Springtime
A Ghost Story
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“This is a gorgeous, delicately surprising piece of writing. . . . It's like spirit photography, all fuzzy outlines and unaccountable light: a snapshot of something that may or may not exist.” —Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times Book Review
When Frances met Charlie at a party in Melbourne, he was married with a young son. Now that the couple has moved to subtropical Sydney, a lusher and more chaotic city, Frances has an unshakable sense that the world has tipped on its axis. Everything seems alien, and exotic—and Frances is haunted by the unknowability of Charlie's previous life. A young art historian studying the objects in paintings––the material world––Frances takes mind–clearing walks around her neighborhood with her dog. Behind the fence of one garden, she thinks she sees a woman in an old–fashioned gown, but something is not right. It's as if the garden exists in a vacuum suspended in time, "at an angle to life."
Springtime is a ghost story that doesn't conform to the genre's traditions of dark and stormy nights, graveyards and ruins. It breaks new ground by unfolding in sunny, suburban Australia, and the realism of the characters and events make the story's ambiguities and eeriness all the more disquieting. The richness of observation here is immediately recognizable as Michelle de Kretser's, a writer who has been praised by Hilary Mantel as a master of ""the sharp, almost hallucinatory detail."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
All the traditional pleasures of a ghost story are revived, and cleverly transformed, in de Kretser's taut, nimble, atmospheric short novel. It isn't spirits but personal habits and histories that intrude on the verdant and "explosive Sydney spring," the first Frances and Charlie are spending as a couple. Frances, 28, is an art historian "whose life had taken place in books"; she met older IT guy Charlie in Melbourne a year prior, and the two bonded over their French mothers and complicated childhoods. Charlie left his family to be with Frances, but the past shadows their new life together. Frances, who doesn't want children, finds Charlie's visiting young son Luke to be an inscrutable intruder; she resents Luke's harassment of her dog, Rod; studying Luke's mother's photos online, she thinks "her face had the empty yet powerful look of a primitive mask." To make matters worse, an eerie prank caller targets the couple, and at a dinner party, Charlie's attention seems to wander to a coworker. When Frances notices, on her daily walks with Rod, a mysterious figure in the "shadowy depths" of a garden, she wonders whether she's seeing something otherworldly. Readers will retain the precise, startling images powering de Kretser's prose azaleas growing "as big as fists" rendering even loved ones as unknowable as the world beyond.
