Description
Praise
‘Carmel Bird’s stories are dark, intriguing and yet always delightful.’ —Andy Griffiths
‘Carmel Bird’s short stories are ingenious, each a delicious fictional Venus fly trap that encloses you in its wonder or horror, or both. There is little terrain of the human condition that her stories don’t touch – a child’s cold case murder and a triggered memory that may have solved it, the sinister banality of suburban life and all its hidden vestibules, beauty and ugliness, creation and the future of the world, small towns and their dark undercurrents, and of course love. Bird’s stories fizz and tingle with originality and freshness, and carry an alluring humour that can turn malevolent and deadly in the blink of an eye. Hands down, Carmel Bird is to my mind the best living short story writer in the country.’ —Matthew Condon
‘As you’d expect, Bird’s beautiful stories soar, though never into a realm you could anticipate.’ —Debra Adelaide
‘Bird’s imagination is extraordinarily wide-ranging and her fiction consequently creates a world that criss-crosses textual, intellectual and geographical boundaries. Her philosophical enquiry gives us stories that blend genres and also question faith and spirituality as well as personal, family and local history. Using elements of the Gothic, fantasy and fairy tale as easily as realism, Bird can be surreal, quirky and macabre, but also humorous, humane and warm. Critics have noted these qualities shared with other celebrated writers such as Angela Carter and Thea Astley, and at least one has identified a ‘rogue quality’ in her work reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But Bird’s voice is truly original: witty, stylish and allusive, it invests trust in the reader to appreciate her literary and cultural references.’ —Judges’ Report, 2016 Patrick White Award
About The Author
CARMEL BIRD is the 2016 winner of the Patrick White Literary Award. Carmel’s work spans forty years, and she has published thirty-eight books. Her most recent collection, published in 2015, is My Hearts Are Your Hearts, and the most recent of her eleven novels is Field of Poppies, published in 2019.
Publication Details
Published as part of the SW Smalls series, celebrating 10 years of Spineless Wonders.
