The premise of Western Sydney author Peter Polites’ third novel feels simple: a son tells his mother’s story. The narrator’s family is from Greece. His mother, named Honoured, was born in a craggy mountain village on the island of Lefkada where twisting paths score the limestone face of the island and the haze of rain carries the scent of pine. Honoured is savvy. In a raucous first chapter composed in her voice, she lectures the son that he should write about her for his next book because Australians love stories of migrant suffering.

To say God Forgets About the Poor is about suffering, however, is to undersell it. The rest of the book’s chapters settle back into the third person, spanning different eras in Honoured’s life, from a 1940s childhood beset by illness to a 1970s Athens full of ‘shouty floral patterns that not even the Mediterranean sun could fade’, to 1980s migrant domesticity in Sydney, and finally the more recent past. Honoured is a fascinating figure: the third child in a family of five girls, raised by a father who wanted an education for each of his daughters.

This is also a book about diaspora and the intricate work of making and remaking lasting links to your history and culture, told with a pungent melancholy but not sentimentalism. Polites scatters echoes of ritual and imagery throughout the book, creating a dense topography of memory and connection: ‘Half a world away the Greeks of the diaspora still gave each other their bountiful harvests of golden lemons in plastic Coles bags and homemade pressed olive oil in two-litre Coke bottles.’

I was thoroughly absorbed in Polites’ crafting of such a tough, paradoxical, generous soul and, contrary to Honoured’s initial assessment, would recommend this book to anyone who loves stories about migrant life, legacy and tough family love.