so far, yet flows so effortlessly. Krien writes brilliantly, channelling indelible images ... Krien resists easy conclusions, following her flawed characters with sharp, sympathetic eyes, before leaving them without fanfare, still compromised and still uncertain, but with the chance to rework the angry echoes of the past into a song of their own. * Guardian *
The wisdom and balance of Krien's writing captivates * Daily Telegraph *
Krien's first novel is a high-wire performance. With its vast historical rigging, epic scope, ethical complexity, and kaleidoscopic view, Act of Grace is enormously ambitious. The reader watches, breath held, as the novel unspools, but Krien's step is sure, and she does not fall. * Australian Book Review *
One of this country's leading voices * The Saturday Paper *

Anna Krien is the author of the award-winning Night Games and Into the Woods, as well as two Quarterly Essays, Us and Them and The Long Goodbye. Anna's writing has been published in The Monthly, The Age, Best Australian Essays, Best Australian Stories and The Big Issue. In 2014 she won the UK William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, and 2018 she received a Sidney Myer Fellowship.