Her book House of Exile (2008), subtitled The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann, is a collective biography. It is based on published sources, interviews and extensive archival research in Europe and America. House of Exile was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Award for Non-Fiction (Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-fiction), the West Australian Book Awards, the National Biography Award, and the ALS Gold Medal. In 2009 it won the Prime Minister's Literary Awards in the non-fiction category.
House of Exile is published in the USA by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, in the UK by Allen Lane /Penguin, in France (Chemins d’Exil) by Autrement, and in Spain (La Casa del exilio) by Circe.
In 1933 the author and political activist Heinrich Mann and his partner Nelly Kroeger (later Nelly Mann (de)) fled Nazi Germany, finding refuge first in the south of France and later, in great despair, in Los Angeles, where Nelly committed suicide in 1944 and Heinrich died in 1950. Born into a wealthy middle-class family in Lübeck, Heinrich Mann was one of the leading representatives of Weimar culture. Nelly was twenty seven years younger – the adopted daughter of a fisherman, a hostess in a Berlin bar – as far as his family was concerned, she was from the wrong side of the tracks. Their story is crossed by others from their circle, Heinrich's brother Thomas Mann, his sister Carla, friends Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth and Kurt Tucholsky, and beyond them, the writers Egon Kisch and Else Lasker-Schüler, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Virginia Woolf and Nettie Palmer among others. In train compartments, ship's cabins and rented rooms, they called upon what was left to them – their bodies, their minds and if they were lucky, their books – and amidst the debris of an era of self-destruction, built their own annexes to the House of Exile.
"Scintillating and rather magical... House of Exile is an extraordinary book, and a really rare accomplishment."
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