Mireille Dushaw

And it's kind of a form of testimony written in the first person.

But members of the novelist's family have objected to this account.

And so there has been quite a lot of controversy around it in the press.

But I don't think you need to know any of that to enjoy it.

It's quite spectacularly compelling.

And it's called Will and Testament.

Yeah, Castle Hill.

I have.

It's actually one of my favourite Patrick Whites.

Yeah, I love that book.

I think it's so ahead of its time in its depiction of, for example, the Indigenous character who was a member of the Stolen Generation.

And I don't know how many other books of that period, 60s, were kind of dealing with that history in the way that he did.

I had read Jenny's previous novel, Department of Speculation.

I'd reviewed it a few years ago and it was very striking and memorable.

And I had heard that she was working on another one, but she's a very slow writer.

I think the gap between her first novel and her second was 15 years.

I can definitely relate to that.

Yes, she writes quite slim, compact novels, and the last two have been characterised by this style, which is rigorously honed paragraphs with lots of white space around them, absolutely beautifully distilled moments that she focuses on.

So it's not a sort of plot driven, heavy on the exposition style novel.

They're not kind of linear narratives that are driven by the question, what happens next?