'I saw my mother for a long time after she died. I would see her out windows, or in the corner of my eye. Always in the periphery, always a dim blur, but unmistakably my mother, the herness skating through every line and flicker.
'Charlotte ('Lot') and Ellen ('Nelly') are sisters who were once so close a Venn diagram of the two would have formed a circle. But a great deal has changed since their mother's death, years before. Clever, beautiful, gentle Lot has been unfailingly dutiful - basically a disaster of an older sister for much younger Nelly, still haunted by their mother in her early thirties.
'When the pair meet at a silent retreat in a strange old house in the Tasmanian countryside, the spectres of memory are unleashed.
'Heartsease is a sad, sly and darkly comic story about the weight of grief and the ways in which family cleave to us, for better and for worse. It's an account of love and ghosts so sharp it will leave you with paper cuts.' (Publication summary)
'In the opening pages of Kate Kruimink’s new novel, Heartsease, the narrator, Nelly Llewellyn, describes a weekend afternoon at Salamanca, in Hobart/nipaluna. “There is brine, coffee, red wine, whiskey, bread, soup, the yellow of old books, and an earthy array of sensible jumpers. Only the merest traces of attempted genocide in the air, the soil.” It’s a sketch that captures not just the sense of linguistic delight and playfulness that makes the book such a thoroughgoing pleasure but also the darkness and sense of loss that moves beneath them.' (Introduction)
'Set in an old house in the Tasmanian countryside, nothing is quite as expected in this second novel from Vogel-winner Kate Kruimink.' (Introduction)
'Set in an old house in the Tasmanian countryside, nothing is quite as expected in this second novel from Vogel-winner Kate Kruimink.' (Introduction)
'In the opening pages of Kate Kruimink’s new novel, Heartsease, the narrator, Nelly Llewellyn, describes a weekend afternoon at Salamanca, in Hobart/nipaluna. “There is brine, coffee, red wine, whiskey, bread, soup, the yellow of old books, and an earthy array of sensible jumpers. Only the merest traces of attempted genocide in the air, the soil.” It’s a sketch that captures not just the sense of linguistic delight and playfulness that makes the book such a thoroughgoing pleasure but also the darkness and sense of loss that moves beneath them.' (Introduction)
