Geordie Williamson

Usually I can wing it, guys, but I've got a piece of paper here.

I've got a cheat sheet because it's a beautiful puzzle box of a novel and it does swap between timeframes and locales with great swiftness.

So you've got to keep a few things in your head.

But one of the great satisfactions is as you go through, you go like, oh, now that name means something.

And it's exquisite, really, the way that the whole thing is drawn together at its conclusions.

No, I'm not going to say that.

I'm saying that it's exquisite the way it's put together.

But what I would also say is that one of the things that we do in publishing is when a book comes in, we have to pick what its readership is.

Sometimes with Elizabeth Strout, say, you know that this is very much a work of literary fiction for an adult audience.

She's a writer for grown-ups.

But this book felt to me, and others who've read it have actually said it to me as well, it feels like YA that may have been sort of upsold into an adult category.

So I think that there is a sweetness and earnestness about the book.

I think there is a technical facility, but I think that it is slightly not the book that I would have expected it to be.

That's not to say that there aren't many lovely and winning things about the book.

As long as you don't end up like poor old David Maloof who used to get letters each year from people who'd gone out to Edmondson Street to his old home and discovered he'd been turned into a car park and would write him shirty letters.

Well, I mean, I really, I was on the radio the other day talking to Sarah Lestrange about the grief that I feel at David's passing because he was an exemplary figure and like an artist, a true artist.

But it's interesting, Sarah's a Brisbane girl and Robert's a Brisbane boy.

And it's amazing how close to a particular locale David's work is.

But just literally anything he ever wrote, please go back, pick up a maloof.

But I wanted to just share something by a Tasmanian local named Keely Jobe.