Readings.com.au: Michelle de Kretser

The Lost Dog

Whatever the linguistic equivalent of perfect pitch may be, she has it - Sunday Telegraph (UK)

The Lost Dog is the extraordinary new novel by the acclaimed writer Michelle de Kretser. Her first novel, The Rose Grower, was a bestseller in both hardback and paperback. Her second, The Hamilton Case, won the Commonwealth Prize (SE Asia and Pacific), the Tasmania Prize and the Encore Prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book.

Set in present-day Australia and mid-20th century India, The Lost Dog is a haunting, beautifully written work that brilliantly counterpoints new cityscapes and their inhabitants with the wild, ancient continent beyond. With its atmosphere of menace and an acute sense of the unexplained in any story, The Lost Dog intriguingly highlights the collision of the primal and the civilised, modernity and the past and home and exile.

A mystery, a love story, a celebration of dogs and the joy they bring us, and a meditation on the essence of art and nature, The Lost Dog is a gripping contemporary novel which explores the weight of history as well as different ways of seeing and comprehending the world.

The Hamilton Case

MURDER, MOONLIGHT, THE JUNGLE CROWDING CLOSE... The place is Ceylon, the time the 1930s. Set amid tea plantations, decay and corruption, this sinuous, subtle, surprising novel is a masterly evocation of time and place, of colonialism and the backwash of empire. It is the story of an embittered Ceylonese lawyer, Sam Obeysekere himself a product of empire - 'obey' by name and by nature - and of a family that once had wealth and influence but starts to crack open when Sam's charismatic father dies leaving gambling debts, an ex-beauty of a wife, an unstable daughter and an inadequate son. But the writing has been on the wall for a generation, ever since another sibling died in his cot- And at the heart of the novel is the Hamilton Case, a 'White Mischief' murder scandal that shakes the upper echelons of the island's society. Sam's involvement in it makes his name but paradoxically ensures that he will never achieve his ambition. A miracle of delicacy and restraint, full of volte faces, and narrated with perfect pitch in a voice that catches both the tragedy and comedy of their situation, this is a gripping, nuanced tale of the end of an era, suffused with 'the unbearable thought that everything might have turned out differently'.

The Rose Grower

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