Description
Praise
‘Lush, opulent and dripping with sensuality, this novella will take you on a journey through 1001 nights that you’d wish would never end.’
-Paris Rosemont, Banana Girl
I’ve narrated so many books over the years, but every now and then there’s a special one — one that’s impossible to keep a professional distance from, but which moves and changes you in the reading of it.
It’s difficult to describe how powerful this small book is. There’s the sheer poetry of the language. There’s the genuinely thrilling erotic writing (a rare thing indeed). There’s the deft weaving of the fictional, the magical, the soaring, the grotesque — by a woman coming into her power just when the world thinks her most powerless.
The Nights is a chimeric, ambivalent, searching novella. It tackles — with terrifying openminded-ness and a complete absence of sentimentality — those two impossible questions of what it means to be an artist and what it means to love. It collapses the boundaries between sex and art, body and language, fantasy and life.
And in the end it reminds us of something that, as a narrator, I should have known well: that words — and stories — live in the body. Story-telling is the most intimate and most transformative of acts. And we need it desperately if we are to survive.
-Kelly Burke, voice actor
About the author
Helen Hopcroft is a Tasmanian artist, performer, and writer. She holds a Royal College of Art MFA (Painting) and a Creative Writing PhD from Newcastle University.
Helen has written non-fiction books for the University of Newcastle and Hunter Valley Grammar School, with her publication list including The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, Art Monthly and The Griffith Review. Helen has been shortlisted for the 2022 and 2023 Newcastle Writers Festival joanne burns Microlit Award, and for the 2022 Nillumbik Prize for Contemporary Writing for her poem The Howling.
Helen once spent a year dressed as Marie Antoinette for a piece of performance art titled My Year as a Fairy Tale. She is currently writing a memoir about the experience. Helen lives in Maitland with her actor/musician husband Tony Jozef and daughter Sophie. She can be found online at @myyearasafairytale
Photograph by Joerg Lehmann
Distribution inquiries:
Our titles are distributed by NewSouth Books through Alliance Distribution Services:
Tel: 02 4390 1300
Email: adscs@alliancedist.com.au
www.newsouthbooks.com.au
