Peter Carty

Kindness backfires: Sufferance, by Charles Palliser, reviewed

When the father of a family takes in a lost young girl from a minority ethnic group, he puts his own household at risk as racial persecution mounts

Chales Palliser. [Credit: Michael Jershova] 
issue 11 May 2024

Charles Palliser’s Sufferance tells us what happens to one family in an occupied country during wartime. What sets it apart is that all the characters are unnamed. The country, region and historical period also remain unspecified. This indeterminacy lends the novel enormous power.

The father of the family decides to take in a young girl from a minority ethnic group who has become separated from her own family.

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