Lily Brett’s Things Could Be Worse is an autobiography, one that explores her own background as the daughter of Holocaust survivors.

Brett writes a series of linked stories about a post-war Melbourne household trying to live an ordinary suburban life under the weight of the unspoken. The book has a lilt that trauma often speaks, that misaligned, a bit sideways prose that's full of absurdities and terrors. But funny, always a bit funny. 

David Rankin’s illustrations run alongside the text; beautifully. Together, they sketch the fragments of migration, memory, and survival without sentimentality.

1990 Meanjin / Melbourne University Press — hardcover first edition, dust jacket intact, original illustrations by David Rankin, in great condition.