The Household Guide to Dying - Fear Not the Reaper
- Nick Terrell
The Household Guide to Dying. Debra Adelaide.
Picador. 386 pp. RRP Au$22.99
The Household Guide to Dying follows Delia Bennett as she attempts to distract and fulfil herself in the final phases of terminal cancer. Delia is a successful author of household guidebooks and she is determined to make her death into something useful by drawing on her own experiences as the basis for a guide to dying. Read more
A Wellington Nocturne - ‘As the Earth Turns Silver’ by Alison Wong
- Nick Terrell
As The Earth Turns Silver. Alison Wong
Picador Australia. $Au 32.99.
Alison Wong’s first novel reconstructs the cultural climate of Wellington as it was when her grandparents first arrived from China in the 1890s. As The Earth Turns Silver is a love story and a tragedy, but beyond that it is an exploration and a celebration of Chinese settlement in New Zealand, charged with an element of displaced self-definition. National growing pains have been fused with a pivotal chapter in Wong’s family history. Read more
By the Graveyard Gate
A middle-aged woman visiting a family plot alerted groundsmen to a suitcase that had been forgotten or abandoned outside the western gate of the Willow Park cemetery. A porter who went to move the case was surprised by its weight. He called for a supervisor to assist and observe as he opened the case. A body! Stuffed inside and partially wrapped in a white sheet liberally doused in perfume. Read more
Assisted Vision - HEAT 19 / Griffith Review 24
HEAT 19 – Trappers Way. Giramondo. $Au 24.95
Griffith Review 24 – Participation Society. ABC Books. $Au 19.95
Having locked myself in a room with the most recent editions of two prominent quarterlies - Griffith Review and HEAT – I allowed myself to succumb slowly to the truth. In a trance-like state of assisted vision, I absorbed HEAT’s elegiac rhythms, while the Griffith Review wound me up with news from nowhere. Read more