THE GRAVE AT THU LE

The Grave at Thu Le explores a young French woman’s relationship with the Hanoi of her family who lived in the colonial community from 1900 to 1954.

Visiting the city for the first time as a tourist, Catherine is struck by Hanoi’s complexities and the ways in which the city’s history has been interwoven with her own.

There are houses to visit, streets which bear different names from the French ones of her family stories, colonial buildings and contemporary ones built since the ‘American’ war.

There are also secrets and surprises, a distant Vietnamese cousin, old Sorbonne-educated politicians, war veterans, artists and teenage Hanoians in love with American culture. She has to examine and understand all their stories before she can solve the mystery which has plagued her own.

The Grave at Thu Le was released in 2005 by Pan Macmillan.

Reviews

"With The Grave at Thu Le at last an Australian novel turns towards Vietnam and does so in an interestingly oblique way...There's a sharp intellect at work here, and a pen every bit as engaged as those of Greene or Koch."

- Drusilla Modjeska, The Monthly


"By creating a shimmering and enigmatic narrative surface, Cole perhaps mimics the dangerous delicacy with which the D'anyers family has repressed and aestheticised its own colonialism. This sense of elusiveness and fragmentation is strikingly reinforced by the texture of Cole's book."

- Delia Falconer, The Australian


"The book is sentimental but not cloying; affectionate, but not indulgent. Cole's overall effect is one of collage, of impressions superimposed on top of each other, of memories juxtaposed with emotions, of sensations experienced one after another to form a palimpsest. Her texturing of text is intensely rendered and most accomplished.

- Mark Thomas, The Canberra Times


"The Grave at Thu Le boasts virtually no flaws at all.It's as credible as memoir and as eloquently plotted as fiction, possibly because Cole's principal gifts are prose and research."

- Books