Too Many Men (novel)

Too Many Men (1999) is a novel by Australian author Lily Brett. It won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2000 for the Best Book from the South-East Asia and South Pacific Region.

Too Many Men
First edition
AuthorLily Brett
CountryAustralia
LanguageEnglish
Genrenovel
PublisherPan Macmillan, Australia
Publication date
1999
Media typePrint (Paperback)
Pages714
ISBN0330361392
Preceded byJust Like That 
Followed byYou Gotta Have Balls 

Plot summary

Ruth Rothwax, a successful New York business-woman, takes her 80-year-old father Edek, a Holocaust survivor living in Melbourne, back to Poland, to revisit the land of his birth. They are also accompanied, unknown to Edek, by the ghost of the dead Nazi Rudolf Höss. The novel explores the two main characters' different responses to what they find.

Reviews
  • Publishers' Weekly noted: "The hardest effect to bring off in fiction is a vision that is at once tender, deeply comic and yet aware of the ultimate sadness of life, the lachrymae rerum. Brett has succeeded triumphantly in the most delightful surprise of the year so far."[1]
  • Shannon Dowling in Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature stated: "Too Many Men represents a culmination of the concerns of [Brett's] work — the legacies of the Holocaust; the concentration and death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau; inter-generational trauma; and continuing anti-Semitism."[2]

Awards and nominations

References
  1. "Too Many Men, Lily Brett, author", Publishers' Weekly
  2. "Traces of Trauma: Loss and Longing in Too Many Men" by Shannon Dowling, JASAL, Vol 6 (2007)
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