Springtime: A Ghost Story

Description

Picking up her pace, Frances saw a woman in the shadowy depths of the garden. She wore a wide hat and a trailing pink dress; a white hand emerged from her sleeve. There came upon Frances a sensation that sometimes overtook her when she was looking at a painting: space was foreshortened, time stilled. When Frances met Charlie at a party in Melbourne he was married with a young son. Now Charlie and Frances live in Sydney with her dog, Rod, and an unshakeable sense that they have tipped the world on its axis. Everything is alien, unfamiliar, exotic: haunting, even. A rare, beguiling and brilliant ghost story by Miles Franklin Literary Award-winner Michelle de Kretser.

Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and emigrated to Australia when she was 14. Educated in Melbourne and Paris, Michelle has worked as a university tutor, an editor and a book reviewer. She is the author of The Rose Grower, The Hamilton Case, which won the Commonwealth Prize (SE Asia and Pacific region) and the UK Encore Prize, and The Lost Dog, which was widely praised by writers such as AS Byatt, Hilary Mantel and William Boyd and won a swag of awards, including: the 2008 NSW Premier's Book of the Year Award and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and the 2008 ALS Gold Medal. The Lost Dog was also shortlisted for the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, the Western Australian Premier's Australia-Asia Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Asia-Pacific Region) and Orange Prize's Shadow Youth Panel. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her fourth novel, Questions of Travel, received 14 honours, including winning the 2013 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Her latest novel, The Life to Come, is the winner of the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award and 2019 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize.