'Frances, a young New Zealand woman, is laid to rest in an unmarked grave in Jamaica in 1894. Her enigmatic husband, the Rev. William Hammond, cannot be found. Reports are later sent to her brothers alleging fraud and, perhaps, murder.
Hammond has long been a restless and elusive traveller, and the credentials of someone who moves so often from place to place are not easy to verify.
When Frances joins him the allure of exotic journeys is soon overshadowed by a sense of foreboding. Does he really want her or is she in the way?
The End of Longing is a thrilling, bitter-beautiful novel which skilfully explores troubled identity and complex motives.' (From the publisher's website.)
'A national survey of senior secondary English curriculum content has confirmed that contemporary literature predominates among set texts, being seen as an ‘essential’ category for study because of its ‘relevance’ in helping students ‘understand the world in which they live.’ Perhaps uncontentious – depending on the meaning of that phrase ‘contemporary literature’: is it what’s written in our own time, or also set in our own time? Too much of the latter could mean that
students’ reading confines them narrowly to the here and now. Part of our responsibility as educators is to help our students go beyond the familiar, and to reframe their experience of the world in which they live by introducing them to worlds elsewhere. Their understanding needs to move across time as well as across different places. In considering what these principles imply in practice for the selection and interpretation of texts, this article combines the perspectives of teacher, curriculum designer and
fiction writer.' (Author's abstract)
'A national survey of senior secondary English curriculum content has confirmed that contemporary literature predominates among set texts, being seen as an ‘essential’ category for study because of its ‘relevance’ in helping students ‘understand the world in which they live.’ Perhaps uncontentious – depending on the meaning of that phrase ‘contemporary literature’: is it what’s written in our own time, or also set in our own time? Too much of the latter could mean that
students’ reading confines them narrowly to the here and now. Part of our responsibility as educators is to help our students go beyond the familiar, and to reframe their experience of the world in which they live by introducing them to worlds elsewhere. Their understanding needs to move across time as well as across different places. In considering what these principles imply in practice for the selection and interpretation of texts, this article combines the perspectives of teacher, curriculum designer and
fiction writer.' (Author's abstract)
