Fault Lines

Sol is a highly gifted but also scarily un-childlike six-year-old whose adoring mother believes is destined for greatness. He bears the same birthmark as his father, grandmother and great-grandfather before him. When Sol and his family make an unexpected trip to Germany, terrible secrets start to emerge.

Narrated by children from four generations of the same family, Fault Lines traces their history back through the years, from California to New York, from Haifa to Toronto and Munich. As dormant family secrets are awakened, shock waves reverberate from a hidden past into a fragile present.

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Nancy Huston reads from Fault Lines

Nancy Huston

was born in Calgary, Canada in 1953 and studied in New England and New York. When she was twenty she went to Paris and decided to make it her home. Writing in both French and English, she translated her own work herself and is the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, as well as a play, children’s books and screenplays. Fault Lines is her eleventh novel

Nancy Huston's q & a

What sparked Fault Lines?
There have been a million sparks, these past years, on the theme of transmission –all the things that get handed down, often with weird twists, from one generation to the next. All the paradoxes of repetitions and revolts in family life. But then – in particular – reading Gitta Sereny’s book The German Trauma and learning about the 250 000 children who were abducted by the Nazis from their families in Poland and the Baltic countries and given to German schools or families to be duly “Aryanized.” What gripped me in this tale was less the revelation of yet another Nazi horror than the theme of identity – trying to imagine what might go on in the mind of a child who was required – sometimes once, sometimes twice or even thrice before the age of 10 – to change his/her language/nation/culture/religion/parents – that is, all the elements that go into the making of an identity!

Where and when is the novel set?
The novel goes backwards in time and basically eastwards in space, from California in 2004 to New York/Haifa in 1982 to Toronto in 1962 to a town in Bavaria, Southern Germany, in 1944-1945. We are in the heads of four six-year-old children in turn, each of whom is the parent of the preceding one.

Do you have a favourite character in the novel?
My favourite character in the novel is Aron, Randall’s father (chapter 2), who is a New York Jew with a wry sense of humour, failed playwright but very successful father.

What's your favourite children's book and why?
Norton Juster’s Phantom Tollbooth, in which a bored little boy named Milo receives an unexpected gift of a tollbooth and goes on a fabulous journey into the Kingdom of Words and the Kingdom of Numbers. The book’s images, jokes and wisdom remain deeply imprinted in my brain to this day.