Michaela Saunders

Hello, Kate.

Hello, Stranger.

Great to have you back.

But also many thanks to Michaela Golowski, who was here in your absence.

We had quite a fun time looking at some of those much anticipated Australian books that you mentioned.

Also today, a French book, Nicolas Mathieu, and it's called And Their Children After Them.

It won the Prix Goncourt in 2018, which is the French equivalent of the Booker or Pulitzer Prize.

But it's now in English in Australia.

That's what I call artistic integrity.

That's right.

Now, Sophie Laguna writes for both children and adults.

Her second adult novel was The Eye of the Sheep, and it won the 2015 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

But, Kate, when we started the bookshelf, what, three years ago, I said that all summer, everywhere I went...

people were reading The Choke by Sophie Laguna.

And I said, I have to go and read it myself, but I never did.

So can you give me the cheat sheet on that?

Well, it's certainly in this new book that we're about to discuss, Infinite Splendours.

So it begins in 1953 near the Grampians Mountain Range in Victoria, a spectacular piece of countryside, these monsters coming out of the ground in otherwise quite sort of flat ground, a wonderful place.

Yes, and Mrs Barry's house and Beverley are identical houses side by side in this landscape.

But the Beverley house, which is Lawrence's family's house, has this space attached to it where there was going to be an orchard planted by the father who never returned.