Robert Lukens

She just senses the excitement of art and creativity and then it stirred something in her.

And this is really, you can feel that the speed of the novel really picks up here.

And I was reading contemporaneous books

reviews of the book when it came out and this is the part that people absolutely love this portrayal of Sydney in this time even though it was through this time of the depression it was this time of a flowering of bohemia and artists and modernism in Sydney and you get a sense of that you can smell it in the air and you can feel that excitement building up in Nora but she doesn't quite know what to do with it but she does get a sense that she wants she wants a piece of this

I mean, what a question.

And I think one of the joys of this book to me is that at every opportunity, Jessica Anderson shies away from coming to simple conclusions.

There's a much easier, neater version of this novel where Nora goes to London and

and finally breaks free of the shackles of her oppressive upbringing and her bad marriage and becomes a famous fashion designer and becomes the fully realised artist she could have been.

But she doesn't.

Nora sort of stands at the brink of things.

She gets close to the edge of different worlds and she kind of vacillates between the two because she's a very real person living in a real time.

And even at the end of the novel, when she's sort of analysing all of these memories and what she's searching for, what they mean, and can she be comfortable with them?

And she isn't really able to come to any conclusions about it because we don't come to conclusions about these things, do we?

And in the end, maybe it just comes down to sitting by the window, looking out at the mango tree and just wondering.

And part of the joy of this book to me is that resonance of that questioning.

The questioning doesn't stop and she doesn't give us easy answers to these things.

So the answer really is what's the conclusion to a life?

Does it really have an answer?

I'm so glad you brought up the final stages of this book and obviously not to give it away, but those final paragraphs, literally just the last two paragraphs, like the phrase heartbreaking gets thrown around a lot when describing novels, but this one truly is.

And it kind of sneaks up on you in the same way that it snuck up on Nora.