Robert Lukens

Yeah, hi.

Hello.

Lovely to be back again.

Always a pleasure.

Oh, you know, we all go through these sort of dizzying highs and horrifying lows with these things, don't we?

I've been quite fortunate that I've been borrowing away working on my new novel.

So that's given me some kind of excuse as to the sorry nature of my reading pile on my bedside.

And in fact, the pleasure of reading these couple of books here that we're going to be discussing today sort of brought my brain back to life a little bit.

So thank you for that.

Yeah, sure.

And it's such a warm and somewhat dense beginning, isn't it?

And we have already this sense of time flashing forwards and backwards.

She's forgotten her hat, but she doesn't know that yet.

So as you said, we have Nora Porteus, a woman in her 70s, returning to her childhood home in Brisbane.

And

and we learn that her parents are dead, her brother and sister are dead, and this is what in some ways brought her back to this somewhat slightly dusting vacant house.

Initially, the only contact she really has is with her neighbours who have to care for her as in the early stage of this novel she falls ill, and really it's in this almost feverish state that she becomes kind of possessed by these memories that intrude into her day, and you get the sense that it's very much this illness which is

confines her to her bed and to this house that sort of forces her to confront some of these memories.

And these are memories that get evoked by small sights and sounds in this house.

And right from the start, you get this sense of this sort of internal tension in Nora, and it comes across in the writing, especially in the initial pages.