Black Rock White City

Patric’s suspenseful and harrowing debut brilliantly explores life as a refugee in Melbourne, Australia. Jovan Brakochevich works as a janitor at Sandringham Hospital while his wife, Suzana, earns money housekeeping for upper-middle class families in the suburb of Black Rock. Graffiti begins to appear around the hospital, and Jovan is ordered to clear the vandalism. David Dickens, a psychologist hired to study the graffiti in order to deduce the identity of the vandal, believes an employee in emotional crisis might be the perpetrator. The vandalism grows in severity, and so does Jovan’s obsession with it. He begins to suspect the messages are meant for him. Tensions rise as the hospital’s defacement leads Jovan to reflect on his past pain and his old life as a poet and educator in the former Yugoslavia, which he and Suzana fled in the chaos of the war and which has strained their relationship. These conflicts within them aggravate memories of their shared pain and manifest as damaging behavior. A sense of dread builds throughout, culminating in a shocking and unforgettable ending. Patric tackles the pressure to assimilate and the longing for one’s former life. The book is littered with quotes from Miloš Tsernianski and Ivo Andric´, and nods to Meša Selimovic´, Danilo Kiš, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky; the inclusion of these voices and narratives, along with the novel’s shifting tones and points of view, help articulate the experience of many forced migrants. This is a heartbreaking yet hopeful work about how trauma can erase identity and drive people to reinvent themselves. (Sept.)