Here Until August
Stories
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A masterful collection of horizons and departures, heartbreak and seduction, from an internationally acclaimed Australian author.
These superbly crafted stories follow the fates of characters who, by choice or by force, are travelling beyond the boundaries of their known worlds. We meet them navigating reluctant partings and uncertain returns or biding the disquieting calm that often precedes decisive action.
An agoraphobic French émigré watches terrorist videos compulsively as she minds a dog named Chavez. A young couple weather the interiority of a Montreal winter, more attuned to the illicit goings-on of their neighbours than to their own hazy, unfolding futures. A Western Australian family cross from mainland to island, from disaster towards a faltering redemption. Other stories play out in locations just beyond the brink of familiarity: flooded townships and distant lakes, sunlit woodlands or paths bright with ice, places of unpredictable access and spaces scrubbed from maps.
From the Catskills to the Snowy Mountains, the abandoned island outports of Newfoundland to the sprawl of an Australian metropolis, this scintillating collection from one of Australia’s most gifted writers shows us how the places we inhabit shape us in ways both remote and intimate.
‘A nuanced, lyrical and masterful collection from one of Australia's short-fiction greats, Here Until August will leave you breathless.’—Maxine Beneba Clarke
‘Here Until August tracks the shimmer of precarious moments and transient moods with devastating precision. In their steady excavation of intimacy, these spacious stories bring Alice Munro to mind. I underlined sentence after sentence as I read: for their beauty, their clarity and their wisdom. Josephine Rowe is a breathtakingly good writer, and this is a marvellous book.’ —Michelle de Kretser
'Here Until August is a superb collection, pared back, astute, yet brimming with life and love and expectation ... resonates with the unflinching acuity of the great Alice Munro.' —The Saturday Paper
‘Gives you the sense that its author has seen a thing or two … But even as a narrator may be stuck in the maelstrom of the past, Rowe manages to drive home the point that the world is not a cruel place, if you only try to engage with it.’ —The New York Times<.i>
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 10 sharp, vivid stories in Rowe's first collection (after the novel A Loving, Faithful Animal) showcase characters overwhelmed by the harsh and often beautiful places in which they feel not at all at home. In "Sinkers," Cristian takes his mother's ashes to the lake that now, courtesy of the hydroelectric company, covers the town where she grew up, and tries vainly to locate her sunken, ravaged home under a lake that "tells him little, dumbly reflecting back the deepening sky." Severine, the narrator of "Chavez," consumed by a grief only gradually revealed, runs from France to a grim neighborhood in a North American city, where she is saddled with a mysterious, "wolflike" dog whose owner has left ostensibly for a couple of weeks, but never returns. "What Passes for Fun," the collection's shortest story, more prose poem than fully developed narrative, centers on an image of the physical world that serves as metaphor for the whole volume, a sheet of dazzling ice suspended over a pond that has dropped away, apparently solid but actually dangerously fragile. While the characters' predicaments are often familiar, Rowe's fiercely idiosyncratic ways of describing scenes will seize and hold the reader's attention. The disorienting, sometimes fragmented prose mirrors the characters' sense of ongoing loss and will linger with readers.
