They do a lot of talking in an awkward inarticulate dialect, but they don’t communicate. On top of that, the saga of this unfortunate rural family in the interwar years is replete with jarring episodes that depict a complete lack of connectedness between the characters.
The story, of two generations of the Nancarrow family, is quite shocking in places, with scenes of brutal violence, sexual assaults on children and abhorrent cruelty to animals. I have to admit that I was making rather heavy weather of her new novel Foal’s Bread until I stumbled across an old article by Murray Waldren that goes some way to explaining aspects of the characterisation that puzzled me*. Her most recent work was a collection entitled A Map of the Gardens (2002), for which she won the Steele Rudd Australian Short Story Award. Her first novel, The Mint Lawn, won the Vogel in 1991, and The Grass Sister (1995) won a regional Commonwealth Prize for Best Book. Gillian Mears is an award-winning Australian author of short stories and novels.
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