In the early passages of The Zookeeper’s War, Steven Conte’s heroine Vera is torn between her attachment to war-stricken Berlin, this ‘darkening city on the northern plain of Europe’, and her homesickness ‘for the chatter of rosellas on her mother’s veranda’ in Australia. Vera’s conflicted emotions reach a climax of sorts at a clandestine New Year’s Eve party where, intoxicated by high-spirited rebellion and liquor smuggled from Sweden, she dances: 

Around her were swooping, frenzied bodies: young, middle-aged, truncated, whole. They were dancing like the possessed, on the rim of a crater, without heed or care or caution, and Vera knew with a fiery certainty that there was nowhere—not Sweden, not even Australia—that she would rather be at this moment than here.