I was the prodigal daughter, off on an adventure aged 19, shedding one life for another, leaving my large, extended, all-enveloping, Jewish family behind.  By the time I reached 50, when so many of them had gone, I began to feel I owed them an incalculable debt, for the love they’d bestowed on me and the riches they bequeathed.  I don’t mean riches in the ordinary sense, but the richness of the culture I’d been born and nurtured in, all but forgotten in my Australian sojourn.

The book is composed of fragments, as more and more bits of that past life came rushing back to me.  Their faces, what I could recapture of their stories, the intonations of the Yiddish they spoke, opened up a past as much mine as their own.  Numbers, as in the book of the Old Testament, the Jewish prayer ‘number my days’ and the Kabbala are symbolic elements in the glue that holds the story together, as is the Fibonacci Sequence.

Sapphires, published in 1995, won the ACT Book of the Year award, was short-listed for others, and long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin prize.