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'If you marry into glass you enter a closed world' ...So Pierre
Labbe warned his daughter in 1747. But tall, blonde Magdaleine was
not daunted. To her the tight traditions of the glass- blowers made
a world she could rule over -- and rule she did. But for her
children that world would be different. This is Daphne du Maurier's
warm, human saga of a family of craftsmen in eighteenth-century
France -- with the violence and terror of the Revolution as a
clamouring background against which their loves and their hopes are
played out.
*** WINNER OF THE 2023 RATHBONES FOLIO FICTION PRIZE*** ONE OF
SLATE'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2022 'Every page of her story feels
charged, like an open circuit waiting for its switch; a lurking
wallop. It's magnificent, peerless writing' Guardian 'When my
family emigrated it felt as if we'd been stood on our heads.'
Michelle de Kretser's electrifying take on scary monsters turns the
novel upside down - just as migration has upended her characters'
lives. Lyle works for a sinister government department in
near-future Australia. An Asian migrant, he fears repatriation and
embraces 'Australian values'. He's also preoccupied by his
ambitious wife, his wayward children and his strong-minded elderly
mother. Islam has been banned in the country, the air is smoky from
a Permanent Fire Zone, and one pandemic has already run its course.
Lili's family migrated to Australia from Asia when she was a
teenager. Now, in the 1980s, she's teaching in the south of France.
She makes friends, observes the treatment handed out to North
African immigrants and is creeped out by her downstairs neighbour.
All the while, Lili is striving to be A Bold, Intelligent Woman
like Simone de Beauvoir. Three scary monsters - racism, misogyny
and ageism - roam through this mesmerising novel. Its reversible
format enacts the disorientation that migrants experience when
changing countries changes the story of their lives. With this
suspenseful, funny and profound book, Michelle de Kretser has made
something thrilling and new. 'Which comes first, the future or the
past?'
Picking up her pace, Frances saw a woman in the leaf-hung depths of
the garden. She wore a long pink dress and a wide hat, and her skin
was a creamy white. There came upon Frances a sensation that
sometimes overtook her when she was looking at a painting: space
was foreshortened, time stood still. When Frances met Charlie at a
party in Melbourne he was married with a young son. Now she and
Charlie live in Sydney with her rescue dog Rod and an unshakeable
sense that they have tipped the world on its axis. They are still
getting their bearings - of each other and of their adopted city.
Everything is alien, unfamiliar, exotic: haunting, even. Worlds of
meaning spin out of perfectly chosen words in this rare, beguiling
and brilliant ghost story by Miles Franklin Literary Award-winning
writer Michelle de Kretser.
Winner of the Miles Franklin Award, 2018 Longlisted for the
International Dublin Literary Award, 2018 New Statesman's best
books of the year, 2018 Michelle de Kretser's fifth novel is both a
delicious satire on the way we live now and a deeply moving
examination of the true nature of friendship. Pippa is a writer who
longs for success. Celeste tries to convince herself that her
feelings for her married lover are reciprocated. Ash makes
strategic use of his childhood in Sri Lanka but blots out the
memory of a tragedy from that time. Driven by riveting stories and
unforgettable characters, here is a dazzling meditation on
intimacy, loneliness and our flawed perception of other people.
Profoundly moving as well as bitingly funny, The Life to Come
reveals how the shadows cast by both the past and the future can
transform, distort and undo the present. Travelling from Sydney to
Paris and Sri Lanka, this mesmerising novel feels at once firmly
classic and exhilaratingly contemporary.
Laura travels the world before returning to Sydney, where she works
for a publisher of travel guides. Ravi dreams of being a tourist
until he is driven from Sri Lanka by devastating events. An
enthralling array of people, places and stories surround these
superbly drawn characters - from Theo, whose life plays out in the
long shadow of the past, to Hana, an Ethiopian woman determined to
reinvent herself. Michelle de Kretser illuminates travel, work and
modern dreams in this brilliant evocation of the way we live now.
Questions of Travel is infused with wit, imagination, uncanny
common sense and a deep understanding of what makes us tick.
Winner of the Miles Franklin Award, 2018 Longlisted for the
International Dublin Literary Award, 2018 New Statesman's best
books of the year, 2018 Michelle de Kretser's fifth novel is both a
delicious satire on the way we live now and a deeply moving
examination of the true nature of friendship. Pippa is a writer who
longs for success. Celeste tries to convince herself that her
feelings for her married lover are reciprocated. Ash makes
strategic use of his childhood in Sri Lanka but blots out the
memory of a tragedy from that time. Driven by riveting stories and
unforgettable characters, here is a dazzling meditation on
intimacy, loneliness and our flawed perception of other people.
Profoundly moving as well as bitingly funny, The Life to Come
reveals how the shadows cast by both the past and the future can
transform, distort and undo the present. Travelling from Sydney to
Paris and Sri Lanka, this mesmerising novel feels at once firmly
classic and exhilaratingly contemporary.
Tom Loxley, an Indian-Australian professor, is less concerned with
finishing his book on Henry James than with finding his dog, who is
lost in the Australian bush.
Joining his daily hunt is Nelly Zhang, an artist whose husband
disappeared mysteriously years before Tom met her. Although Nelly
helps him search for his beloved pet, Tom isn't sure if he should
trust this new friend.
Tom has preoccupations other than his book and Nelly and his
missing dog, mainly concerning his mother, who is suffering from
the various indignities of old age. He is constantly drawn from the
cerebral to the primitive--by his mother's infirmities, as well as
by Nelly's attractions. THE LOST DOG makes brilliant use of the
conventions of suspense and atmosphere while leading us to see anew
the ever-present conflicts between our bodies and our minds, the
present and the past, the primal and the civilized.
A flamboyant beauty who once partied with the Prince of Wales and
who now, in her seventh decade, has "gone native" in a Ceylonese
jungle. A proud, Oxford-educated lawyer who unwittingly seals his
own professional fate when he dares to solve the sensational
Hamilton murder case that has rocked the upper echelons of local
society. A young woman who retreats from her family and the world
after her infant brother is found suffocated in his crib. These are
among the linked lives compellingly portrayed in a novel everywhere
hailed for its dazzling grace and savage wit - a spellbinding tale
of family and duty, of legacy and identity, a novel that
brilliantly probes the ultimate mystery of what makes us who we
are.
It is the 14th of July, and the world is about to change...Set at the start of the French Revolution, the story centres on a young woman, from a down-at-heel aristocratic family, caught up in the bloodthirstyearly years of the Terror, as events in Paris are duplicated in a small town in the South-West of France. But her private passion is hersearch to create, by grafting, cross-pollination and experiment, an exotic repeat-flowering crimson rose such as had never been grown before then in Europe. Meanwhile, an American balloonist lands in the fields nearby, and falls in love with her sister; and the young local working-class doctor is torn between ethics, reason, revolutionary zeal and unrequited love. A beautiful, elliptical novel about history,love, revolution, the march of science and progress, all beautifully mirrored in the rose - growing metaphor and the rose-grower's passion.
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