Fiction
My first novel, Geography was published in 2004. The film rights have been sold and hopefully we will see a movie made by Big & Little Films in the next few years. My second novel, Bird, is coming out with Text in July 2008. It is the story of Anna, a child who survives the Siege of Leningrad in WW2 then escapes to America. Anna lives as a singer and actress in Los Angeles and Paris in the Fifites before going to India in the Sixties. There she meets two Tibetan lamas in Darjeeling she is finally able to reclaim her life from the horrors that have haunted her. But in choosing to live as a Buddhist nun, she abandons her daughter, Az. I have also begun to research third novel, This Devastating Fever which is based on several years of the life of Leonard Woolf (1904-1915). They were the years he was in Ceylon and, on his return, began his courtship with, and marriage to, Virginia Stephens. An extract from it will be included in Best Australian Stories 2007, edited by Robert Drewe.
Read Excerpts of my writing
- Extract from 'This Devastating Fever'
- Virginia leant forward as a child might. She sipped. Her mouth was full of the thick stuff. She gagged then swallowed. Her mouth opened again. Her husband put his spoon to it. The operation became mechanical. It continued, this war...
- Extract from 'Bird'
- The day Anna began her haunting of me was a Thursday. August 14, 2003. Eleanor rang first thing, 'Just to say hello. Is it hot in New York today?' And yes, it was. The temperature was heading for the mid-Nineties....
- Extract from 'Geography'
- I am trapped in a bad play, a bad romance novel, the lines are not convincing even to me, who wants desperately to be convinced. I drop Michael off where he is staying and he gets out of the car. He hesitates, stands by the car, drums his fingers on the roof, then leans back in and kisses me all over my face, on the mouth. I think he will leave it at that but he doesn't, begins to bite my lips hard, my neck.