There are two sentences in Vidya Madabushi’s novel The Days Toppled Over that I find especially worthy of our time: “Hard work was the price they were willing to pay. Exploitation was the real price exacted from them.”
At a time in Australia when many of us feel smothered by rising interest rates, inflation and corporate greed, this rings with a depressingly contemporary truth – and yet Madabushi’s second novel is not the average Australian’s story. Instead it’s a sometimes confronting look at the lives of international students who arrive in Australia hoping for brighter futures but who are quickly subsumed into the daily grind without any stability or assurance that they’ll ever be able to call this country home.
