Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: High Places, The
Author: MCFARLANE FIONA
Format: PAPERBACK
Publication date: 01/02/2016
Imprint: HAMISH HAMILTON
Price: $33.00
Publishing status: Active
Fourteen brilliantly inventive stories from Fiona McFarlane, Miles Franklin-shortlisted author of The Night Guest
These wide-ranging stories resonate in the way of only the finest writing and the most pleasurable reading. There are storylines that seem straightforward on the surface but have a dozen things circling underneath, others that sit just off-centre with a particular lens trained on human behaviour. All of them zoom in on life’s unknowable points, strange moments around which fortune turns; all make superb use of ambiguity and foible. A man living temporarily in a hotel becomes a sudden stranger to himself. A young girl in rural Queensland feels her world tilt when American soldiers parachute in during World War II. A lottery win sees a man receive a poignant lesson in the nature of luck. The father of a boy who narrowly escapes tragedy cannot see things in quite the same way afterwards . . .
Fiona McFarlane can sculpt a character with one telling observation, turn a story with a single line. Her proclivity for seeing the bizarre in the ordinary, her sense of mystery and wit, and her deftness with detail make her that prized thing – a seriously good writer who is also effortlessly readable. And her ability to tell an unlikely storyline in a way that convinces utterly makes her a true original. The High Places is richly nuanced writing full of surprises.
ISBN: 9781926428567
Pages: 288