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The Trapeze Act by Libby Angel

by
April 2017, no. 390

The Trapeze Act by Libby Angel

Text Publishing $29.99 pb, 240 pp, 9781925355925

The Trapeze Act by Libby Angel

by
April 2017, no. 390

An epigraph from Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected lectures (2012) sets the tone of Libby Angel’s novel, The Trapeze Act ‘what is the moment but a fragment of greater time?’ This book is composed of fragments, which, taken together, capture the desire for a complete understanding of history and the impossibility of satisfying that desire.

A well-written and entertaining début, The Trapeze Act is narrated by Loretta Lord and set in an unnamed southern Australian city – one proud of its free-settler establishment and, by the late 1960s, home to the highest murder rate in the country. The novel moves across time and space, shifting between Loretta’s memories of her trapeze- artist mother, with her exuberant accounts of the Dutch Rodzirkus; her barrister father and the notorious murder cases by which he made his fame and fortune; and the found stories of her great-great-great-grandparents, who in 1858 emigrated to the colonies in search of elephants and their ivory.

Anna MacDonald reviews 'The Trapeze Act' by Libby Angel

The Trapeze Act

by Libby Angel

Text Publishing $29.99 pb, 240 pp, 9781925355925

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