'For Orla, living in the suburbs in 1968 on the cusp of adolescence, her father is a great shining light, whose warm and powerful presence fills her world.
'But in the aftermath of his sudden death, Orla, her mother and her sister are left in a no-man’s-land, a place where the rights and protections of the nuclear family suddenly and mysteriously no longer apply, and where the path between girl and woman must be navigated alone.' (Publication summary)
Dedication: For my father, William Orr Kirk
Epigraph:
'thinking I think of you and me.
Our empty spaces where fathers should be.'
-A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, Eimear McBride
'Bad parents often make good literature: the egotistical and controlling Sam Pollit in Christina Stead’s tour-de-force The Man Who Loved Children; the abusive father and alcoholic mother in Edward St Aubyn’s masterful trilogy Some Hope; and, in William Faulkner’s gothic novel, As I Lay Dying, the cowardly and manipulative Anse Bundren who, among his many misdeeds, forces his pregnant teenage daughter to forgo her savings for an abortion so he can buy a set of new false teeth and attract a second wife.' (Introduction)
'In Driving Into the Sun, Marcella Polain – winner of the Anne Elder Award, the Patricia Hackett Prize, and more – has done an excellent job of capturing the inner emotional landscape of a young girl growing up fatherless in Perth’s outer suburbia in the 1960s. She recreates an era of television westerns and Bakelite phones, a time when Perth residents had just learned to worry about unlocked doors and windows, and when you could buy a house and land for $14,000 – if you were a man. If you were a woman with $13,000, as the novel points out, you needed a man to stand guarantor for the rest.' (Introduction)
'In Driving Into the Sun, Marcella Polain – winner of the Anne Elder Award, the Patricia Hackett Prize, and more – has done an excellent job of capturing the inner emotional landscape of a young girl growing up fatherless in Perth’s outer suburbia in the 1960s. She recreates an era of television westerns and Bakelite phones, a time when Perth residents had just learned to worry about unlocked doors and windows, and when you could buy a house and land for $14,000 – if you were a man. If you were a woman with $13,000, as the novel points out, you needed a man to stand guarantor for the rest.' (Introduction)
'Bad parents often make good literature: the egotistical and controlling Sam Pollit in Christina Stead’s tour-de-force The Man Who Loved Children; the abusive father and alcoholic mother in Edward St Aubyn’s masterful trilogy Some Hope; and, in William Faulkner’s gothic novel, As I Lay Dying, the cowardly and manipulative Anse Bundren who, among his many misdeeds, forces his pregnant teenage daughter to forgo her savings for an abortion so he can buy a set of new false teeth and attract a second wife.' (Introduction)
