Palimpsest: The Story of a Name

Official selection

Veteran editor Mary Stephen has never been able to work out whether her surname is Stephen, or Suet, or Chan. Why would a typical Chinese family take a Western name? Opening the notebooks her father left behind, she discovers that her ancestors were Aboriginal Australians, and that her mother, a young woman with literary ambitions, may have helped Virginia Woolf's nephew meet Ling Shuhua in secret. As the mystery of her origins deepens, she turns detective, moving through the upheavals of history and home movies to piece together a secret family history around the name 'Stephen'. Colonialism, war, shifting identities: truth and fiction overlap, and who can tell them apart? Searching for what is real in a family history and memory written, erased and overwritten again and again, she rewrites her own story.

Translated from English by IFFDAY, not yet reviewed.