Cirrus@Austlit

'Slowly returning to a life of her own after years of children and unquiet suburbia, Ramona contemplates still life painting and the authenticity of art, experience and self.'  (Introduction)

'He hated the word ‘retirement’, but not as much as he hated the word ‘village’, as if ageing made you a peasant or a fool. Herein lives the village idiot.

'Professor Frederick Lothian, retired engineer, world expert on concrete and connoisseur of modernist design, has quarantined himself from life by moving to a retirement village. His wife, Martha, is dead and his two adult children are lost to him in their own ways. Surrounded and obstructed by the debris of his life – objects he has collected over many years and tells himself he is keeping for his daughter – he is determined to be miserable, but is tired of his existence and of the life he has chosen.

'When a series of unfortunate incidents forces him and his neighbour, Jan, together, he begins to realise the damage done by the accumulation of a lifetime’s secrets and lies, and to comprehend his own shortcomings. Finally, Frederick Lothian has the opportunity to build something meaningful for the ones he loves.

'Humorous, poignant and galvanising by turns, Extinctions is a novel about all kinds of extinction – natural, racial, national and personal – and what we can do to prevent them.' (Publication summary)

'Lena knew that the most tenuous of threads held everything together. At home she was known as the girl who lost things. Books, pens, wallets, her mother’s jewellery - the more precious the thing, the more likely she would lose it. She rifled through the pouch in from of her in search of her notebook. In New York she had learnt to take herself seriously, to believe that her thoughts and ideas mattered. I am no longer the person that I was, she incanted. I am different now. Coming home changes nothing.

'Two women, two lives, two paths. But are they so very different? In this poignant, dark, humane and funny novel, mother and daughter take turns opening old wounds and replaying old scripts, struggling with what can and cannot be said. Cusp is a novel about how small worlds are part of big worlds. It’s also about being a girl, about loving your mother, about life and death, and about not quite being there and almost being here.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (2018 ed.).