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Madeleine Byrne

Madeleine Byrne is a journalist and writer currently residing in Paris. 

Madeleine Byrne reviews 'The Black Butterfly' by Kathleen Stewart

November 2001, no. 236 01 November 2001
When you think about it, public swimming pools are strange places. Semi-naked bodies saunter about, while others battle against gravity in speed-designated lanes. Perhaps it is no surprise that these sites of aqua profonda dominate recent fiction. Whether the pools are in Paris or Fitzroy, they act as metaphors for the human condition. In Kathleen Stewart’s new novel, The Black Butterfly, a bur ... (read more)

Madeleine Byrne reviews 'Voluntary Exiles: From Tamatave to Peking' by Joan Rowlands

April 2001, no. 229 01 April 2001
After a three-month journey to Madagascar by steam-ship, the first thing to greet the newly married missionaries Thomas and Elizabeth Rowlands were fields of wet sugar cane. Brightly painted wooden cottages surrounded the harbour; former slaves and Arab, Indian, and Chinese traders filled the streets. ‘Rain fell heavily, but covers of rofia cloth, which swelled and thickened in the wet kept the ... (read more)

Madeleine Byrne reviews 'How the Light Gets In' by M.J. Hyland and 'Tristessa and Lucido' by Miriam Zolin

September 2003, no. 254 03 June 2020
One of Frank Moorhouse’s stories in his collection The Americans, Baby (1972) vividly describes two people’s tentative steps across a divide. It is a sexual overture, but also one that defies the constraints of national stereotypes. Carl, an Australian university student, bristles at an American man’s advances. Uneasy about his new sexual identity, he is unable to shake the sense that he is ... (read more)