Cirrus@Austlit

'Across her seven novels, Amanda Lohrey has been interested in the role that reading plays in our lives. In her work, reading is always situated: we know where her characters read, how it shapes and is shaped by their circumstances. We follow 1950s Hobart communists from their reading groups to the docks to the courtroom. In a near-future Australia, characters read to find some guidance about how to act meaningfully in the face of political crisis. A woman’s reading of Jane Eyre in a dark Leichhardt terrace scaffolds her life and decisions. Another character reads Madame Bovary on a canal boat, freezing, miserable and surrounded by rowdy teenagers, and finds herself oddly reflected. A city man moves to the bush and reads travel writing about another land stolen, fought over and decimated.' (Introduction)