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ABR Arts

Book of the Week

Thunderhead
Fiction

Thunderhead by Miranda Darling

A feminist triumph and homage to Virginia Woolf, Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead is a potent exploration of suburban entrapment for women. The novella opens with a complex satire of Ian McEwan’s response to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) in his novel Saturday (2005). All three books are set over the course of a single day, where the intricacies of both the quotidian and extraordinary occur. In this novella’s opening paragraphs, Darling’s protagonist, Winona Dalloway, wakes to see the sky ablaze through her window. While ‘it is dawn in the suburbs of the east’ – rather than a burning plane, evoking 9/11 terrorism, as in McEwan’s novel – she believes it ‘telegraphs a warning, red sky in the morning’. This refers to the opening of Mrs Dalloway, where Clarissa Dalloway feels, ‘standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen’.

Interview

Interview

Interview

From the Archive

December 1992, no. 147

A Well Depicted Woman

Here it is, nearly Christmas, and as usual, the list of Books I Have Read is running into the hundreds, and I have that end-of-year mad, fleeting illusion that also afflicts exam-fevered students … that somehow it All Adds Up.

From the Archive

April 1994, no. 159

New and Selected Poems 1945-1993 by David Rowbotham

... Be tough
And dream. It's your only chance.
Imagination precedes fact.

Born in Toowoomba in 1924 and serving in the RAAF in the Second World War, David Rowbotham has produced nine books of poems, four of prose (stories, novel, monograph), worked collaboratively on an autobiography while employed at the Brisbane Courier Mail for thirty­two years, partly as the arts editor and partly as founding literary editor.

From the Archive

September 2013, no. 354

Jay Daniel Thompson on 'Philosophy in the Garden' by Damon Young

P hilosophy in the Garden is the latest book from philosopher and social commentator Damon Young. The text contributes to existing studies of the cultural and personal significance held by gardens. Young begins by noting that gardens ‘can console, calm and uplift’, as well as ‘discomfit and provoke’. This range of responses adds to the ‘philosophical value’ of these spaces. Young moves on to discuss several ‘great minds, and the gardens they loved (or loathed)’. These include the authors Leonard Woolf (best known for being Virginia’s husband), Colette, George Orwell, Marcel Proust, and Jean-Paul Sartre.