Book review — The Secret Year of Zara Holt, by Kimberley Freeman

Title: The Secret Year of Zara Holt

Author: Kimberley Freeman

Publisher: Hachette, 2025; RRP: $32.99

Reviewed by: Jason Nahrung

I haven’t kept up with Kimberley Freeman’s work since her debut, Duet – this is her eighth, falling into the publishing category of ‘women’s fiction’. Which is to say, stories about women making their own way in the world with a good dose of relationship struggle to boot. While Duet was a ripper read, my tastes swing more towards speculative and climate fiction, the former being the oeuvre of Freeman’s alter ego, Kim Wilkins. Wilkins, a powerhouse in the Australian writing scene, is also an accomplished academic based in Brisbane, and one can imagine the fun she had researching the subject matter for Zara Holt (drawing on Zara’s memoir as a key source). There must have been some interesting choices about what to keep, what to leave, what to imagine, what to leave unsaid, given that Dame Zara Bate DBE died in 1989 but has family still, on top of the rich life she led.

Which is the reason this book caught my attention: something of a departure from previous outings, in being an imagined story of real people. Zara Dickins’ second husband, Harold Holt, is perhaps best known for embracing ‘all the way with LBJ’ – which surfaces here – and his death by drowning just shy of two years into his prime ministership, his body never recovered, the enduring mystery of which infuses this novel and inspires its title. But what about Zara?

A quick read of a couple of biographies reveals an accomplished businesswoman and creative talent, an exemplary partner to a government minister and prime minister, and wife who suffered through the serial cheating of her renowned husband.

Freeman centres her fictionalised tale on the Harry-Zara axis, an enduring if turbulent love affair that stretched from first meeting as teenagers to tragic end, with all the travails between. The history is told primarily in the first person, a retrospective with flaws and all. For instance, the attraction with Harry endures through Zara’s first marriage, to English soldier James Fell, with Zara adapting to the role of a colonial wife in India. Then comes the aftermath of her marriage’s explosive end, leaving her essentially a single mother raising three sons.

Learn more about the life of Zara Holt

@ Nightlight, on the ABC

But The Secret Year… is more than a love story. Unfolding between 1927 and 1968, the novel has room to explore the challenges faced by Zara and her best friend, Betty, as they establish their own fashion business as single women (and resurrecting it later), how they navigate the social mores of the times, and how Zara steps out of Harry’s shadow. A highlight is a speech given at a ladies’ charity function in which, after providing encouragement for women to make their own way, she invites the attendees to come chat, but ‘please don’t call me Mrs Holt. I’m Zara.’

Adding dimension to the star pair’s fire-and-ice relationship is a well-drawn supporting cast of family and friends, and the period settings – life in Melbourne, Canberra and India, the various overseas and interstate locations – which offer sufficient details to not only give a feeling for time and place but add to the characters’ stories. Celebrity moments both dull and exhilarating, jet lag, inspiring local fashions, all frame the environment in which the Holts were moving.

As the tragedy of Cheviot Beach looms closer, Freeman picks up the pace, skipping across highlight events. Meeting US President Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Birdie; attending the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II; hosting the Johnsons amid the tumult of the Vietnam War … touchstones revealing the Holts’ relationship, Zara’s handling of her husband’s career and infidelities, and the impact on her own life and career.

And then, there’s Harry’s disappearance while swimming, one of his flames a witness. The aftermath provides a poignant imagining of Zara’s response, one we won’t reveal here, sufficient to say it captures the heart of the story beautifully.

The strength of The Secret Year… is the ring of honesty in its depictions of these lives writ large yet grounded in very human challenges, a slice of history most assuredly all dressed up with somewhere to go.

>> Jason Nahrung is a Ballarat-based writer and editor. www.jasonnahrung.com

Review copy provided by the publisher