'A compelling novel of three women and their dark secrets from the award-winning author of The Yellow House.
'Three women. Three secrets. One weekend.
'Alison is an actress who no longer acts, Patrick a musician past his prime. The eccentric couple live an isolated, debauched existence in an old manor house in Scotland, a few miles outside their village. That is, until Patrick's teenage daughter, Neve, flees Australia to spend a year abroad with her doting, if unreliable, father, and the stepmother she barely knows.
'On the weekend of Neve's eighteenth birthday, her father insists on a special feast to mark her coming of age. Despite Neve's objections, her mother Shannon arrives in Scotland to join the celebrations. What none of them know is that Shannon has arrived with a hidden agenda that has the potential to shatter the delicate façade of the loving, if dysfunctional, family.
'Feast is the story of three women connected beyond blood, and what happens when their darkest secrets are hauled into the light.' (Publication summary)
'An unsettling, creepy story about dysfunctional families and slowly unravelling secrets.'
'For more than a decade now, the Stella Prize, an award celebrating Australian women’s writing, has been changing Australia’s literary landscape. It has taken a monkey wrench to the way literary esteem is bestowed in this country. Its annual whack has shifted the calibration of what kinds of books are valued.' (Introduction)
'British sculptor Barbara Hepworth wrote that ‘there is no landscape without the human figure’. Similarly, there is no human without the landscape in which they are situated, human and landscape mutually shaping, resisting and defining the other.
'Three new Australian novels probe this interdependence, each of them concerned with the historical forces that have silenced and confined women, and each of them testing the capacity of their female characters to assert their stories, their selfhood, in the face of a hostile and unfamiliar landscape. Critically, what differentiates the novels is the degree to which their authors discover within these environments a similitude with their characters’ emotional struggle, the landscape not merely adorning the narrative but becoming essential to it.'(Introduction)
'British sculptor Barbara Hepworth wrote that ‘there is no landscape without the human figure’. Similarly, there is no human without the landscape in which they are situated, human and landscape mutually shaping, resisting and defining the other.
'Three new Australian novels probe this interdependence, each of them concerned with the historical forces that have silenced and confined women, and each of them testing the capacity of their female characters to assert their stories, their selfhood, in the face of a hostile and unfamiliar landscape. Critically, what differentiates the novels is the degree to which their authors discover within these environments a similitude with their characters’ emotional struggle, the landscape not merely adorning the narrative but becoming essential to it.'(Introduction)
'An unsettling, creepy story about dysfunctional families and slowly unravelling secrets.'
'For more than a decade now, the Stella Prize, an award celebrating Australian women’s writing, has been changing Australia’s literary landscape. It has taken a monkey wrench to the way literary esteem is bestowed in this country. Its annual whack has shifted the calibration of what kinds of books are valued.' (Introduction)
