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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
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ORDINARY MATTER

Laura Elvery

Inspired by the twenty times women have won Nobel Prizes for science, this short-story collection from award-winning writer Laura Elvery is a thought-provoking follow-up to Trick of the Light.
Since 1901 women have been honoured with Nobel Prizes for their scientific research twenty times, including Marie Curie twice.

Spanning more than a century and ranging across the world, this inventive story collection is inspired by these women whose work has altered history and saved millions of lives.

From a transformative visit to the Grand Canyon to a baby washing up on a Queensland beach, a climate protest during a Paris heatwave to Stockholm on the eve of the 1977 Nobel Prize ceremony, these stories interrogate the nature of inspiration and discovery, motherhood and sacrifice, illness and legacy.

Story notes in back of the book encourage deeper reading - perfect for book clubs or education settings.

Laura Elvery's work has been published in Meanjin, Overland, The Big Issue fiction edition and Griffith Review. She has won the Josephine Ulrick Prize for Literature, the Margaret River Short Story Competition, the Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize, and the Overland Fair Australia short story prize. Laura has a PhD in Creative Writing. She lives in Brisbane.
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Book

Published 2020-09-01 by UQP University of Queensland Press - St Lucia (AUS)

Comments

Daring, wholehearted and wickedly funny, each story in Elvery's Ordinary Matter expertly reveals an entire world - of love, hurt, healing; of ambition, discovery, and revenge. An utterly luminous collection from one of the country's most original voices.

Elegant, wise and humming with insight - this sublime collection proves that Elvery is in a class of her .own

The construction of a polished collection of stories, of tonally varied fictions told in surprising ways, is quite an achievement.

There is nothing ordinary about these stories - extraordinary, yes. Elvery takes inspiration from the few women scientists who have won Nobel Prizes, but then has the creative courage to follow those threads of inspiration wherever they may lead - often to very unexpected places.These stories gently and beautifully track the outward ripples of these women's scientific achievements, through the years and across decades.An experimental and literary triumph.

A beautifully crafted and moving collection of stories about women who change history while struggling against its constraints.