Author: Susan Swingler
Publisher: Fremantle Press
ISBN: 1921888679
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Abandoned at the age of four, Susan Swingler had no contact with her father Leonard or with her stepmother, the revered Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley, until the age of 21. In this startling part memoir, part mystery, Susan explains why she and her father were kept apart while telling the story of her quest to find him. As she painstakingly traces and documents clues to a better understanding of Leonard, she inadvertently unravels an intricate fiction created by Elizabeth Jolley to protect those she loves.
Author: Josephine Rowe
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 193678758X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
"I found myself considering those rare things only books can do, feats outside the purview of film or fine art . . . Gorgeous." —Samantha Hunt, The New York Times Book Review It is New Year’s Eve 1990, in a small town in southeast Australia. Ru’s father, Jack, one of thousands of Australians once conscripted to serve in the Vietnam War, has disappeared. This time Ru thinks he might be gone for good. As rumors spread of a huge black cat stalking the landscape beyond their door, the rest of the family is barely holding on. Ru’s sister, Lani, is throwing herself into sex, drugs, and dangerous company. Their mother, Evelyn, is escaping into memories of a more vibrant youth. And meanwhile there is Les, Jack’s inscrutable brother, who seems to move through their lives like a ghost, earning both trust and suspicion. A Loving, Faithful Animal is an incandescent portrait of one family searching for what may yet be redeemable from the ruins of war. Tender, brutal, and heart–stopping in its beauty, this novel marks the arrival in the United States of Josephine Rowe, the winner of the 2016 Elizabeth Jolley Prize and one of Australia’s most extraordinary young writers.
Author: Josephine Rowe
Publisher: Black Inc.
ISBN: 1743821107
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
A masterful collection of horizons and departures, heartbreak and seduction, from an internationally acclaimed Australian author. These superbly crafted stories follow the fates of characters who, by choice or by force, are travelling beyond the boundaries of their known worlds. We meet them navigating reluctant partings and uncertain returns or biding the disquieting calm that often precedes decisive action. An agoraphobic French émigré watches terrorist videos compulsively as she minds a dog named Chavez. A young couple weather the interiority of a Montreal winter, more attuned to the illicit goings-on of their neighbours than to their own hazy, unfolding futures. A Western Australian family cross from mainland to island, from disaster towards a faltering redemption. Other stories play out in locations just beyond the brink of familiarity: flooded townships and distant lakes, sunlit woodlands or paths bright with ice, places of unpredictable access and spaces scrubbed from maps. From the Catskills to the Snowy Mountains, the abandoned island outports of Newfoundland to the sprawl of an Australian metropolis, this scintillating collection from one of Australia’s most gifted writers shows us how the places we inhabit shape us in ways both remote and intimate. ‘A nuanced, lyrical and masterful collection from one of Australia's short-fiction greats, Here Until August will leave you breathless.’—Maxine Beneba Clarke ‘Here Until August tracks the shimmer of precarious moments and transient moods with devastating precision. In their steady excavation of intimacy, these spacious stories bring Alice Munro to mind. I underlined sentence after sentence as I read: for their beauty, their clarity and their wisdom. Josephine Rowe is a breathtakingly good writer, and this is a marvellous book.’ —Michelle de Kretser 'Here Until August is a superb collection, pared back, astute, yet brimming with life and love and expectation ... resonates with the unflinching acuity of the great Alice Munro.' —The Saturday Paper ‘Gives you the sense that its author has seen a thing or two ... But even as a narrator may be stuck in the maelstrom of the past, Rowe manages to drive home the point that the world is not a cruel place, if you only try to engage with it.’ —The New York Times
Author: Sigrid Nunez
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429944978
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 398
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Book Description
The paths of two women from different walks of life intersect amid counterculture of the 1960s in this haunting and provocative novel from the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend Named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Christian Science Monitor Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind introduces two women who meet as freshmen on the Columbia campus in 1968. Georgette George does not know what to make of her brilliant, idealistic roommate, Ann Drayton, and her obsessive disdain for the ruling class into which she was born. She is mortified by Ann's romanticization of the underprivileged class, which Georgette herself is hoping college will enable her to escape. After the violent fight that ends their friendship, Georgette wants only to forget Ann and to turn her attention to the troubled runaway kid sister who has reappeared after years on the road. Then, in 1976, Ann is convicted of murder. At first, Ann's fate appears to be the inevitable outcome of her belief in the moral imperative to "make justice" in a world where "there are no innocent white people." But, searching for answers to the riddle of this friend of her youth, Georgette finds more complicated and mysterious forces at work. The novel's narrator Georgette illuminates the terrifying life of this difficult, doomed woman, and in the process discovers how much their early encounter has determined her own path, and why, decades later, as she tells us, "I have never stopped thinking about her."
Author: Elizabeth Jolley
Publisher: Persea Books
ISBN: 9780892554058
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Alma Porch, novelist and aspiring dramatist, is hired to teach a course in Trinity College's "Better Body Through the Arts" summer program for overweight adults. On the rundown campus in the remote Australian outback, Alma is surrounded by starving matrons, orgies of sex and gluttony, and an eccentric group of staff and students who are eager to open themselves to the transforming possibilities of her screenplay, "Foxybaby." As the students develop their roles and film this story of a father trying to rescue his runaway daughter and her baby from discos and drugs, the play becomes a kind of therapy and begins to unite and console the lonely hearts of this unlikely group in surprising ways.In this wise and frequently uproarious book, Elizabeth Jolley is at her provocative best.
Author: Tracy Farr
Publisher: Fremantle Press
ISBN: 1922089478
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
Recounting the remarkable life of Dame Lena Gaunt—music’s most modern musician as the first theremin player of the 20th century—this novel about an octogenarian and former junkie is as geographically diverse as it is culturally and musically rich. An offer to play her unusual instrument, where sounds are produced not through touch but instead through hand movements in the air, leads Lena to revisit her life—from her discovery of music to falling in love and from Southeast Asia to Australia and Europe. Vignettes of growing up, the glittering years on the world stage, melancholy, war-time periods, and growing old all compose the story of a woman whose life is made and torn apart by those she gives her heart to.
Author: Geordie Williamson
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 1921961236
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Alarmed by the increasingly marginal status of Australian literature in the academy, Williamson has set out to reintroduce us to those key writers whose works we may have forgotten or missed altogether. His focus is on fiction that gives pleasure, and he is ardent in defence of books that for whatever reason sit uneasily in the present moment.
Author: Helen Garner
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 1925774910
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
The private diaries of one of Australia's greatest living writers, the much loved, fearless and fierce Helen Garner.
Author: Elizabeth Jolley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780702254864
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
In this potent tale of love and loneliness, Elizabeth Jolley has woven two parallel stories into a dazzlingly original novel. Arabella Thorne is a brilliant, witty and accomplished woman. The exotic tale of this flamboyant eccentric and her European travels - with jealous secretary and shy schoolgirl protégée - is the inheritance that transforms the uneventful suburban life of Miss Peabody.
Author: Elizabeth Jolley
Publisher: Persea Books
ISBN: 9780892554010
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 568
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Book Description
Set in 1940s wartime England, the trilogy follows young Vera, who leaves her cultivated Midlands home to become a nurse in a military hospital and is catapulted into adulthood through unorthodox love entanglements with both men and women, two illegitimate children, and finally emigration to Australia, where, from her new vantage point-now a doctor and writer-she looks back on her life's journey. Combining the beauty of Virginia Woolf with the spare, heartbreaking insightfulness of Jean Rhys, the trilogy is both a literary tour de force and an accessible, universal portrait of a woman in search of sustaining love.
