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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

ELEMENTAL

Amanda Curtin

Nearing the end of her life, Meggie Tulloch takes up her pen to write a story for her granddaughter. It begins in the first years of the twentieth century, in a place where howling winds spin salt and sleet sucked up from ice?oes.

A place where lives are ruled by men, and men by the witchy sea. A place where the only thing lower than a girl in the order of things is a clever girl with accursed red hair. A place schooled in keeping secrets. Moving from the north-east of Scotland to the Shetland Isles to Fremantle, Australia, ELEMENTAL is a novel about the life you make from the life you are given.

Amanda Curtin is a writer, book editor, and adjunct lecturer at Edith Cowan University. Her ?rst novel, The Sinkings, was published in 2008 and a short story collection, Inherited, in 2011, both to critical acclaim. She has been granted writing residencies in Australia, Scotland, Ireland, and the United States.
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Book

Published 2016-02-01 by Scribe Publications

Comments

Elemental features a supple poetry of prose, a music that is both unique to time and circumstance and yet timeless and universal It's an example of the way language and dialect work like grace notes giving wings to a four-square dance.

Elemental is an exquisite novel. Every word of it is tightly crafted and pregnant with possibility Yet, at the same time, there is something almost old fashioned and timeless in its deep perceptions and observations.

Elemental continues Amanda Curtin's fruitful fascination with memory, history and the generational legacies of family, following her debut novel The Sinkings and her collection of short stories, Inherited this is another moving novel from a unique Australian fiction writer.

Curtin's mastery of empathy and grace mirrors the master himself: Thomas Hardy. — Chigozie Obioma

Assonantal and alliterative, and peppered with Scots and Doric vocabulary Meggie's voice is poetic and convincing, while a gentle metaphorical undertow invites the reader to make connections that may not be immediately apparent.