Where to Start with Thomas Keneally: A Reading Guide

Thomas Keneally (born 1935) is the Australian novelist who won the Booker Prize in 1982 for Schindler’s Ark (published as Schindler’s List in the United States and subsequently as a film by Steven Spielberg) — a documentary novel about Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved more than 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust. He is one of the most prolific and most celebrated Australian writers of the twentieth century, with a body of work spanning historical fiction, memoir, and nonfiction that has consistently engaged with questions of moral courage, war, survival, and the Australian experience of history. His fiction is notable for its combination of meticulous historical research, documentary honesty, and genuine novelistic power.

Where to Start: Schindler’s List (1982)

The essential Keneally — and one of the most important historical novels of the twentieth century. Oskar Schindler was a German industrialist, a member of the Nazi Party, a committed opportunist, a serial womaniser, and a heavy drinker who saved more than 1,200 Jews from the death camps by employing them in his factories in Kraków and Brněnec. Keneally tells his story in the form of a documentary novel — using the techniques of fiction alongside documented fact, drawing on testimony from survivors he interviewed in person.

What makes the book exceptional is its refusal to romanticise Schindler. He is presented with complete honesty: his failings, his initial motivations (cheap labour, black market profits), the long period before his commitment to saving lives becomes unambiguous. Precisely this honesty makes what he eventually does more extraordinary. One of the indispensable works of Holocaust literature.

The Daughters of Mars (2012)

Keneally’s most accessible major novel after Schindler’s List — and his most important work about the First World War. Two Australian sisters, Naomi and Sally Durance, nurse at Gallipoli, on hospital ships, and on the Western Front, each carrying a secret from their last night on the family farm. The novel is a meticulous recreation of nursing in the First World War: the triage stations, the wound management that medicine of the era could barely accomplish, the institutional life of the hospital ship between theatres of war.

The sisters’ different temperaments — Naomi more reserved, Sally more instinctive — give the novel two genuine emotional centres. The secret between them generates sustained tension without melodrama. His finest work about Australia’s experience of the two world wars.

Why Schindler’s List Is the Ideal First Book

For a reader new to Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List is the ideal first book because it is his most celebrated work, a winner of the Booker Prize, and the fullest expression of his distinctive achievement, the rendering of a true story of the Holocaust with the power of fiction and the authority of fact. Schindler’s List, also known as Schindler’s Ark, tells the true story of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved the lives of more than a thousand Jews during the Holocaust, rendering this extraordinary story with deep research and the narrative power of a novel. As an entry point, it offers the fullest expression of Keneally’s gifts, the rendering of real historical events with the power of fiction, the moral seriousness, and the gripping narrative. It welcomes the newcomer with its extraordinary true story, its narrative power, and its profound moral weight, drawing the reader into one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust. It is his most celebrated work and a fine representation of his gifts, so that the new reader encounters Keneally at his most powerful. For the newcomer, then, Schindler’s List is the natural and ideal starting point.

What to Expect as a New Reader

As a new reader, you can expect Schindler’s List to be a powerful and gripping account of a true story of the Holocaust, rendered with the authority of fact and the power of fiction. You can expect an extraordinary true story, for the book tells the real story of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved the lives of more than a thousand Jews during the Holocaust, an account of moral complexity and remarkable courage. You can expect the rendering of real events with the power of fiction, for Keneally combines deep research and factual authority with the narrative skill of a novelist, bringing the true story vividly and grippingly to life. You can expect profound moral weight, for the book confronts the horror of the Holocaust and the moral complexity of its central figure, an ambiguous man who became an unlikely savior. You can expect a gripping and deeply affecting reading experience that confronts difficult history. Expect, in short, a powerful and gripping account of a true story of the Holocaust rendered with the power of fiction, a profound introduction to Keneally’s gifts.

Going Deeper After Your First Book

Once Schindler’s List has introduced you to Keneally’s gifts, the reader who wishes to go deeper can explore his prolific body of work, which ranges widely across historical fiction and other subjects, drawing on real events and figures with the same combination of research and narrative power. Keneally is a prolific writer, and his many novels engage with a wide range of historical subjects and periods, often illuminating real events and figures through fiction, in his characteristic combination of factual authority and narrative skill. Reading these after Schindler’s List deepens your appreciation of Keneally’s distinctive gifts, the rendering of historical events with the power of fiction, the moral seriousness, and the gripping narrative that mark his work, and reveals the range of his prolific output. His characteristic strengths run through his fiction, and the reader who has been gripped by Schindler’s List will find them across his work. Building your reading journey through Keneally’s work is a matter of following his historical fiction from his most celebrated work into his wide-ranging output. The reader who begins with Schindler’s List and continues through his work will find a prolific and accomplished writer of historical fiction.

Reading Thomas Keneally

Keneally’s fiction is distinguished by its moral seriousness and its documentary commitment: he researches his subjects with the thoroughness of a historian and renders them with the technique of a novelist. His central interest throughout his long career has been the question of moral courage in extreme circumstances — what enables a person to act well when it is costly, what prevents them, what the cost of both action and inaction turns out to be. Begin with Schindler’s List for the most essential and the most internationally celebrated; read The Daughters of Mars for his most carefully rendered portrait of ordinary people in extraordinary conditions.