Maggie

Description

A Catholic priest appears to promise the world; a schoolgirl starved for affection and looking to escape her violent home life - this is the story of MAGGIE. In the autumn of 1967, seventeen-year-old Maggie Reed is dreaming of breaking free from her troubled family. All she has to do is move from childhood to adulthood. For her, university will be the key. Then, one morning after Mass, she meets the new curate, and is slowly drawn into a taboo relationship with the much older Father Nihill. Bringing to life descriptions of 1960s Australia that are by turns starkly confronting and exquisitely beautiful, Maggie explores questions of power in a complex, forbidden relationship and reveals the strength of a young woman who both loses herself and finds herself anew.

Catherine Johns was born in Cessnock, NSW in 1949. She has taught English and French in Melbourne secondary schools, and English in TAFE. Her short stories have been published in Meanjin and Island Magazine. One of these was shortlisted for The Age short story competition. Maggie is her first novel. Catherine lives and writes in Melbourne.

As soon as I swam past the first phrase I was in, in a world, past yet present, old yet eternally young, a world I did not want to leave. A story of abuse, yes, a story of betrayal, yes, but above all a work of high literature that was as gripping as it was meaningful. I read till one in the morning. The characters are all sharply defined, the narrative voice powerful, mesmerising. The language is unerringly beautiful and poised, but so natural, you are there - immediately, standing in the garden, in the cities she describes. This is the story of a woman's near annihilation and her recovering the scattered atoms of her life - as if she were finding her way back to a lost garden that was there before everything happened. - Catherine de Saint Phalle, Stella-Prize shortlisted author of Poum and Alexandre