How Bright Are All Things Here

Description

What shall I talk about? Love and art? Life and death? Or flowers. Flowers are nice. Bliss Henderson has lived a flawed, passionate life. She was an isolated child, a budding artist, and a sophisticated career woman in 1960s London. Through marriages and friendships, ambition and achievement, love and loss and redemption, the witty, irreverent and not always wise Bliss embraced her motto, 'amor fati': love your fate. Now in her final days, Bliss excavates the layers of her past through a haze of morphine, unearthing memories and feelings she's forgotten; regrets, losses, grief. And secrets, secrets she never meant to tell anyone. To her three remaining step-children - now adults themselves - Bliss was a woman without a past. However, as Bliss mines her memory, time twists and loops, characters fade in and out, and to her step-children the frail Bliss is suddenly more fleshed-out and real than she has ever been before. And once they know it all, once they have untangled their connecting, conflicting, inextricably entwined stories, how will they judge her?

Susan Green has worked as a teacher, cook, radio producer, education writer and bookseller. She lives in the Victorian goldfields town of Castlemaine with her husband and miniature schnauzer. She is the author of the Verity Sparks series for children and her writing has won several literary awards, including an Age short story prize.