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An illustrious family. A beautiful home. A shipwrecked young woman left on its doorstep. Don t think they re going to save her … About this event
Kavita Bedford joins Nikki Gemmell to discuss her new book The Ripping Tree, an intense, sharp tale of survival written in Gemmell’s signature lyrical prose, but with audacious overtones. This is a thrilling examination of Australia’s dark colonial history. Conceptualised by Gemmell on her return to Australia after 15 years living in the UK, this novel has taken her nine years to craft. It is her love letter to Australia – and encapsulates the wonder of seeing the country with fresh eyes.
Specifically, she, like me, is freelance by choice: not a laid-off journalist or a parent juggling writing with domestic duty, but a childless millennial opting in, for a mix of reasons, to the gig economy. Her assignments are not the novel’s background, nor does her choice to write lead to grand arguments about
writing. Instead, Bedford puts her narrator’s mundane freelance problems When will she get paid? Is her editor exploiting her? Should she accept a dicey assignment? at the novel’s core.
Bedford is refreshingly committed to portraying writing not as a calling or craft but as work. She shows freelance writing as a form of what the journalist Sarah Jaffe, in her recent book
From Spain to Sydney to Small-Town New Mexico, 3 Debuts Anchored by a Strong Sense of Place
By Alexandra Chang
131 pp. And Other Stories. Paper, $15.95.
At the opening of Baltasar’s novel, the unnamed narrator is at the edge of a high building, contemplating suicide. She remarks lightheartedly on her surroundings (“The air is so pure! But not too humid, which is nice”), and considers her body: the unwieldy parts “like oversized furniture,” and whether her eyes will be open in her fall. She doesn’t, however, take the leap. Instead, this unconventional and refreshing novel takes us through a series of vignettes that skip around this woman’s 40-some-year life, as she inhabits the metaphorical edge, where there is “room to live, vertical as ever, brushing up against the void.”