Erica Marsden grew up in an Asylum, Melton Park. Not as a patient, her father was the chief medical officer and their family lived within the compound. Perhaps that is why their mother ran away when Erica was only nine, their father mistaken when telling Erica ...more
An odd, dreamy book that feels loaded with complex meaning. The central character has left the city to live in a small coastal community near where her son is imprisoned and has a hard-to-explain obsession with building a labyrinth. The book unfolds hypnotically, with a handful of characters and lin ...more
A beautiful episodic novel, quite possibly my favourite Lohrey in any form (she can do it all: short stories, novels, essays). A woman moves to the south coast to be near the prison where her son is serving a life sentence. She becomes obsessed with building a labyrinth and suddently structure and c ...more
‘Why am I here, behind the dunes in this dusty old shack? To be close to the prison, yes, but there is another reason.’
Erica Marsden has moved from Sydney to the fictional town of Garra Nalla on the south coast. She has moved to be close to her son, Daniel, who is in a nearby prison. Full of grief a ...more
Oh this is hypnotic and beautiful - I'm copying the blurb but it's entirely true. The story spirals a woman away from her family members by some senseless and violent losses and then gently and wisely, as the Labyrinth she decides to build takes shape, she gently spirals back again, learning some mo ...more
I just finished this mesmerising book and I miss it already. I love it when a book surprises me. I was expecting this story - of a woman named Erica who moves to a coastal town to be near her adult son, who is in prison for a horrible crime - to be largely focussed on that, and while it is hardly a ...more
Wonderful book, well deserved winner of the Miles Franklin Award as the best work of fiction in Australia for the past year.
There is heaps unsaid or unfinished in this book, there is little resolution of anything. It's the journey and Erica is leading us on the journey. The writing is exquisite, the ...more
The Labyrinth is a deeply contemplative tale starring all the topics I love reading about in novels — guilt, redemption, moral culpability, insanity, art and the complex, sometimes fraught relationships between parents and children — so any wonder I loved it.