Live bodies

Josef Mandl, retired from business, takes a sharp-eyed look at his past. As a young man in the communist underground in Vienna he fought street battles against the Nazis. Safe from persecution in New Zealand, however, he is classed as enemy alien and locked up onSomes Island in Wellington Harbour. At war's end, an Austrian Jew in a 1940s antipodean and colonial society, Mandl exists in harmony and in conflict with refugees and New Zealanders alike. His story mirrors the alien experience everywhere. In precise, elegant prose Maurice Gee looks at themes of loss and dispossession, of family, friendship and love, investing the familiar with touching significance. Live Bodies is, quite simply, an exquisite piece of writing by one of New Zealand's finest novelists.