The Performance
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
BARBARA JEFFERIS AWARD 2022 - HIGHLY COMMENDED
ABIA AUDIOBOOK OF THE YEAR 2022 - HIGHLY COMMENDED
LONGLISTED FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD 2022
SHORTLISTED FOR THE NSW PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARDS CHRISTINA STEAD PRIZE FOR FICTION 2022
A SYDNEY MORNING HERALD 'MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2021'
'In this novel, the project of living is rendered with compassionate clarity.' NEW YORK TIMES
'Thomas's imitation of wandering minds is flawless.' WASHINGTON POST
'Claire Thomas has constructed, with graceful precision, a near-perfect wind-up music box of a novel.' ARTS HUB
The false cold of the theatre makes it hard to imagine the heavy wind outside in the real world, the ash air pressing onto the city from the nearby hills where bushfires are taking hold.
The house lights lower.
The auditorium feels hopeful in the darkness.
As bushfires rage outside the city, three women watch a performance of a Beckett play.
Margot is a successful professor, preoccupied by her fraught relationship with her ailing husband. Ivy is a philanthropist with a troubled past, distracted by the snoring man beside her. Summer is a young theatre usher, anxious about the safety of her girlfriend in the fire zone.
As the performance unfolds, so does each woman's story. By the time the curtain falls, they will all have a new understanding of the world beyond the stage.
'How each woman interacts with and is altered by the play enacts beautifully the dialectical relationship between art and life.' WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN
'Written with passion, The Performance is a brave book: unafraid of confronting the dissonances of living in a modern Australia.' THE CONVERSATION
'Witty, affecting, brilliantly wise and original.' Gail Jones, author of A GUIDE TO BERLIN, THE DEATH OF NOAH GLASS and OUR SHADOWS
'A potent meditation on the intensity of women's lives.' Charlotte Wood, author of THE NATURAL WAY OF THINGS and THE WEEKEND
'Claire Thomas writes with a sure eye and knowing heart.' Tony Birch, author of BLOOD, GHOST RIVER and THE WHITE GIRL
'I read from start to finish almost without looking up.' Clare Bowditch, author of YOUR OWN KIND OF GIRL
'Read it as soon as you possibly can.' Emily Bitto, author of THE STRAYS
'A tour de force. I can't recommend this too highly.' Patrick Gale, author of A PLACE CALLED WINTER and TAKE NOTHING WITH YOU
'Quietly transformational' THE TIMES
'Inventive and rule-breaking...deliciously clever and self-aware' Arts Hub
'Richly rendered and perceptive' Publishers Weekly
'This is a masterful work. Highly recommended.' Canberra Times
'An intimate, compassionate, and unusual novel' Kirkus
'Intimate, poignant, and darkly funny.' Sunday Times
'Lively and intimate...The way Thomas plays with the reader is sort of genius.' The Guardian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thomas's incisive sophomore effort (after Fugitive Blue) follows three women of different generations and backgrounds as they separately attend a performance of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days in Melbourne. While bushfires rage across Victoria, the women sit in a dark, air-conditioned theater, watching the play unfold as they consider their own existential fears and desires. Margot Pierce, a literature professor in her 70s, grapples with the prospect of retirement and her husband's illness; Ivy Parker, a middle-aged philanthropist, contemplates the still-excruciating loss of her first child; and 22-year-old Summer, a drama student and usher at the theater, worries about her girlfriend, April, who must travel into the fire zone to help her parents. Though the women only cross paths briefly, during a witty section of the novel that unfolds at intermission, their respective anxieties about climate change, the confines of womanhood, and love and loss intersect magnificently throughout. Meanwhile, as the onstage drama progresses, the play's protagonist becomes increasingly trapped by the desiccated earth, thus serving as a performative embodiment of the women's own inexorable journeys through time. This richly rendered and perceptive meditation on motherhood, memory, and the challenges of living through frightful times will hold readers spellbound.
