It came out in Australia last autumn, but it took a few months before looser Covid-19 rules meant Mason met any readers at events. The response to the novel, which is about a marriage collapsing amid the stress of an undefined mental illness, has been electric, fired by plaudits from the award-winning novelist Ann Patchett, who called it “serious literary fiction” and said she wanted to send it to everyone she knew. The engrossing result is Mason’s third book in her native Australia but her first to hit UK shelves. “Anything I’d seen, felt, thought or heard was all there, like this big meal made from leftovers,” she says via Zoom from a shed of “phone box proportions” in her garden in Sydney, Australia. I hadn’t told my publisher I was back to work, as I didn’t think it was a novel,” she insists.
Except that once she had picked herself up off the floor of rejection, she couldn’t help starting something fresh, in secret, rising before dawn to hammer out some words before starting her day job as a freelance journalist, not to mention mother to two teenage daughters. Her previous attempt at a literary novel had bombed she couldn’t face even showing her manuscript to her publisher, and she’d sworn off fiction for ever. Meg Mason didn’t write Sorrow and Bliss for anyone to read.
0 kommentar(er)
