The Last Thread is a novel about a life in fiction – recalling a young boy’s childhood in the Netherlands and a family’s journey to Australian during the 1980s, as well as the tangled strings that bind them together.

Here, Readings’ Books Division Manager Martin Shaw, who describes the book as ‘a gutsy, moving, beautifully wrought and utterly compelling work’ chats to author Michael Sala about autobiography and the dark pull of the past.

Michael, I loved your book – congratulations on a fine debut. But love’s a loaded word in the context of this novel, isn’t it? We hang on to it in our kin and other close relationships – sometimes as a ‘last thread’ – but there can be a whole history of devastations under its veneer. I loved the steadfastness you exhibit in your examination of a sometimes quite gut-wrenching family history. Did you struggle with trying to retain some critical distance?

Love is a loaded word in The Last Thread, and I think that one of the themes of this book is the idea of love, what it means to different people and how it gets corrupted. I’m not just talking about love between people, but about the way people see themselves.

I made many false starts before I wrote The Last Thread. For a long time, the material was too confronting – too painful, too raw. It amazed me how, when I started writing about what I remembered, my childhood returned to me in such a visceral way. For a while, when I began writing about the difficult events in my life (my father’s abuse of my brother, my stepfather’s violence, my younger brother’s disappearance), I became more depressed and felt far more vulnerable, but gradually I started to find my feet.

Critical distance to the material in my childhood was a massive challenge, but it was a crucial one too. On the one hand, you have to feel the material that you are writing about in order to really bring it to life. On the other, you can’t let that raw feeling dominate you or the story.

Almost a character in its own right is the city of Newcastle. In one passage, the mother character, Nici, says ‘the city just becomes the memories you have of it’. You reside there still. Does the city have a pull all of its own, or is it so constitutive of your identity that you cannot imagine living anywhere else?

I did intend Newcastle to become a kind of character in this book that changes and grows over time. I think what my mother says at that stage of the book is an interesting idea, but I don’t agree with the underlying sentiment, or maybe I think the idea should be carried through to its natural conclusion. Yes, the city you live in is partly a product of your memories, but you are constantly adding new layers of memory to the picture. The more time that you spend there, the more your experience of the place diversifies and changes. I guess it’s about how you live your life: whether you repeat the past or build from it, and perhaps that’s reflected in your view of wherever you find yourself.

The ‘Michael’ character in this novel visits Holland, the country of his birth, for the last time as a 13 year old. Several of your characters are reckoning with versions of events, stories of the past that have accreted new layers over the years. Did you return to Holland for your research for this book? Or is it written entirely from your own memories of that time, with some imaginary excavations of events you were too little to comprehend fully?

I haven’t been back to Holland since I was 13. So, in a sense, the Holland that I came from is a product of memory coupled with imagination. It’s more of an emotional place than a physical one. But The Last Thread is not a book about the past; it’s about how the past relates to the present. It’s about what I live with now as an adult. I like your idea of imaginary excavations. At the best of times, memory is not precise, and how can I remember precisely things that were said, when they occurred in a language with which I am no longer that competent? But I have carefully attempted to brush back the muck, to capture what happened as I remember it.

One scene that I struggled with in this way was a visit to an aunt when I was nine, just before we left Holland for the second time. She literally spoke as if I wasn’t there and decided to summarise the whole scandalous past of my family for my mother. It was horrible but fascinating, my grandmother’s involvement with the Nazis, her intense anti-Semitism, the callous way that she’d treated some of her children. I’ll never forget how dramatically my view of the whole world changed in just a couple of hours, just through listening to someone talk. I never looked at my grandmother in the same way again.

Towards the end you describe a pair of nineteenth-century brass candleholders from a ship, that the mother gifts to Michael. ‘They’re designed with hinges so that the candles always stay level. The ship might be going down, but at least you’ll be able to see the look on people’s faces, the water coming in.’ You’ve been prepared to stare down some really strong themes, and the candleholders, like Michael, are still around to tell the tale. Michael has the occasional nightmares, but he also has love, a child of his own to care for … an equilibrium, of sorts?

There’s a kind of question in that image of the candleholders for me. If the ship is going down, if you’re stuck down there and heading towards the bottom of the ocean, is there a point in seeing the looks on people’s faces, the water coming in?

There were definitely times, while writing this book, that I wondered if illuminating all of this experience was worth it. I didn’t want to get consumed by it, and that’s always the risk, and it’s probably inevitable that it happens for a while, but somehow you have to find a way of pulling yourself free enough to be able to tell the story without becoming damaged by it all over again. Because in the end, the story isn’t about the damage, it’s about the interesting perspectives and experiences of the people involved.

I didn’t want to become that figure of my aunt towards the end of the book who is consumed by the bitterness of her experiences, but at the same time, I think the past matters. I don’t think that you can bury it indefinitely. You need to be able to look at it with a steady eye and that takes practice; it helps if you can find a good balance in your life as a whole. My daughter, towards the end, is a really important part of the book for me. Becoming a father really put me in a position to write this book.