Boy Lost: A Family Memoir by Kristina Olsson

JUDGES' COMMENTS

This nonfiction narrative of a child stolen from his mother’s arms has the elements of mythic tragedy: a beautiful mother, a dangerous father, a boy in the wilderness.  But it’s also a book about the way stories are made — about experience being transformed into memory, memory being transformed into story, about records, both written and imprinted in the body, and about untold stories and the impact of silence, the deep shadow cast on all who come after — ‘this is the story never told, not to us, the children who would grow up around it the way skin grows over a scratch’.

Olsson tells the story with the grace of a narrator who is questioning and thoughtful but who does not intrude and never judges. The language is beautifully poetic and unfolds the story with insight and economy. In a feat of imagination — and extending the boundaries of memoir — Olsson is able to inhabit characters in a way that is entirely convincing. This memoir is much more than the story of one mother and child — it broadens out into the social and historical landscape of Australia to explore why and how our culture has allowed so many children to be taken from their parents.

Memoir by its nature looks at individual lives, which can seem unrelated to the larger world, but in questioning the nature of memory and the construction of self, Olsson has created a story that is both intensely personal and powerfully universal. Her story traverses private lives and public issues in the way the best memoirs do.