MAX

Alex Miller, two-time winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, writes the incredible story of his truest friend, Max Landau.

"I began to see that whatever I might write about Max, discover about him, piece together with those old shards of memory, it would be his influence on the friendships of the living that would frame his story in the present. According to your 1939 Gestapo file, you adopted the cover names Landau and Maxim. The name your mother and father gave you was Moses. We knew you as Max. You had worked in secret. From an early age you concealed yourself - like the grey box beetle in the final country of your exile, maturing on its journey out of sight beneath the bark of the tree. You risked death every day. And when at last the struggle became hopeless, you escaped the hell and found a haven in China first, and then Australia, where you became one of those refugees who, in their final place of exile, chose not death but silence and obscurity." Alex Miller followed the faint trail of Max Blatt's early life for five years. Max's story unfolded, slowly at first, from the Melbourne Holocaust Centre's records then to Berlin's Federal Archives. From Berlin, Miller travelled to Max's old home town of Wroclaw in Poland. And finally in Israel with Max's niece, Liat Shoham, and her brother Yossi Blatt, at Liat's home in the moshav Shadmot Dvora in the Lower Galilee, the circle of friendship was closed and the mystery of Max's legendary silence was unmasked. Marked as always by Alex Miller's incredible capacity for truth and character in his writing, it is a moving meditation on memory itself, on friendship and a reminder to the reader that history belongs to humanity, that the dead still have so much to tell the living. Traversing Europe this is the story of the many who were terrorised and displaced during some of history's darkest moments, uncovered by the rare gift of Miller's powers of memory and observation. Inhabiting the Helen Garner and Robert Dessaix territory of creative non-fiction this is a beautiful tribute to a lost friend, told in fragments that encapsulate Max's life. Alex Miller is twice winner of Australia's premier literary prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, first in 1993 for The Ancestor Game and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He is an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, in 1993 for The Ancestor Game. His fifth novel, Conditions of Faith, won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the 2001 NSW Premier's Awards. In 2011 he won this award for the second time with his novel Lovesong. Following the publication of Autumn Laing he was awarded the prestigious Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2012. Coal Creek won the 2014 Victorian Premier's Literary Award.