They also provide commentary on the main story which is, as you’ve probably guessed, a love story. – holding out her wing as if it is broken. These notes, which are interspersed throughout the novel, are delightful and poetic, albeit brutal at times:
The novel takes place over a year, a year that is paced by the life-cycle of a kookaburra family which Harry watches and documents in the spare righthand column of his old milk ledger. Its central characters are the lonely, gentle dairy farmer, Harry, whose wife has left him, and his also lonely neighbour, Betty, who has brought her fatherless children to the country and who works in the local aged care home.
Like her gorgeous first novel, Everyman’s rules for scientific living, Mateship with birds is set in rural Victoria in the past, this time, the early 1950s.
Many bloggers* have already read and reviewed it so, once again, I’m the last kid on the block, but I have finally got there. It has also been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award. Last month her second novel, Mateship with birds, won the inaugural Stella Prize, and this month it won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction at the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.
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