Cirrus@Austlit

'Ever since reading Randolph Stow's Tourmaline nearly five years ago, it has held a strange power over me. It might not have been the most highly regarded or publicly well received of Stow's novels within his lifetime, but within the writing community there appears to be quiet and growing recognition that it might be his most resistantly alluring. Bernadette Brennan's 2004 essay 'Words of Water', which describes Tourmaline as deeply poetic' yet 'silent' (144), gestured towards this renewal of interest '  in the novel over the last two decades. A mentor once suggested to me that the prose-poem of a first chapter might be the best opening to an Australian novel ever, and whenever I meet someone who has read Tourmaline, it always feels like something of a shared secret.'

 (Introduction)