Affirm Press have just launched A Break in the Chain, the first novel by academic and author Tangea Tansley. Tansley was born in Zimbabwe into a family that boasted of its ancestral family links to Prussia and Australia. Her father’s stories included tales about a Jewish side of the family that had been jewellers, and about a rift between a father and a son over a beautiful woman that caused the son to abandon his faith as well as his adopted country. Tansley moved to Western Australia and started a career as a researcher of comparative literature as well as a writer of non-fiction. When she began looking deeper into her family story, she discovered that the family of which her father had spoken was the famous Melbourne jeweller Kozminksy, which dates back to the gold rush. What began as historical research is now a novel. Here’s a blog post by the author on the background to the novel.