Suggestion

Haven't read it yet but loved listening to it during the holidays when serialised on Radio National, 'The Idea of Home' by John Hughes. Lyrcial, moving, really very beautiful.The following is from ABC web site:

This book won the Douglas Stewart Prize for non-fiction in this year's NSW Premier's Literary Awards, and is being read on First Person during Life Matters at 10.15am from 4-15 July.

In The Idea of Home John Hughes writes about growing up in the Hunter Valley coal-mining town of Cessnock in a household dominated by memories of the Ukraine, which his mother and grandparents were forced to flee during the Second World War. Hughes charts the effect their stories and routines had on him as a child, the way they shaped his imagination and determined his idea of himself - as a student in Newcastle and later as the holder of a prestigious scholarship at Cambridge University. Yet this inheritance almost undoes him, for in Cambridge what he encounters is not the romantic idea of Europe he had imagined, but a provincialism more pronounced than that he had left behind in Australia.

Information about and texts from the Heywire program can be found at: http://www.abc.net.au/heywire/default.htm