Lovesong

Lovesong is a novel by Australian author Alex Miller, originally published in English as Lovesong. It won the 2010 Australian Age Book of the Year and the 2011 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. The story begins in a small Tunisian restaurant in Paris, Chez Dom, run by the widow Houria and her young niece Sabiha, a place where North African migrant workers rest after shifts at the slaughterhouse. On a rainy afternoon, Australian tourist John Patterner, who has taken the wrong train, steps in out of the rain and meets Sabiha, who left Tunisia at twenty-one to join relatives in Paris. He never returns to his former life. Years later, John and Sabiha live a quiet life in a Melbourne suburb. John tells the story he has kept buried to an elderly writer, Ken, who sees in it the possibility of writing the last "simple love story" of his life. But his daughter reminds him that love is never simple. Through the narrator's listening and retelling, the novel unfolds layer by layer the couple's more than twenty years together: hard work in the restaurant, ties to an immigrant family, the longing for a child, and the intractable obsession behind Sabiha's words, "It's not an affair, I just want a child." In restrained, lucid prose, Miller explores loyalty and betrayal, desire and loneliness, and cross-cultural identity, giving a seemingly private tragedy universal resonance.