'A dangerous man moves in with a mother and her two adolescent children. The man runs an unlicensed mechanic’s workshop at the back of their property. The girl resists the man with silence, and finally with sabotage. She fights him at the place where she believes his heart lives—in the engine of the car.
'Set at the close of the 1970s and traversing thousands of kilometres of inland roads, Exploded View is a revelatory interrogation of Australian girlhood.
'Must a girl always be a part—how can she become a whole?' (Publication summary)
'Stories of trauma — personal, communal and national — dominate the Miles Franklin Award, Australia's most prestigious literary prize, in its 63rd year.'
'The strange and dangerous psychological space Tiffany inhabits focuses on small details that make up the whole.'
'Carrie Tiffany’s new novel Exploded View is the first featured book in Guardian Australia’s new highlights series, The Unmissables. In this exclusive essay, Tiffany meditates on her childhood and the highways and dirt tracks she drove as an adult trying to reconcile her youth with the writer she had become.' (Introduction)
'There’s a point in Carrie Tiffany’s new novel, Exploded View, where the teenage narrator sits in a parked car with her mother and brother, parked in front of their ‘mission brown’ suburban house, all three people unmoving, waiting, tense. It’s a moment of stillness, but also, briefly, of possibility – ‘She could always change her mind,’ the narrator says, ‘Maybe there is someplace else for us to go?’' (Introduction)
'In Exploded View, Carrie Tiffany sheds the bucolic settings of her two previous novels for Australian suburbia. Her narrator is an unnamed teenager who lives with her mother and brother in their new home with their mum’s new partner, “father man”.' (Introduction)
'The strange and dangerous psychological space Tiffany inhabits focuses on small details that make up the whole.'
'The term ‘exploded view’ refers to an image in a technical manual that shows all the individual parts of a machine, separates them out, but arranges them on the page so that you can see how they fit together. As the title of Carrie Tiffany’s new novel, it can be interpreted as a definitive metaphor and perhaps, in a somewhat looser sense, an analogy for her evocative technique. Various things happen over the course of Exploded View, some of them dramatic, but the novel has little in the way of a conventional plot. Its characters exist in relation to one another, but they barely interact. There is almost no dialogue. It is the kind of novel in which the psychological and emotional unease is displaced or buried beneath the matter-of-fact narration.' (Introduction)
'Carrie Tiffany’s new novel Exploded View is the first featured book in Guardian Australia’s new highlights series, The Unmissables. In this exclusive essay, Tiffany meditates on her childhood and the highways and dirt tracks she drove as an adult trying to reconcile her youth with the writer she had become.' (Introduction)
'Stories of trauma — personal, communal and national — dominate the Miles Franklin Award, Australia's most prestigious literary prize, in its 63rd year.'
