Panthers and the Museum of Fire

Complex, urgent, and fascinating, this novel about walking, memory, and writing has earned comparisons from Virginia Woolf to Karl Ove Knausgard. The narrator walks from Glebe to a central Sydney, Australia cafe to return a manuscript by a recently deceased writer. While she walks, the reader enters the narrator’s entire world: life with family and neighbors, narrow misses with cars, her singular friendships, dinner conversations, and work. We learn of her adolescent desire for maturity and acceptance, and her struggle with religion and anorexia. Photos are provided by Bettina Kaiser. Jen Craig’s first novel is Since the Accident (2009). Panthers and the Museum of Fire was long-listed for the 2016 Stella Prize.