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Michelle de Kretser

Michelle de Kretser

Michelle de Kretser is the author of The Rose Grower (1999), The Hamilton Case (2003), The Lost Dog (2007), and Questions of Travel (2012). She has won many prizes, including the Miles Franklin Award and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction.

'Like a Thief in the Night' by Michelle de Kretser (Afterword to the Text Classics edition of The Suburbs of Hell by Randolph Stow)

September 2015, no. 374 25 August 2015
My copy of The Suburbs of Hell (1984) is a handsome Heinemann first edition salvaged, like so many treasures, from a remainder tray. The dust jacket features a golden hourglass and type on a sky-blue ground: the colours Fra Angelico favoured for the vaults of heaven. A travel card that served as my bookmark is still tucked away in its pages; the date-punch informs me that I first read the book in ... (read more)