Michaela Kolowski

And it keeps you hanging on all the way to the very end, which is unusual considering that

the john dyer character and marva's character are both morally a bit open-ended it's not a straight kind of mainstream real ticker box genre thriller book it's got a lot more question marks hanging over it than that which i really enjoyed yes it doesn't tie everything together

There were a number of really well-written women in this novel.

There's John Dyer's aunt, whose name is Vivian, who's a real truth teller for him, who always tells him that, you know, a beautiful face comes with a price and gives him all kinds of advice about parenting, about love lives, about everything, about grief.

There's a wonderful, I guess, an intelligence operative called Lorna, who's very impressive.

Miranda.

She's really great.

I agree with you.

She really does jump off the page.

There's a fabulous woman called Miranda who John Dyer meets at a dinner party and sort of overlooks because as he admits himself, he's used to falling for the most beautiful face, falling for the woman who takes his breath away.

And again, his aunt says to him at one point in the novel,

remember that that that's that first blush of exhilaration that's your instinct telling you to run the other way that's not the moment to dive in but unfortunately for John Dyer whenever he's moved romantically he tends to dive in by when he's moved by a beautiful face he tends to dive in but I also really enjoyed again a sort of ambiguous character who we meet through the children who all go to the same school the mother of of the Russian boy who's been bullying John Dyer's son

And she is, we don't quite know what she's about.

And she sort of comes at John Dyer in a very interesting way.

But again, even when we learn what her motivations were, she's still not a one-note character.

And for, I think, for this, if we are thinking of this as a kind of a genre novel, for there to be so many lovely, nuanced women, very different to each other, I really enjoyed that.

And it made it feel like a very real world, a very whole world.

Angela, it's Michaela here.

You're also the President of PEN International Sydney.

Can you remind us a bit about what that organisation is and what it does?