“I saw my mother for a long time after she died. I would see her out windows, or in the corner of my eye. Always in the periphery, always a dim blur, but unmistakably my mother, the herness skating through every line and flicker.”
Charlotte (‘Lot’) and Ellen (‘Nelly’) are sisters who were once so close a Venn diagram of the two would have formed a circle. But a great deal has changed since their mother’s death, years before. When the pair meet at a silent retreat in a strange old house in the Tasmanian countryside, the spectres of memory are unleashed.
Heartsease is a sad, sly and darkly comic story about the weight of grief and the ways in which family cleave to us, for better and for worse. It’s an account of love and ghosts so sharp it will leave you with paper cuts.
Kate Kruimink is a writer from southern Lutruwita. Her first novel, A Treacherous Country, won the 2020 Vogel/Australian’s Literary Award. It was shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction and longlisted in the UK for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. In 2021, she was one of the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Best Young Novelists. Kate also writes short stories and essays, which have been published widely. Heartsease is her second novel.
Kate will be in conversation with Jane Rawson: author, environmentalist and editor of Island magazine.
Tickets are $10, and include a glass of wine or a cold drink.
