Book of Dirt

The Book of Dirt is a novel by the Australian writer Bram Presser, published in 2017. It won the Christina Stead Prize for fiction and the Voss Literary Prize in 2018.

The book's narrator, who shares the author's name, sets out to find out what happened to his grandparents during the Second World War. Jakub Rand and Dasa Roubickova were deported from Poland to Theresienstadt and from there to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the little they left behind is a collection of writing and correspondence that the narrator uses as his starting point. What he assembles is part family history and part invention, because the records are fragmentary and the stories the family told about itself do not always fit what the documents say. The novel moves between research, memory and narrative, and the gaps are left visible rather than filled in.

Presser is a poet, and this was his first work of fiction; the material came from his own family's papers. The chapters move between the narrator's own travels and the voices of the people he is trying to recover, and the title refers both to the earth the family came from and to what was buried in it.