Kavai Strong Washburn

That I was really looking forward to the Sydney Writers Festival.

I'm really sad that that's not happening this year.

Yeah, so certainly...

I think that I had spoken about Jesmyn Ward previously and Salvage the Bones was one where there's a little bit of a sibling interplay in that one.

I read that book years ago and absolutely loved it.

It was just fantastic.

That was certainly a book I thought about when the family that's there and the way that as a reader, you could feel the fierce love that the family had for its members.

I really wanted to have some similar rendering of that on the page.

So that's a book that I think about and I'm sure was a very large influence.

There's also a book called The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver that has a similar structure.

My structure is very similar in the sense that there's a rotating first-person perspective.

among the siblings.

And it's an all-female family, or at least all the people that you hear from are the sisters and the mother.

And so rotating through all their perspectives, you got the sense of how they had different perspectives on a given situation.

There's a book by an author from Zimbabwe at the time that it was called Rhodesia, and her name's Alexandra Fuller.

She wrote a book called Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight.

And I found that very influential.

That was a book I read a long time ago.

My wife had a copy of it, actually.

And when we were dating, I read it.