Andrew Riemer's masterful account of the changes in Australian society in the years after World War II, as experienced by the author and his family after leaving Hungary.

On a freezing November day in 1946, Andrew Riemer, then a 10-year-old with mumps, left a bomb-scarred Budapest on his way to Australia. In 1990, just a few days before Christmas, he returns to the city of his birth where, amid the decay of a world waking from totalitarian rule, he tries to reconstruct the past from shreds of memory and family myth.

In the years between, his career had taken him from being an expert in French-knitting, a skill acquired when, unable to speak English, he was put in a class for intellectually handicapped children, to Sydney University, where he taught English Literature.