Review: THE HIDDEN BOOK, Kirsty Manning

• 
  This edition made available as an e-book on Libby by my local library
  
• published: 29th August 2023
• ISBN: 9781760879884
• 312 pages
• author website

Synopsis (author)

From the bestselling author of The Jade Lily comes a compelling novel based on a true story of a WWII European heirloom that brought down war criminals and travelled through history … to be found in an Australian country shed in 2019.

Europe, 1940s: Imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, Spanish fighter and photographer Mateo Baca is ordered to process images of the camp and inmates for a handful of photo books being made for presentation to top Nazi figures. Just five books in total, or so the officials think …

Mateo manages to make a secret sixth book and, with the help of a local woman, Lena Lang, it remains hidden until the end of the war.

Australia, present day: When thirteen-year-old Hannah Campbell's Yugoslavian grandfather, Nico Antonov, arrives in Australia to visit his family, one of the gifts he brings with him is an intriguing-looking parcel wrapped in a flour sack, which Roza, Hannah's mother, quickly hides.

Later, Hannah sneaks off in search for the mysterious package. She is horrified to find in it a photo book full of ghastly historical photographs of a terrible place full of people suffering.

At first Hannah has little context for what she sees, but over the years, as she experiences love, grief and trauma, she understands what these photos came to mean, for herself, her freedom and for those who risked their lives to 'bear witness' to history. 

A startling story of clandestine courage and treachery in World War Two, and how we must meet and overcome our pasts to move into our futures.

My Take

Two main time frames. Mauthausen concentration camp 1940s to 1945. and Australia, New South Wales 1985 to 2017. Hannah's grandfather Nico pays his final visit to his daughter Rosa and brings with him a book which Hannah barely glimpses. It contains photos of prisoners of war in the concentration camp. Rosa hides it away but Nico promises that one day Hannah will be old enough  to look at it.

So the story tells how this book of photos came to be created at the same time as telling the story of Hannah's life over a period of 30 years. Initially Rosa  resists giving Hannah the book, but it becomes an obsession with Hannah.

In a sense it is not really crime fiction although crimes are committed. There is plenty of mystery though.

At times I became impatient with the narrative but there can be no doubt that the story is carefully and sensitively told.

In the Acknowledgements at the end the author says she wanted to talk about how the clandestine photos of Mauthausen were used to convict Nazi war criminals. She took some facts and used them to create a fictional scenario, with fictional characters describing how a secret photo album has come to be on display in the Sydney Jewish museum.

A very readable story.

My rating: 4.4

I've also read 4.7, THE JADE LILY