Juliana Stolburg was born in 1947 into the bleak landscape of a Zeeland wasted by war, death, flood, and dark secrets. Janna’s violent mood swings were soothed by the Singer sewing machine on which she fashioned new garments from old; ‘the throb of the needle, the movement of the treadle – backward, forward, backward, forward’ beat out the chronicle of her life to the listening child. But Janna’s life is only part of Juliana’s narrative. Memory her agent, she leads us smoothly between past and present, old world and new, the watery green island of Walcheren and alien Australia.

Who is Juliana, this adult reflecting on the past? Does she exist or, as with Alice, have we slipped through the looking glass and discovered that nothing is what it seems?

Elisabeth Holdsworth was the inaugural winner of the Calibre Prize for her essay, ‘An die Nachgeborenen: For Those Who Come After’ (ABR, February 2007). Her first novel, of almost the same title, uses her family’s thousand-year heritage as grist for those who come after,blurring the divide between fiction and memoir, effortlessly slipping between a haunted European past and the difficult fictive present in Australia, reworking truth, rumour, and tragedy into a compelling narrative of love, loss, and sacrifice.

Holdsworth, trained in the social sciences, has chosen fiction over memoir, rejecting the latter as slippery and unreliable, since the memoirist is constrained by another fiction: that truth can be threatening and deeply disruptive. Her ambivalence is implicit in the arresting image of nine happy children in a cobbled street that appears on the endpapers of the book, and in the map of the province of Zeeland printed on the verso of a dedication ‘for absent friends’. Immediately, we are suspended between Dichtung und Wahrheit, fiction and truth. The child second from the left in the photograph is the author, born Elisabeth de Rijke-Nassau. Her family have been leaders in the Calvinist-Protestant stronghold of Middelburg in Zeeland since the thirteenth century.

Two families: one rich, landed, speaking high Dutch and on first-name terms with the royal family; the other impoverished, illiterate, Jewish. From them descended Juliana Stolburg, the last of a long line of European aristocrats who had lived on the southern island of Walcheren for eight hundred years. To her mother, Janna, she was one of the Nachgeborenen, the label she bestowed on Juliana and her four friends who nearly died from rheumatic fever in 1949.

Juliana’s father – ‘Spanish Jack’, a hero of the Resistance in his long leather coat – is redolent of tobacco, gin, and the sea. Like her half-Japanese grandmother’s parent, he is an expert on water, but by 1959 he is disillusioned, disgraced, and unemployed. The Stolburgs rent out their estates, pack up their possessions, and sail to Australia. ‘Black Jack’ finds work as a director with a Melbourne firm of Dutch wool exporters. Each evening he turns to the gin bottle to dull his despair.

Meanwhile, the Stolburgs buy a handsome house in leafy Malvern, and twelve-year-old Juliana bumps into a ‘tall blonde god’ called Phillip de Vere, who is studying to be a psychiatrist. ‘Philly’ decides to make Juliana his ‘project for the summer hols’. Becoming her chief mentor, he helps her to discard her thick Dutch accent, widens her reading, and expands her world. In one way or another, Philly – witty, charming, homosexual – will be with her to the end of her days.

Juliana is a sleepwalker. The dark times that scarred her parents’ generation have also affected their children. From her adult perspective she directs us to contemplate the psychological effects of war on those born after the conflict, imprinted with their parents’ traumatic experiences. The child recovers under Philly’s tutelage. He prescribes medical books and psychological dictionaries and encourages her to write about herself in order to overcome remembered stress.

But there is no cure for Jack Stolburg. Two years later he is dead, and Juliana’s childhood effectively over. The fifteen-year-old is forced to become self-sufficient and to take charge of her mother. Because she is unable to meet the mortgage repayments, the house is soon repossessed. Soon, all that remains of Juliana’s father is the Daimler, with its leather upholstery and scent of cigars. Juliana drove it, legally or not, for more than twenty years.

Juliana is a loner, intelligent, discreet. Such is her gift for languages that the army recruits her straight from school. Of the five relationships that shape each period of her life, all but the last include Janna: two sets of loving grandparents, her parents and Philly. He provides a refuge when mother and daughter can no longer live together; ultimately he is the bridge that reunites them. He gives Juliana friendship, emotional stability, and unconditional, companionate love, but eventually she loses both Philly and Janna in terrible accidents.

Two years later, she marries bisexual Oscar, ‘so like dear, dead Philly’. For thirty years, Oscar plays second fiddle to Juliana’s career as a spy wherever the Australian government posts her, and conducts discreet affairs until he falls in love with a man linked to the tragedy in her past. Discovering this lover’s identity shatters her and she fears that vulnerable Oscar will suffer the same fate as Philly. ‘Tell me about Philly and your mother,’ says Oscar as their marriage ends. ‘It’s always been Philly, hasn’t it?’

This elegant and beautifully structured work is rich and contextually flawless, its style consistent with its civilised and well-defended narrator as she grapples with the layers of betrayal and unexpiated guilt that are central to the novel. Irony, understatement, and humour are present; Holdsworth displays a deft touch with dialogue. The characterisation of some minor players is not always successful – Philly’s parents and siblings, and the fellow psychiatrist at Prince Henry’s Hospital, lack depth – but they are essentially bit parts. The author is on sure ground with the predatory Dutch couple who pilfer her mother’s possessions. Janna, Philly, and Oscar are fully realised.

Fiction has enabled Holdsworth to range freely between past and imagined present, to incorporate both ‘the public performance of our lives’ and those aspects behind the mask, ‘inaccessible to a wider audience’, that she discussed in ABR in a later essay ( ‘Missing from My Own Life’, October 2008). In this convincing and ultimately fast-moving text, it can be difficult to recognise that Holdsworth’s creative solution is neither memoir nor that more verifiable genre, autobiography, but, rather, a masterly piece of writing that has woven fiction and fact into a powerful expression of love and loss.

Read Elisabeth Holdsworth's Calibre Prize winning essay 'An die Nachgenborenen: For Those Who Come After' (February 2007)