Jen Craig

"Every new novel by Jen Craig is cause for celebration. They are a reminder that literature is still being written in the English language. In Wall, her brilliant third novel, Jen Craig deepens her proliferative style of self-examination as her narrator tries to contend with that most heart wrenching of questions: how to dispose of your parents’belongings after they die?" MAURO JAVIER CÁRDENAS, Aphasia A woman returns to Australia to clear out her father’s house, with an eye to transforming the contents into an art installation in the tradition of the revered Chinese artist Song Dong. What she hasn’t reckoned with is the tangle of jealousies, resentments, and familial complications that she had thought, in leaving the country, she had put behind her—a tangle that ensnares her before she arrives.

A woman returns to Australia to clear out her father's house, with an eye to transforming the contents into an art installation in the tradition of the revered Chinese artist Song Dong. What she hasn't reckoned with is the tangle of jealousies, resentments, and familial complicatioins that she had thought, in leaving the country, she had put behind her - a tangle that ensnares her before she arrives.

In a suburban Sydney pub, a woman tells her younger sister the story of how her life has changed since a serious car accident. She speaks of the blossoming of romance, the rediscovery of her long dormant creativity: her ability to draw. And yet an exhibition comes to nothing, a lover is abandoned. She leaves everything behind. In the driving monologue of her own narrative, the younger sister attempts to make sense of her life and the events and thoughts that have obsessed the elder since the accident.

A woman starts out from a quiet corner of Glebe in Sydney towards the bustle of Broadway and Surry Hills, carrying with her the manuscript of a childhood friend who has recently died. Her thoughts surge between past and present as she strives to understand the effect of her friend's manuscript, Panthers and the Museum of Fire, has had on her. Not only does the manuscript remind her of what she might prefer to forget - youthful ambitions, an abandoned friendship, entanglements with religion and anorexia - it also ignites in her a creative impulse.

Complex, urgent, and fascinating, this novel about walking, memory, and writing has earned comparisons from Virginia Woolf to Karl Ove KnausgÅrd. The narrator walks from Glebe to a central Sydney, Australia cafÉ to return a manuscript by a recently deceased writer. While she walks, the reader enters the narrator’s entire world: life with family and neighbors, narrow misses with cars, her singular friendships, dinner conversations, and work. We learn of her adolescent desire for maturity and acceptance, and her struggle with religion and anorexia. Photos are provided by Bettina Kaiser. Jen Craig's first novel is Since the Accident (2009). Panthers and the Museum of Fire was long-listed for the 2016 Stella Prize.