Saturday, 30 April 2011
The Time It Rained Fish (Esperance Press, 1999)
The first Ellen is born near Skibbereen in Ireland during the time of the Great Hunger. The second Ellen is born in the arid suburbs of Sydney, Australia. Both women fulfil a destiny shaped by their family curse, the Bauravilla curse, and their failure to find what they are seeking- each other.
The Time It Rained Fish is the story of two soul-sisters separeted by over a century of time and half the world. But linking them are three generations of Irish-Australian women. The culmination occurs in Tasmania where the landscape is alien to both and yet permits the impossible- their meeting.
The World as a Clockface (Penguin Books Australia, 2001)
'People are wrong about the South Pole being at the bottom of the world,' said Holmann Schuyler. 'If I drew you a map, it would look like the face of this clock, with the South Pole at the centre...'
The people of Whalers Gate, on the Antipodean island of Esmania, claim that nothing has been the same since the turn of the century. They say that the wing of an Archangel has been seen over the town, and young Sister Clemence has been beset by visions. It's been a hard winter, the women have gone sun-crazy, and the watercolour teacher, Lavinia Chomsky, has run off to sea with Captain Schuyler. Borne on a strange odyssey through mythical lands, they discover a world where time and place are distorted, so that what has been marginalised becomes central, what was once on the bottom now sits on the top.
The World as a Clockface is a captivating and poetic telling of a magical, wide-ranging story, from an exciting new voice in Australian fiction.
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