Second Sight

There are many things that might happen when a woman is experiencing a long dark night of the soul: being whisked off to sunny Tuscany is rarely one of them. If only it was, Janine Burke suggests in her award-winning second novel.


First published in 1986, Second Sight came out years before Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love, another book that extolls Italy’s revitalising properties, though in a very different way. It won the Vance Palmer Award for Fiction in 1987.


Janine Burke is an award-winning novelist, art historian and biographer. Her books include Australian Women Artists: 1840–1940 (1980), Dear Sun: The Letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed (1994), Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker (2002), which was shortlisted for the 2002 Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, and The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide (2004), and, most recently, My Forests (2021).