Cart 0
Quiet City

Quiet City

Walking in West Terrace Cemetery

Carol Lefevre

I do not think that I believe in ghosts, but just for this morning, just for the time it will take to ramble through this quiet city under clouds the colour of tin, or of pigeons' wings, I am going to believe in them.

Ordinary lives are revealed as extraordinary, as Carol Lefevre traces the stories of West Terrace Cemetery's little-known inhabitants: there is the tale of the man who fatally turned his back on a tiger, and the man who avoided one shipwreck only to perish in another; there is the story of the young woman who came home from a dance and drank belladonna, and those who died at the hands of one of South Australia's most notorious abortionists.

Said to be the most poetic place in Adelaide, in this heritage-listed burial ground the beginnings of the colony of South Australia are still within reach. Amid a sea of weather-bleached monuments, the excavated remains of Australia's oldest crematorium can be seen, and its quietest corner shelters the country's first dedicated military cemetery.

From archives, and headstones, the author recovers histories that time and weather threaten to obliterate. Quiet City is a book for everyone who has ever wandered through an old graveyard and wished its stones could speak.

Shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature (Non-fiction)

$12.95$34.95

Clear

Carol Lefevre holds both a M.A. and a Ph.D in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide, where she is a Visiting Research Fellow. Her novels include If You Were Mine (2008), Nights in the Asylum (2007), which won the Kibble Award, the People's Choice Award at the South Australian Writers Festival, and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Her non-fiction book Quiet City: Walking in West Terrace Cemetery (2016) was shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. In 2016, Carol won the Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship at the South Australian Festival Awards for Literature. She was Writer-in-Residence at the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice in 2016/17. Her novella, Murmurations (2020), was shortlisted for the 2021 Christina Stead Prize for fiction in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, and for the Adelaide Festival Award for Fiction (2021). The Tower, a collection of connected short stories, was published in October 2022 by Spinifex Press.

Find out more

ISBN   
CATEGORIES: ,
IMAGES   25 greyscale photographs
PAGE COUNT   328
DIMENSIONS   210 x 140 mm