In The Last Sky, Alice Nelson delivers a powerful meditation on the nuances attachment, the workings of memory, storytelling and history on nations and individuals, and the strange legacies of colonialism, love and betrayal.Set against a backdrop of uncertainty and changing political temper, the novel is set in the months leading up to the return of the colony of Hong Kong to China after ninety-nine years of British rule. Loyalties are divided, the privileged world of the British expatriates is under threat and the Chinese population is strained and uneasy.Into this maelstrom steps a young woman, Maya Wise, an Australian art historian adrift in a failing marriage and alone in a strange world far from home. Maya drifts through Hong Kong, exploring the surreal world of the expatriates and the equally intricate worlds of the Chinese characters she encounters. She begins to uncover the secret past of an old Chinese bookseller and the wartime love affair he had with a young Jewish woman seeking refuge in China. As Maya pastes together the fragments of a life destroyed by desperation and love, she begins to imaginatively reconstruct the story of the forgotten histories of Hong Kong and Shanghai and to make sense of her own life.The narrative is interspersed by an imagined series of stories about the Jewish refugees in Shanghai and the strange, transient world they created in the ghettos of the Chinese city: the jazz clubs and the makeshift kosher bakeries, the bars where you could dance with a Russian countess for 10 cents.A eulogy for the end of love, this acutely observed novel is also a moving meditation on exile, memory and the ways in which we reconcile ourselves with loss. The Last Sky marks Alice Nelson as one of Australia’s most promising new talents.