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9781743058695

Temperance

Carol Lefevre

December, 1963: widowed cafe owner Stella Madigan, with her two young children Fran and Theo, and the free-spirited artist Mardi Rose, embark on a road trip to Byron Bay. But a night spent in the tiny outback town of Temperance will alter all their lives, and ignite a chain of events the children will struggle to both conceal and resolve, long into adulthood.

Temperance explores the discrepancies between what children see and what adults allow them to believe. Its mystery unravels against a background of early 1960s Australia, where religious wars are fought in suburban living rooms, and feminism has made so little headway that a relationship between two women can be seen as perverse, even dangerous.

This haunting novel vividly inhabits its suburban beachside setting, while sensitively exploring through its characters the corrosive effects of ambiguous loss, and of tightly held family secrets.

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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.

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ISBN   
CATEGORIES: ,
PAGE COUNT   320
DIMENSIONS   210 x 140 mm