Bøker av Carmel Bird

'You clamber up, heading for the exit, the circle of faint light, as the radiance of the pre-dawn leads you on toward freedom. I follow. You spread your darling wings. You enter the net that awaits you.'Bold, tender, and often fantastical, Love Letter to Lola enters the very pain of loss and grief while preserving a wise, sly, humorous, and ironic point of view. The thylacine, the dodo, the passenger pigeon, the blue macaw are all candidates to return from extinction, and here each is given its own moving narrative. The meaning of the British monarchy is challenged by a green spider; a unicorn and the rainbow serpent contemplate the end of the world; an angel gives his perspective on human life and love with a thoughtful and exquisite mischief. The author's own 'Reflection' on the inspiration and the construction of the stories is a swift and penetrating conversation on how writing happens.Carmel Bird won the Patrick White Award for Literature in 2016. She has published novels, short stories, and non-fiction, her 2022 memoir Telltale foregrounding her Tasmanian origins, as well as her lifelong interest in the natural world, and in reading and writing. The Stolen Children - Their Stories, which she published in 1998, is an early landmark work in the promotion of indigenous issues. Love Letter to Lola is the latest offering of an author who is known for the sharpness and originality of her narratives.

In prose that sparkles with wit, shocks with insight, and beguiles with the air of legend, these eight stories take the reader from post-apocalyptic Tasmania to the tragedy of surrogate pregnancy in the 1950s. Loss of species, the whims of publishers, the question of Islam in regional Australia - these are among the subjects Carmel Bird addresses in her characteristic probing style.

From inside her Toorak mansion, Margaret, matriarch, widow of Edmund Rice O'Day of O'Day Funerals, secretly surveys her family in the garden. Everyone, including Margaret herself, is oblivious to the secrets that threaten to be uncovered by a visiting American relative who is determined to excavate the O'Day's family history. How far will Margaret go in order to bury the truth? Family Skeleton examines a family that has for generations been engaged in dark business. You can't dig a grave without disturbing the smooth surface of the ground. Deftly woven with elegant wit and with compassion, this dark comedy is about what you might unearth if you dig deep enough.