Climate Ready Australia 2030 lifts off miragenews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from miragenews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
What? Who? I was holding a book and asking myself these questions. What did I just read? Who wrote this… this parcel of nerves, energy, perception, poetry, philosophy tied with some witty barbed wire? The page was lit. It was also familiar: this was the coup de foudre that lovers feel. Reader, that blow isn’t restricted to people. I had recently felt it with the Italian Elena Ferrante and, more recently still, the French Annie Ernaux. And here it is again with the Australian Beth Spencer.
Can an 11 year old fall in love? Yes. It’s a normal, sunny, delightful thing to do. Normal, sunny, delightful will be how they look back on it, with laughter and pleasure across their lives. Roland, the narrator of Ian McEwan’s Lessons (Penguin) is 11 and taking private lessons from a 23-year-old piano teacher at his boarding school. “Round-faced, erect, perfumed, strict,” she sits close to him on the narrow stool. “Her perfume overwhelmed his senses and deafened him.” Her arm is “firm and warm” against his shoulder. Roland’s mother is far away in Tripoli.